Of Mice and Motherhood: The Beauty and Bravery of Mrs. Brisby
“Afterthoughts” is a Fear of God blog series featuring co-hosts and guests further unpacking thoughts, themes, and ideas that keep them up at night from the conversations and content covered on the show. This entry is by frequent guest and Horror Enneagrammarian, Asia Swartzentruber, and is a follow-up article to this past week’s episode featuring The Secret of NIMH. Enjoy, then, these afterthoughts…
Usually, when I start typing away at a FoG article, I am doing so wearing my Enneagramarian hat.
Today, that hat is tucked away in a locked drawer somewhere, and I find myself instead, donning a very new wordsmithing identity.
When Nathan & Reed asked me to participate in recording their episode on The Secret of NIMH, I was instantly thrilled. As a child, NIMH, along with most other Don Bluth’s films, cleverly disguised as children’s stories, were a constant source of inspiration. I can’t count how many times (as I’m sure most of you can’t either) I watched movies like An American Tail (and its sequel that shockingly lived up to its predecessor), The Land before Time (whose sequels most definitely did not) The Pebble and the Penguin, A Troll in Central Park, Thumbelina, and many other Bluth classics. I think I watched Don’s films more than I ever watched Disney - and even then, my favorite Disney movies were Beauty and the Beast and the surprisingly grown up Hunchback of Notre Dame. It’s not difficult to see where a burgeoning passion for darker content comes from when you line all of these Grimme-esque stories together.
However, among all of these stories, NIMH always stood out to me as something very special.
Obviously, the visual beauty of the piece was enough in and of itself to galvanize my imagination. I was immediately struck while re-watching it after many years how much the color scheme and the visual elements influenced so much of my own work as an adult. My senses were so stimulated by how willing the animation team was to create nothing less than Art. For many years, I have bemoaned the way that so many animated pieces serve what feels like less-than visual glory due to the youth of their viewers. It’s as though some studios think they can cheat at their craft because their audience is younger. I have always despised that - because I have always believed that children should have the most beautiful things. Don Bluth seems to feel the same way, as NIMH’s beauty, its seemingly effortless artfulness, is on full display. It pours the entire bowl of “what could be” into its creation and serves it, piping hot, to the smallest of us.
But aside from how visually lovely NIMH is, there was something deeper, richer, and truer about the themes it conveyed. I knew, even as a child, that I was not watching a “kids” movie. And after having a robust conversation with my podcasting comrades, it sounds like everyone else did, too.
I remember watching this film as a tike and feeling something akin (pardon me for being dramatic) to physical pain - like there was something so deeply tucked away that I just couldn’t reach my little limbs out far enough to grasp. Something about this movie was always out of reach.
I spoke on the podcast about the “lore” in my family about when baby Asia had very bad pneumonia, and that because of those stories I felt a strong kinship with Timmy in his own battle with the illness. Knowing that a sickly little child could inspire such a propulsive love, strong enough to shake such world-altering events made me feel important. It made me feel worthy. It made me feel loved. As a youngest child, it made me feel significant.
But now - about 15 years later, I return to this film with an entirely different perspective, and it’s one that mildly ruined me in the best way.
When I started watching it - firstly, I was shocked at how desperately I wanted my husband to have no distractions as he viewed it for the first time. I turned off every light in the house and chucked our phones. And once the film had started, I soon realized I had been holding my breath as a very fresh wave of completely unearned emotion arose within me. I suppressed it.
It was only the opening credits.
But my whole being soared as the weathered hands of Nicodemus gathered us into the tiniest epic. I sat in a stupified state, reliving something out of my childhood in an entirely new way. The colors were brighter, the score more thrilling, the characters more meaningful.
Then, in a moment of quiet lullaby, as Mother Brisby gently feeds her ailing child, my husband looked over at his wife to find her crying.
She was shocked, too.
Let me go back and explain something to you.
There are three paradigms that have shaped my life monumentally: Beauty/Ugliness, Bravery/Fear, & Motherhood.
I have struggled, as most women do, with the concept of beauty for my entire life, and I can summarize that feeling in the single mantra I often use to decorate my house: “If it isn’t beautiful, why is it here?” That can be a hard pill to swallow when I often (unfairly) apply it to myself.
So, stories of beauty - tales that hail beauty as the healing ointment I believe it to be, have always meant a great deal to me.
I have had an anxiety disorder since I was about twelve years old, and unfortunately it has only gotten more potent as I get older. The feeling of “I simply cannot” is one that I am well acquainted with - along with the crushing pain in my chest that can accompany moments of disorientation so strong that I spiral into a panic that none but my husband have ever witnessed.
So, stories of bravery from a place of weakness have also always meant a great deal to me.
