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| the O'Brien Family, 2018 |
Kelly O’Brien is a Toronto-based independent filmmaker and a mother of three whose autobiographical work often features her children. In 2007 she left behind her career as a TV producer to care for her second child, Teddy, who was born with cerebral palsy. Three years later she returned to independent film, pursuing an MFA in Film Production and eventually creating the documentary Softening, about her family’s experience having a child with a severe disability. The film won the grand jury prize in the shorts competition at the 2013 DOC NYC festival. Two of her shorts were presented as Op-Docs by The New York Times online, where she wrote, "Having children has transformed my creative life in ways that constantly surprise me. Sometimes I wish I could approach the world from a less personal perspective, but I can’t. Instead I try to make work that captures the poetry of the everyday and finds universal themes through my family’s experiences.”
Kelly O’Brien’s films resonate with many, and have been especially important to Allison Ellingson, an artist finding her footing while raising two young children, one of whom also has cerebral palsy. She interviewed Kelly for Cultural ReProducers, and their conversation explores systems of support, grief and joy, and the choice to share all this through artmaking.
Note: italicized photo captions below represent text O'Brien used when sharing on social media.
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Here's another failed attempt at a family portrait. I'm starting a collection. I listened to an interview with Anne Carson recently and she said, "That’s what you discover when you look at your old family photographs — a lot of them are pictures of nothing, very evocative pictures of nothing." That slight difference between nothing and something is why, I guess, I keep trying. |
Kelly O'Brien: I live in Toronto with my husband Terence and our three kids: Emma (14), Teddy (11) and Willow (7). If I had to reduce their temperaments to a few adjectives I would describe Emma as intense, curious, creative and moody; Teddy as joyful, mysterious, sweet and challenging; and Willow as fun, defiant, warm and imaginative.
It’s not like I wasn’t creative before motherhood, but I would have to say that the experience of having children has enriched my artistic life in ways that constantly inspire me. If I wasn’t a documentary filmmaker interested in personal storytelling I think it would be much harder to find that motherhood/career balance. I’m glad those stars aligned.
Whether mothers can make “good” art about their children and whether or not it’s even valued by the culture at large seems like a hot topic these days, evidenced by a slew of recent articles on the subject. The truth is I don't spend enough time in any professional art world context to know how difficult it really is for other artist mothers. At this point in my life, I’m grateful for one creative burst a day!
During our emails back and forth for this interview you wrote something about your life that resonated so deeply with mine. “Some days,” you wrote, "I feel like I am falling through an abyss and nothing makes sense or matters, while other times I have total clarity that making something beautiful is all I need to do in life.” I feel like we're kindred spirits.
Allison: That's how I felt when I first saw Softening. I'm so glad to talk with you about the beauty and heartbreak of our family lives. My son, Hans, has cortical visual impairment and as a result, can’t see patterns, which makes the textile artist in me so sad. How does Teddy experience your work?
Kelly: That’s a tough question. If you asked me a few years ago, I wouldn’t be able to answer without crying. In fact, I probably wouldn’t be able to answer at all. Teddy has cerebral palsy of the “severely disabled” kind, both physically and developmentally. He’s also legally blind and deaf, although he can see and hear a little – more than the medical tests account for. All this to say I don’t think he experiences my work as a viewer. But sometimes he has fun with the process, which really is the most important part. Because I make work about my kids, our family and everyday life, Teddy is often one of the subjects, and there’s nothing he likes more than being with his two sisters. I’ve found, at first quite unexpectedly, that making films or taking photographs opens up different opportunities for us to spend time together and Teddy loves that.
Allison: I love this picture! It reminds me of Hans, whose favorite place to be is sitting with one of us on the couch. He also has severe cerebral palsy, of his own variety, and my question to you today is: how do you make sense out of the caregiving role of "special needs" motherhood, and how do you find time to make work given its demands (appointments, therapy etcetera)?
Kelly: For the first few years of my life with Teddy, I made zero work. I actually didn’t think I would make anything again. It was enough to make it through a day with Teddy and his various appointments without sinking into sadness and worry. If someone had told me then that I would go on to make a film about the experience and that a short version of it would end up on the NYTimes website, I never would’ve believed them.
By the time Teddy was around three years old, I started to feel a little less overwhelmed and a little more restless. I couldn’t go back to my old job as a TV producer because the hours were too long, so I applied to do an MFA in film production. I knew that if I could find the strength to make a film about my experience, I might be able to reach other parents and siblings in a similar situation. Most days it was too hard to make that film – it took a certain distance that grief doesn’t give you – but eventually, over time, little bits of recorded life turned into a diary film about our story. (I must point out here that I couldn’t have done this without the emotional and financial support of my husband Terence. His jobs as a teacher and art writer have kept us afloat – although with very little subsidized government help for kids with special needs, it hasn’t been easy.)
