Non-Apologia by Dina Strasser

In February of 2004, the American Academy of Pediatrics released a statement that children under two should watch no television whatsoever. In a twist of fate, nine months later, New Line Cinema released the final Special Edition DVD of its "Lord of the Rings" Trilogy. Unrelated? Incompatible? Having nothing to do with maternity and art? Read on.

It was a case of strange bedfellows. The first was a sneaky, downright duplicitous post-partum depression-- of a kind where, when I finally decided that perhaps I should check in with a therapist and told her my story, she said kindly, "I would have put you on medication if you'd shown up four weeks ago." My devoted husband, and the strength of my family and friends' support, helped to mask some of the severity. At other times, consumed with the daily grind of keeping an infant alive and well for the first time, I simply ignored my perseverant and increasing worries-- about my daughter being permanently scarred by hearing the dishwasher going during her naps, for example.

Other parts of the depression were camouflaged by their sheer weirdness. I had daily, paralyzingly powerful panic attacks, but they always and only occurred at twilight. I called them "Sundowner's Syndrome," referring to my typical artistically emotional responses to light and weather. I didn't even make the connection to my haywire hormones.

It was also during this period that I cancelled a trip to Niagara Falls because I knew, categorically, that I would accidentally drop the baby over the safety rails into the water. The power of this conviction was overwhelming: the image I conceived of her little form disappearing into the clouds of mist at the base of the falls still haunts me, and I am much, much better now.

Disappointing, but not surprising: TV as companion, relief from this isolation and anxiety, pure need for escapism-- I seemed to have dropped into all of that psychological pabulum without one ounce of critical analysis. But here's the other bedfellow, one which is cause for a more conciliatory approach, I think: the Special Edition DVD of the movie the Lord of the Rings. This was the TV we watched constantly, my infant and I.

And in retrospect it makes a lot of sense.

Why not read a book instead? Read a book? Anyone who is nursing an infant for the first time knows that in those first few months, if you sit down for five seconds you come to consciousness with your face buried in the laundry basket, snoring wildly—never mind scraping up the mental acuity to put two words together in a poem.

In early motherhood, the art that sustained me, despite all my promises to myself, was the first thing to go. Reading my dog-eared classics or the NY Times Book Review—gone. Writing, gone. Piecing a song together on the guitar and presenting it at the open mic coffeehouse down the street, gone. Putting in long hours adjusting the lighting grid for my beloved critically acclaimed local theatre-- so gone.

I have always had a hunger for artistry. This was the same artistry I seemed to have sacrificed for family life. It only made the hunger all the more intense.

Enter the DVD.

LOTR Special Edition presented me with a window into a wonderfully imaginative, and principled, community of moviemakers: fully committed to realizing the world of Middle-earth with as much attention and fidelity to the written word of Tolkien as possible. I ate this up. Every interview filmed, every voiceover commentary, every outtake and documentary, I devoured with my eyes. The swordsmiths. The costumers. The painters. The writers. The photographers. It was a feast for my art-starved soul, fed to me on the only plate my exhausted body could handle at the time: television.

Naomi Wolf describes a similar phenomenon in her book Misconceptions, where the loss of her intellectual and creative community was one of the most painful developments in her new motherhood. For her, it was symbolized by no longer being able to smoke cigarettes and argue with male compatriot professors in cafes. For me, it was no longer being able to smoke cigarettes-- well, at least have the option to smoke cigarettes-- and discuss character motivation and stage blocking.
Naomi, bless her, survived and thrived, but didn't get this feeling of community back for a long time. I got it back by watching The Lord of the Rings.

Artistry by proxy. I never would have known.
The landscapes of the movie helped, too. The camera's passages over the forests and valleys could make me gasp even on the twentieth time through the film. Critiques have been made of Tolkien's overweening love for the lay of the land, and reading the Rings trilogy in high school I would skim these pages with desultory impatience. But there in front of me, on the screen, were the august mountains of Middle-earth, the thud of horse hooves on peat moss, the luscious green hills and silver stars of the hobbits' homeland on a summer night.

There were analogous places in my own life. A spring-fed lake deep in the Adirondacks that you can only get to on foot. Throngs of blackberries next to the highway. The silent, snow-covered cemetery, replete with peace. These were places I couldn't bring a stroller: places that, at least temporarily, I had lost. In that tender time I wept over it, more than once. But an hour of the DVD in the morning (or at listless mid-afternoon, or while changing the twelfth poopy diaper of the day, or at 3 AM nursing the baby) made it bearable at last.

Now that I am past the depression and have succeeded somewhat in integrating art back into my life (see? I’m writing this essay), I am also able to recognize the philosophical aspects of LOTR that were in play.

It's the weirdest part of my story, because personally Tolkien had a deeply compartmentalized, traditional, hearth-and-home-driven philosophy of women, one that shows up in his epic clearly. There is but one prominent female character out of a cast of dozens of males (not counting the giant poisonous spider named Shelob who eats men for breakfast-- but let's not go there). That sole woman, Eowyn, has her dubious claim to fame through rejecting her femininity and disguising herself as a warrior man. While she earns plaudits in the story from the narrator for her accomplishments on the battlefield, it's with a distinct feeling of reluctance: and of course, Eowyn finds her true happiness only once she falls in love and settles down. This is all the subject of understandable invective from feminist literary scholars.

But sitting in the papasan, trying to figure out how to operate my breast pump while the DVD played on, none of that mattered. In what I recognize now as delicious irony, what those same scholars have pinpointed as the indomitable, boy's-club maleness of the Lord of the Rings--the circle of warriors, the quest, the battles, the testing of physical endurance and inner resolve-- were the very same things that soothed me the most as a woman in the midst of PPD.

You see, I did not want to escape into Middle-earth after all, leaving my mewling, inconvenient infant behind. I did not want to tag along behind the hobbits, reclaiming my independence. I did not want to be a warrior on the glorious Ring Quest. No: I was in the throes of becoming a mother. I was seeking out, enduring the burden of, and protecting the greatest good that there is in the universe: a child. I was the Quest.

So I watched the film over and over, back to back, day after day. I drank up a feeling of relief, comforted. This story understood. This story was mine. This story allowed me to show up four weeks late to my therapist and not have to take Zoloft.

Did you know the word "comfort", in old English, meant just that? Com-fort. With strength.

Here's a last fact about Tolkien’s story, and perhaps the most crucial. Tolkien had originally told the tale of The Hobbit to entertain his three young children.

Indeed, accounts of Tolkien's life are united on the fact that for the time and culture of WWII England, Tolkien was an unusually involved father: warm, demonstrative and loving. It occurs to me that this love might be running through his creative epic, unseen, like gold thread in close-woven tapestry.

Yes, it was television, unadulterated, 24/7.

But it also may have been simply one artist parent's heart, reaching across time to help heal another.

34 year old mother of Rebecca (3) and Ian (1), Dina Strasser is a public school teacher of English as a Second Language. She hopes to be able to do that really loud two-fingered whistle in her next lifetime.