Pregnancy, Parenthood, and Big Fish

I recently rewatched the movie Big Fish with my husband Aaron. We hadn’t seen it since we were in college, when we were sophomores and sweethearts. Aaron convinced me then to watch it with him by mentioning it was directed by Tim Burton. I loved Tim Burton then. I displayed a large coffee mug decorated with Jack Skellington’s grinning face on my desk, despite the fact that I did not drink coffee. I was expecting something like the other Tim Burton films I loved- Sweeney Todd, Corpse Bride, yes, even his version of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.

When we watched Big Fish it was a sweeter and more tender movie than I expected. Will Bloom, a grown man, is called home by his mother because his father is dying of cancer. He returns with his wife Josephine, who is pregnant, and he tries to untangle which of his father, Edward’s, stories are true and not true before his dad dies and he loses the ability to ask him again. The strangeness I expected from Tim Burton was tempered, relegated to the parts of the film dedicated to Edward’s fantastical stories.

Edward helped rid his small town of a giant, then worked with that giant at a circus for three years to get the name of a girl he fell in love with at first sight. He not only went missing when serving in Vietnam, he escaped with the help of conjoined twins who were in show business and wanted to bring their act to America. And Edward keeps telling Will he’s not going to die yet, because a witch showed him his death when he was a child. The conclusion of the film argues that Edward’s stories are both true and not-true, a blend of real and fantastical. The events are based in reality, the details are fabricated, the emotions are true. I thought as an English major it was a great argument for the importance of stories, and remembered it fondly.

We chose to rewatch the movie because we wanted something that was both fantastical and comforting. Rewatching Big Fish at thirty-two was very different than first watching it at nineteen. I could see the flaws that I had not understood before. Many of the fantastical stories of Edward Bloom relied on the exotic other, approaching fetishization or at least carelessness. Or they worked as archetypes, setting up a strange situation and relying on the viewer to fill in the details. But Big Fish was also a sadder movie than I remembered, and demanded more of me.

At the ending of the film, Will sits with his father in the hospital, telling him a story as Edward passes. I remembered Edward’s passing as a happy, beautiful death. On my rewatch I sobbed through the end. Since I first watched the movie I’ve sat with a parent, holding their hand in the hospital bed, as machines beep and measure things I don’t understand. I read Annie Dillard and prayed the rosary by the hospital room window, watching snow fall softly and constantly while my parent slept. I learned more than I ever wanted to about sodium levels and how they affect stroke patients. Our outcome was different. My parent came home. We were lucky.

But I had no way of knowing that fear before.

Early in the film Josephine says she is 7 months pregnant, which is the same benchmark I am as I write this post. I spend a lot of time now thinking about my baby. Who will they be? Will they get Aaron’s long fingers? My square teeth? Will they have Aaron’s mom’s musical talent, or my dad’s precise, architectural drawing ability?

I don’t spend as much time thinking about it all the way back. Will Baby get my Slavic round face, the one that I share with my dad and my grandpa? But who did that come from? What stories do I not know? What stories do I need to collect while there’s still time, and what stories are now to be forever lost to me?

When my grandpa died almost 10 years ago, I wrote in my journal one line- I will never know all my grandpa’s stories. It remains to me one of the saddest things I’ve ever written, and I can still feel the echo of the ache in my chest. Big Fish argues that Edward’s stories are him, and to know his stories is to know him. But that’s not completely true. Will’s hunger to know his dad in a way that he never could is based on only having these fantastical stories, of witches in swamps and lost towns, of bank-robbing poets and uncatchable, clever fish. But the truth of his father was the big, gregarious man who was always swept up in the excitement of encountering people, even as much as he loved his family.

As Aaron and I prepare to meet our baby, I find myself thinking about parenting and parenthood a lot. There’s the practical considerations, but also the philosophical. Will my child know me? Will they see me? Will I know and see them?

Last year I found out I was pregnant in the bathroom of an Embassy Suites hotel in Orlando, Florida. Aaron and I were ecstatic. A week later I found out on a park bench in downtown Minneapolis that I was having a miscarriage. We were devastated.

A few months into the grief of losing a pregnancy, I was reading a book on pregnancy and learned about the concept of fetal microchimerism. In utero, some of the fetus’ cells get crossed into the mother’s bloodstream, and vice versa. And those cells stay, sometimes for decades, or for the remainder of the mother’s life. It was a lightbulb moment, and a comfort, that the baby I lost still lives inside my body in some small way. And this baby too will live on in my body, even after they are born. Even as they grow and become independent and become embarrassed by me and roll their eyes while I tell stories. I am fundamentally, biologically changed by being a mother.

And yet, even as their cells live in my body, I do not know my child yet. They will become themselves, and I will learn their stories, and try to understand them. And they will do the same for me, sometimes with love and sometimes with frustration. I was right with my first viewing of Big Fish- the film is about the importance of stories. I’m just glad we revisited it. We also needed to be reminded of the fundamental difficulty of knowing the people you love.