My Brother, Teddy, a short Op-Doc version of Softening, from The New York Times
The film I made, called Softening, took a long time, almost five years, and then Willow was born so I was back to full-on childcare, with even less time to make films. But back in 2009 I reluctantly joined Facebook. We were having a benefit to help with Teddy’s therapy and care costs. It was a way to get the word out about the event. I didn’t have much to do with Facebook again for the next few years until I somewhat spontaneously started posting pictures and stories about my kids. I’ve always been interested in trying to capture the everyday, the poetry of it, and Facebook became an unexpected way for me to do that. I didn’t have the time, energy, money or patience to make a film, and I wasn’t into social media at all (I still don’t know how to tweet!), but looking back I must have been desperate to make something, anything. I liked the immediacy of Facebook. I never saw what I was doing as “art” per se. I never referred to it as an art project. It was more of a daily experiment, a way to make sense of what was happening around me. In an interview with Marguerite Anderson about her memoir, La Mauvaise Mère, she said, “The relationship between a woman and her children is I think the most intimate relationship one can have in life. I really believe that, very deeply, so it's important that we write about it and truthfully.” I’m almost embarrassed to admit it, but I used Facebook as a way to do just that.
For the past two years, all three kids have been in school during the day so I’ve had more time for my work. Last fall I started a PhD in Environmental Studies, with the hope of turning my dissertation into a personal essay film that tries to find some beauty in this time of environmental crisis.
The truth is though, even before Teddy, I never had the confidence in what I did as a filmmaker to think that I could turn it into a full-fledged career, and over the years I’ve become less ambitious — my priorities naturally shifted after Teddy was born. But slowly, but surely, I just kept making small things.
After having a kid with disabilities, and coming to terms with the painful truth that life doesn’t always work out the way you thought it would, you don’t take as much for granted, at least I try not to. There are still long stretches of time when I make nothing, or when I feel like whatever I make is terrible, and who cares about me and my family and what I think anyway?! But mostly, I’m just so grateful I have a way to express how I feel. It’s less lonely.
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"What are inside trees?" she asks.
I think she wanted an anatomy lesson but it made me think that maybe if we thought more about the insides of things we would care more. |
Kelly: I grew up on the West Coast just outside Vancouver, near the ocean, a forest and mountains. When I moved to Toronto over 20 years ago I thought it was the ugliest place on Earth. I’ve come to love many things about it, like my friends and the cosmopolitan-ness of the place — everything but the landscape — which, if you’re from beautiful British Columbia (the province’s license plate slogan), is pretty significant!
Anyway, when I had kids I felt like they were missing out on the idyllic childhood that I had in proximity to nature. They got traffic, pollution and urban density instead. But when Emma was about six she attended an elementary school downtown that was beside a street endlessly under construction. I’ll never forget this one cold November afternoon after picking her up. We got to the crosswalk and she cried, ”Look mom!” She was pointing to a tiny tomato plant growing up through the cracks in the cement. In the middle of the city, in the ground beneath our feet, I was reminded that there’s resilience and beauty. That moment was kind of a turning point for me, and since then, whenever I can, I try to expose my kids to nature in the city. Turns out it’s not that hard to find once you start looking for it.
So my interest in environmental studies extends backwards to where I grew up, but also forwards, because like all parents, I’m worried about the world we’re leaving behind for our children.
Allison: Beyond your husband, where did you draw emotional support as you began to make work about your experience with Teddy?
Kelly: When I went back to graduate school I was the oldest student by decades and the only mother, but because I’d been part of the art community in Toronto for a long time, many of the professors in the film department knew me a little. If it wasn’t for their unanimous, unwavering support I never would’ve been able to finish Softening. They pushed me along in the most gentle way. There are so few personal films about kids like Teddy, especially ones outside of mainstream portrayals like movie-of-the-week happy-ever-after narratives, so I think my professors knew the value of what I was doing and did everything they could to facilitate it, both emotionally and creatively.
