When Mamma Mia! was released, in 2008, a good friend of mine went, on his own, to see it in the cinema. When he told me this, I was shocked. I didn’t have him down for a rom-com fan, or a Meryl fan, or as being a member of any specific Mamma Mia!-related fandom.
“I thought it was an Abba biopic,” he told me, ruefully.
How he managed to avoid the plentiful publicity surrounding the film’s 2008 release, I’ll never know, but avoid it he did.
He told me that he was so fully committed to this belief of his, that Mamma Mia was, in fact, the story of the founding of Abba, the Swedish pop group formed in 1972 which, in 1974, became the country’s first ever winning entry to the Eurovision Song Contest (I am, incidentally, a big fan of the Eurovision Song Contest, even though it was, in a roundabout way, responsible for the demise of a long-term relationship I was in – and no, I don’t think Australia should be included), that when Stellan Skarsgard’s Bill Anderson arrives on Kalokairi for the wedding of his maybe-daughter Sophie (and high jinx ensue!), my friend thought, ah, now we’re getting to the Swedish pop band bit.
This is, I think, a great example of the power of belief, and the cognitive dissonance that can occur when something we had thought, or even imagined, to be one way, turns out to be quite another.
There is a certain level of adjustment that’s required, when some such strongly held belief is shattered, and honestly I think the ability to make said adjustment smoothly and without too much mental toil is a talent we greatly undervalue.
That same friend once called me on his way home from the gym – we worked at the same company at the time – to ask me to let our manager know that he would be late to work as someone had stolen all of his clothing, along with his deodorant, towel and toiletries, from his locker, and he had to go home to get replacements.
When, a fortnight later, his belongings were found in a routine sweep of locked lockers, he was incandescent with rage. “What a shitty thing to do! Did they think that was funny?!” he asked, entirely seriously. He would not – and still will not – countenance the possibility that there was no cunning trickster in the gym that day, switching his personal effects from one locker to another and that, instead, he may simply have forgotten where he stashed them. “They were definitely in that locker,” he seethed.
It’s fair to say that, for him, the mental acrobatics required to accept that his initial belief may be wrong, are somewhat beyond the scope of his talents. (I’m not naming him here to save his blushes, obviously, but if you need a name to put to the story, you may refer to him as Shmeoin.)
I thought about him, and his solo cinema trip, this week as Beatrice and I discussed “the fourth trimester” – a concept that was new to us both, honestly, as before I got pregnant I’d never heard the likes – in our podcast. You can listen to the episode below if you’ve any interest in my body, my baby or my postpartum period.
It’s fair to say that giving birth, caring for a newborn, breastfeeding, (probably) not breastfeeding… all of these things carry along with them a whole heap of expectations and assumptions, all of which, people tell you, will be thrown out the window in week one. It is no use, people telling you this; until you’re there, you can’t quite imagine that it will be different to the way you firmly believe it will be.
An example: I believed that I would suffer from postpartum depression. With a history of depression and anxiety, and being medicated for same for more than 10 years, it seemed like a definite. If anyone is going to suffer from PPD, I thought, it will be me.
When I cried, in those early days – because I read a news story about abandoned dogs, or because I thought the baby was smiling at me (it’s almost always just gas, in the beginning), or because I suddenly thought to myself, if Brandin and I had never met… – I felt myself sliding down a slippery slope toward mental instability.
“Of course you’re crying – you just had a baby!” my sister told me, in an attempt to comfort me, and I thought, well, yes, but I’m crying too much.
It took me a while to accept that my emotions were heightened in a way that didn’t necessarily speak to a mental illness but was, in fact, closely related to the very act of having given birth. (I hesitate to use the word “normal”, but to accept that this was all “normal”.) I was waiting for the morning to come when I would wake up and feel bereft, and angry, not just at my husband for sleeping longer than me (normal) but at my baby for existing, at me for doing something (lots of things) wrong… I was waiting for Stellan Skarsgard to come along and confirm my ill-held beliefs.
I guess I’m not great at adjusting my own assumptions, either; some things feel so definite, in my mind, that the very notion of them ending up differently is… hard to grasp. See also: all those years I spent convinced that I would never have children. Sometimes I wake up and I feel as though I have found myself in someone else’s life.
I think, really, that if you wait long enough, Stellan Skarsgard will almost always arrive to confirm what you’d always thought, or feared, would happen. (Or, honestly, some Skarsgard or other will arrive – there are dozens of them, like lemmings, toddling along behind each other to their doom, or victory.)
If you believe something hard enough, and for long enough, you will never accept that things could ever be different – better, or closer to what would make you happy, or even just as something you never could have imagined.
This is not, incidentally, about The Secret, or the power of positive thinking. Instead of repeating mantras to ourselves, maybe we should all take a little more time to clear our minds, to erase our mantra board, to rid ourselves of those deeply held beliefs that threaten to dictate not only our futures, but the very present we find ourselves in right now, today, at this minute.
(My friend Schmeoin would not be pressed on whether or not he enjoyed Mamma Mia! in the end. I’m not sure he was able, so deep was his confusion about the whole thing. He has not, to my knowledge, seen Mamma Mia! 2.)