And as far back as I can remember, Motherhood has been my destiny. Which is quite ironic considering that, among my group of friends, I am known as the least “maternal” of any of them. I don’t coo over my friend’s babies. I’ve never been much of a doting auntie, although I do love my nieces and nephews. But I think I always knew that once I had a child of my own, there would arise in me a ferocity of love that would never again be contained.
I do not adore children writ-large. But the moment one of these tiny humans is called “mine”, that’ll be the end of me, plain and simple.
So that has been the plan all of my life.
But then… My first 3 years of marriage were plagued with trouble, mostly arising from a secondary diagnosis of PTSD that I had not received yet and had no idea how to cope with from prior life events. I was nowhere near healthy enough to bring a child into the world.
Once my husband and I found peace together, I realized two years of rigorous health. The trajectory of my life to having my own brood was once again on track. I started to feel a sense of urgency - 23 years old had turned into 28 so very quickly!
Then I got very sick.
What started out as a simple cold turned into an entire year of pain so debilitating I could do little more than sit or lie down without mind-bending pain. My whole body, over the course of a year, was betraying me. What little traces of beauty I had worked so hard for over my life started to (I felt) melt away as inactivity reshaped me. And whispers from doctors of possible embolisms and infections and that dirty word endometriosis left me reeling. I had already had certain dysfunctions in my body for years. Apparently now it was only just beginning to hurt.
As I write this, I have gone through quite literally the hardest year of my life. And as the date for my then upcoming surgery to see how bad the damage was was rapidly approaching, I was left to my own devices, never speaking to even my own husband about how deeply the possibility of not being able to have children was affecting me. It didn’t help that my two closest friends (the ones who affectionately know me as “not maternal”) are both pregnant.
But it was just something I couldn’t talk about.
And eventually, I started to resign myself to the fact that maybe I was simply not supposed to have children because of my anxiety. How could I properly care for a child when taking care of myself was such a struggle? Surely, I didn’t deserve them. Surely, I would do them more harm than good.
But when I woke up from surgery, I was told that pregnancy was still very much a possibility for me. And I felt lighter in a way that I could not describe.
Several days later, as I wept on the couch next to my husband while Mrs. Brisby fed her sickly babe, I found the words. Combining what I had always wanted as a child with what I had just been told could still be possible for me after several years of turmoil and one year of agony, I was met with such overwhelming relief. And once that dam of tears broke during the movie, it was never rebuilt. I wept on and off throughout the whole film because I knew I was watching me.
Or at least what I wanted to be me.
Mrs. Brisby was beautiful because she was simple. Her constant gentleness and patience in the face of busybody shrews and sweet but overwhelming crows reminded me of a mildness that I knew could be possible amidst chaotic feelings.
She was brave because she loved. As Jackson pointed out in our conversation so astutely, her mantra of courage when facing the oldest, most dangerous creature she can think of is: “Remember Timothy”. And that goal echoes again when she faces the ancient Nicodemus.
From Nicodemus and his band of compatriot super-intelligent rats, Mrs. Brisby is given help and security, which, in turn, inspires her to take up the mantle of her own courage. Upon being informed that her late husband’s death was caused by an attempt to drug the faceless farmer’s monstrous cat, she volunteers to finish the job her heroic husband started.
What is it that could have prompted such a mild mannered, mousy (pun respectfully intended) mother to take on such a potentially suicidal mission? My only answer is that her love had grown too big. If love for fragile Timmy is what prompted her to go down, down deep into the earth under the rosebush to find the rats, then the budding branches of that love had begun to germinate and bloom for this new community of mysterious creatures who had sworn to help her. And the memory of her husband’s selfless mission left unfulfilled provided a catalyst from which that love could march forward.
Timmy. Her late husband. The rats and their benevolent leader.
There was simply too much love to remain stagnant.
Or, perhaps, she had been too loved to remain stagnant.
And it was that kind of love that I could feel piling up inside me, like pillows in a pillow fort inside which my own someday Timothy's and Teresa’s lay hiding.
Watching Mrs. Brisby wield the ruby red medallion given to her by Nicodemus as her beloved children gasped for air inside a sinking cinder block, I, as a privileged audience member, got to see that love materialized in all its magical splendor. The glory of her simple fortitude produced a beauty and a force so strong that nothing could have stood in its way. Nothing was too heavy.
And I’d like to think the same thing of myself.
That nothing is too heavy for love.
Not my anxiety disorder.
Not my depression.
Not my insecurity of feeling unbeautiful.
Not the pain that comes with physical conditions.
Not the confusion when my someday little ones confide pieces of themselves that hold shame.
Not the loneliness that comes, should anything happen to my husband.
No, I have been loved too well, and I know better.
And I thank Mrs. Brisby for reminding me that love is simple and that courage is contagious.
Long live motherhood and the mouse that gave me hope.
