Parenting isn’t easy, and motherhood—from pregnancy to birth to postpartum to the entirety of life—often gets ugly. In fact, the experience of childbirth is among the most physically violent things that can happen to a human body; there is breakage and leakage, and much blood, and intense labor, and those are only the brute physiological facts of the matter. There are all sorts of methods and procedures to make this process more bearable, of course, but all that aside, you are still being rendered as a passage, a causeway; inert and gorily split open so that some small, helpless entity, molded in you, borne heavily by you, can come howling out.

Is that a cynical way of putting it? Maybe, but all the same, when the overwhelmed protagonist of Mary Bronstein’s If I Had Legs, I’d Kick You, Linda, says to her therapist, “I’m one of those people that’s not supposed to be a mom”, one has little difficulty believing it. Never mind that she may have ulterior (i.e. deceptive) motives for stating this: The film is really one long protracted state of crisis, where Linda gradually comes to terms with the feeling that she is unfit to be the mother of her child, and in many ways takes the shape of a birth-trauma metaphor, as the main action kicks in with water breaking through Linda’s apartment roof and is throughout concerned with the physical/emotional toll this resultant burden of care obligates one to uphold. […]