It took me so long to finish the film that when I was done, I needed a break from making work about that experience. Every image of Teddy carries such weight and I constantly wrestle with how to transcend the burden of representation so he isn’t just seen as a disabled child but as the happy-go-lucky and challenging kid that he is. It was a lot to take on, especially as his mother. I was also spending more time with my youngest, Willow, because Teddy and Emma were at school during the day, so I became immersed in her world and ended up photographing and writing about her. The short NYTimes Op-Docs film, How Does Life Live? was inspired by all the questions that Willow asked me. Recently though, I’ve been approached by a film producer to make a follow-up film to Softening, so I’ve been thinking more about that. I don’t think the process will be as intense. Life is lighter now. I mean, not always, but the sadness is bearable and there is more joy.
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Emma paints Willow. Willow paints Emma. Emma and Willow paint Teddy. Summer’s rare moment of sibling togetherness. |
Allison: What is your relationship like with the disability justice movement and culture?
Kelly: When Teddy was born, people always wanted me to meet their friend, or their friend of a friend, who had a child like Teddy. I also heard a lot of miracle stories — you should meet so and so because they did this with their child and now he or she can walk, talk, hear or see …. The gesture to connect me with others was kind and well-intentioned — the hope always being that introducing me to the right person would make me feel better, less alone — but the truth is, it rarely did.
Early on, a social worker suggested that Terence and I go to a play group for parents with special needs babies. We went once, but no baby there had as many needs as Teddy and we left feeling even worse. And then Teddy’s physiotherapist put me in touch with another mom with a special needs kid. I’ll never forget meeting her for the first time and telling her how lost and grief-stricken I felt. When I asked if she felt the same way, she basically told me that wallowing in sorrow was no way to move forward. “I just willed myself to move on,” she explained. But I was falling apart. I had no idea how to will myself into any place other than the one I was in, and no amount of practical advice from a stranger, no matter how much we had in common, was going to help.
Years later I was screening Softening at a hospital event and I told the story about that woman, more as a way to talk about my own slow process. I wanted to reassure other parents in the audience that some of us need time, possibly years, to make sense of their new life as a parent raising a child with disabilities. Coincidentally, the woman was at the event. She came up to me afterwards and apologized. “I’m so sorry I made you feel worse,” she said. “I should’ve known better.”
Those early encounters definitely made me less interested in reaching out to others like me, but I was also so overwhelmed by what had happened that I wasn’t interested in connecting with anyone outside my very tiny world, period. Retreating became my way of coping.
In the last few years I’ve tried to identify more with the disability justice movement because I’ve felt like I need to be more of an advocate or spokesperson for kids like Teddy. For example, I admire one of Teddy’s teachers so much and recently made a short film called Walk With Me based on a short story she’d written about working with kids with special needs for over a decade. It’s more polemical than other work I’ve made, but it felt necessary.
Allison: How do you navigate the terrain of making your children’s lives public?
Kelly: I’m going to begin my answer to your question with another one of my Facebook posts:
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"I like this picture you took," Emma tells me, "but it's the opposite of Willow." "What do you mean?" I ask. "I don't know, it's just not her." I know lots of people who would never post pictures of their kids on Facebook. The whole idea makes them uncomfortable. I totally get it, but it still makes me feel like I’m doing something wrong. I want to say my kids are my muses, they’re amateur actors, occasional collaborators, but I’m not sure this is a good enough answer. When asked about her photographs of her family, Sally Mann replied, "The fact is that these are not my children; they are figures on silvery paper slivered out of time. They represent my children at a fraction of a second on one particular afternoon….These are not my children at all; these are children in a photograph.” I have a harder time separating my kids from my pictures of them. |
Now that Emma’s older, the posts with her have become more collaborative. She’ll say things like, “Take a picture of me, Mom!” or if Willow says something wise or funny, Emma will encourage me to write about it. It’s like I have another pair of eyes and ears helping me. I also ask Emma for permission before I post something about her, but I feel less comfortable sharing her life publicly. Willow is still a bit young to understand what I’m doing, but she likes scrolling through the pictures even though she sometimes tires of me taking them! Teddy will never really get what I'm up to, but I try my best to represent him in a way that's accurate, in a way that's true to his sweet and complicated being. More than anything, I feel like the process has opened up communication between all of us, given us insight into the different ways we see and understand the world. I also know that my time with them is limited and one day they'll be telling stories about me. As British novelist Rachel Cusk writes, “Children are characters in the family story we tell – until, one day, they start telling it themselves."
Allison Ellingson is an artist working primarily with textile processes and the social fabric. She received a B.A. from St. Olaf College in 2002, a Master of Divinity from McCormick Theological Seminary in 2007, and in 2015 earned an M.F.A. in Fiber and Material Studies from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Originally from Chicago, Ellingson recently moved to rural Minnesota. She is the mother of two human beings.
