Lady Bird (2017) was like looking in a mirror.
why I think that lady bird is the best film to ever exist.
If I could write a love letter to Greta Gerwig, it would just include prose about how much Lady Bird changed my life. I know we, as a society, speak hyperbolically so frequently that most words have lost their meaning but believe me when I say: watching Lady Bird for the first time was as close as I have ever come to experiencing religion. It changed me. Something in me shifted and I felt free to live beyond my childhood for the first time.
I wish I could live through something. A thought I’ve had many times. Followed by I want to go where culture is, like New York… Upon pressing play, I knew I was going to be stripped bare and called out by this film. Being a daughter is actually exhausting. It will probably be frowned upon that I said that, purely because I am a daughter. I should be grateful. I should follow form. I should be the perfect daughter.
But it’s hard. The experience of girlhood, something Greta Gerwig depicts so perfectly, is one that comes with so many layers of confusion and misunderstanding. But Lady Bird being so focused on the times when you think you’re more than a daughter, more than one half of your mother’s whole being, more than your root. It is like looking in a mirror to my own teenage years. To feel so much anger towards your mother because she really is the only one who can see through you whilst also seeing you. To be angry at your mother because she is a reflection of you.
Lady Bird was the catalyst to me admitting to having “mommy issues” (which is nothing to be ashamed of). Most daughters have “daddy issues”, right? That’s the expectation. Any damage to a daughter can only be caused by her father. But, whilst daddy issues seem to be the obvious default for lack of emotion or instability, mommy issues tend to alter the chemistry of your brain. You have always been with your mother. Since her birth, you existed within her. When a relationship is that innate, that connected, you feel the issues rise to the surface like a volcano with no warning. There isn’t a shake of the ground, you just explode. Because the person you are taking issue with is the only one who may ever have the capability of understanding you.
School, for some, is “the best years” of their life. That, I will never understand. Those were the worst years of my life. Thanks to the crazy organ that is my brain, a lot of it has been repressed and I don’t shed tears over an experience I had nearly a decade ago (thanks god) but I do not ever look back on those years with a smile. So I related to Lady Bird wanting to escape her Catholic school with urgency. Probably more than most. Religion was such a huge part of my life but I needed to leave. I did anything and everything to not continue my education in a Catholic school after the age of 16. “So I understand that you’re not interested in any Catholic colleges?” “No way. Sorry, but yes, no way” felt extremely personal to me. I wanted to escape it all and reinvent myself. I wanted to learn who I was or who I could be outside of these confines. Some may see Lady Bird as being self destructive for being brave enough to go outside of what she knows but I think she has wanderlust. Wanderlust to see the east coast and wanderlust to find herself. She is pretty inspiring, actually.
Hey Mom: did you feel emotional the first time that you drove in Sacramento? I did and I wanted to tell you, but we weren’t really talking when it happened. All
those bends I’ve known my whole life, and stores, and the whole thing. But I wanted to tell you. I love you. Thank you, I’m... thank you.
The mundane tasks I did/do with my mother are the ones I remember most prominently. Buying a prom dress will probably be the first and last time I have an experience like that with my mother since I don’t plan on getting married but I just remember my anger and hurt. I remember craving her validation in a similar way that Lady Bird did when she asked her mom “Why can’t you say I look nice?”. Most of my life will be spent searching for my mothers validation, I fear. Do I look nice to you? Do you like my hair? Does my outfit look good? Does my body look perfect? I couldn’t care less about anyone’s answer to those questions but my mothers and so the prom dress shopping scene will always be one that I hold dearly to my heart.
“I want you to be the very best version of yourself you can be.”
“What if this is the best version?”
On a funnier note, the scene of Lady Bird “losing” her virginity has to be the only accurate depiction I’ve seen based on my own experience. I spat my drink out the first time I watched that, wondering how Greta Gerwig knew about my life in such intimate detail. Now I look back and laugh. Being young is so inherently stupid. Hilariously stupid. So even though I am not the type of person whose first time was with their first love and all of that stereotypical romantic bullshit, I do look back at that experience with a giggle. You don’t realise in the moment how little it actually means. That you will continue to have this experience for the rest of your life and it will only get better. Watching Lady Bird as an adult makes me feel a sense of nostalgia for my childhood naivety. I do however, wish that I had the boldness of Lady Bird to yell “who the fuck is on top their first time?”. She was ahead of her time for sure and if this movie came out before I lost my virginity, I would’ve followed suit!
I’m sure by now you’ve realised that I saw my entire life in Lady Bird, but the storyline that really felt like looking through a crystal ball was Lady Bird moving away for college. I will probably never know what my parents felt when I went away to University. I didn’t see their faces on the way home, I don’t know how they felt back home whilst I wasn’t there. But I like to imagine it went something similar to the experience of Lady Bird’s parents. If I got anything out of my experience at university, it was that it helped mine and my mothers relationship immensely. Distance really does make the heart grow stronger and so I found myself spending many nights at university on the phone to my mum, acknowledging how much she did for me when we lived under one roof. The ending scenes of Lady Bird are all about her reflecting on her mother and how she made Lady Bird the woman she is in that very moment. It’s ironically flawless.
I believe we should all have a piece of art that feels like home to us. For me, it’s Lady Bird. But if you haven’t found yours, I encourage to you to never stop searching for it. Never stop listening to songs and watching movies until you find the person that made complete sense of your world. That is one of the most beautiful things in the human experience.