Watched May December a few days before watching Lion. Nothing in common between the stories, but it is about how a child's life turns out due to the actions of their parents, who are often victims of circumstance themselves. In the first instance, the father of the children was was a minor himself, when an older woman seduced and later married him. The movie was inspired by those events and shows the children in state of permanent discomfort about their sordid origin. One of the two parents was not at fault and neither are the kids - yet they all suffer. There is no better place they can escape to so this is the life they must somehow make peace with.
The second movie has a happy ending for the protagonist who is reunited with his birth mother but also has wonderful adoptive parents. His adoptive brother does not have nearly the same outcomes. His early childhood until adoption was significantly worse that trauma held him back despite the opportunities he received after being adopted. Both movies are made very well and got me thinking about outcomes in people's lives - what they control and what they can't.
For some reason, it brought to mind a woman I worked with at some point that was extremely difficult to deal with. She blew hot and cold all the time so you never knew what state you'd find her any given time. Some folks had developed adaptations to cope with her because was critical to the work they were doing. I chose not to have any in-person interactions with her but use online and email channels only. It was more predictable to deal with her that way. For the longest time, I struggled to understand why H was this kind of person that made it tremendously tasking for others to get along with her.
Somehow in the light of these two movies which have nothing to do with H - a product of a stable, upper-class family with excellent education, married to a lawyer and mother of a pre-school kid. When she is feeling sociable, I have heard her share things about her family which sound perfectly regular and normal. Yet, there had to be something about her childhood and youth that made her into this highly peculiar individual. More likely than not, she was responding to something in her environment that she was not in her control. Over time she became the H we learned to avoid or adapt to.
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