IF I HAD LEGS I’D KICK YOU

🌊

So, here we are, right in the middle of the awkward week between Christmas and the New Year, full of shame and self-disgust for our yuletide over-indulgences, yet not quite ready to nail down our resolutions and annual commitments to self-improvement.  For my part, I have just polished off the remains of the goose and the turkey and the chipolatas, a pure meat feast save for the introduction of a dollop of cranberry sauce, and I welcome the quiet of an empty house and much missed solitude (nowt for company other than a slightly wilting tree, straining under the weight of its ornaments including this year’s addition of a Benson Boone bauble, to which I address various rhetorical questions along the lines of “How about a sliver more of this ginger cake?” and “A glass of wine isn’t a bad idea, eh?  Or two?”).  I had my daughters, their partners, my brother, a friend and my ex-husband (😇… and I think he really, really appreciated the gift of a 1000 piece jigsaw puzzle of my face, a regift from my brother who received it from me while he was in rehab for alcoholism… and likely to provide hour upon hour of joyful ex-wife entertainment…) to cater for this year, and while I acknowledge I lean into the holidays as a means of drawing us all together and pretending we are as we used to be, I think it is probably time to allow some of the traditions to fade and think of things a little differently.  After all, things are not as they were: children and husbands have flown the coop and my nurturing duties to them can play second fiddle to my duties to myself, should I so wish.  And I think perhaps I do so wish.  Who’s up for a children and ex-husband-less Christmas next year?  I think the Bahamas are calling.

Christmas is a labour-intensive holiday and my bet is that the vast majority of the chores of prepping and planning and purchasing, wrapping and distributing, cooking and feeding, cleaning and restoring to normality rests with women.  If there was a way to increase the intensity of Linda’s (Rose Byrne’s) madcap life in IF I HAD LEGS I’D KICK YOU (written and directed by Mary Bronstein), it’d be to set it at Christmastime.  As it stands, things are pretty fucking intense for Linda, being solely responsible for (i) the home, (ii) the child and (iii) her job as a psychotherapist and, by proxy, all of the various trials and tribulations of her clients, each of which is falling apart, quite literally (the home is uninhabitable due to a leak, the child is suffering from some form of eating disorder which may or may not be purely psychological, and the therapy is insufficient to correct self-destructive and dangerous behaviours).

Women are phenomenal, right?  It is a wonder we can keep going given the number of stressors and the massive weight of responsibility which tends to fall squarely on our beleaguered shoulders.  And let’s be honest: sometimes we just can’t….  For Linda, the straw threatening to break the camel’s back is precisely the thing that should have alleviated the weight and given her some respite from the frenetic pace of her life: the return of the husband who has been in absentia for the vast majority of the film.  Unsustainably stretched between responsibilities to her home, child and clients, she has made some poor decisions, admittedly, but it is the realisation her husband (and society, generally) will become aware of these arguable mis-steps (and will judge her harshly for them) that threatens to send her over the edge.  She flees from the hotel room in which she and her daughter have been cloistered, heading to the beach and the cusp of a violent sea, Edna Pontellier’s fate in her sights, but her attempts to throw herself into the ocean are thwarted and her exhausted, limp body is deposited back on dry land time and again.

To my mind, these final frames of IF I HAD LEGS I’D KICK YOU are a powerful visual metaphor for nature’s insistence that we (i.e. women) can never give up (even when we really, really want to).  No matter how hard things become and no matter how much we want to counter Mother Nature and throw in the towel, it is in our DNA to persevere, particularly when it comes to our roles as nurturers and carers (to children, yes, but also to parents, friends, even ex-husbands…).  Christmas or otherwise, women are doing the heavy lifting when it comes to the home and children, we are expected to (and want to) deliver professionally and socially, too, yet we are terrible at asking for the help we need, and we are (a)shamed when we err and stumble.  It ain’t easy being a woman, folks.  It’s fucking exhausting.

Linda is entirely depleted by the end of the film (as are we from watching her), yet in a few moments and a line of dialogue - “I’ll be better, I promise. I’ll be better” - Bronstein manages to finish on a note of female-centric hope: Linda’s daughter attends to her, her face shown for the first time in the film (which I took to be a sign of her maturity and of her liberation from the feeding tube which kept her infantilised, maybe?), and we know Linda is not alone.  She will be looked after by her daughter.  They will look after one another. ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

Women, eh?  Fucking marvellous. Especially at Christmas. 💕🎄💕🎄