Run Towards the Danger: Confrontations with a Body of Memory

by Sarah Polley

A nurse comes into my room on the first night in the high-risk ward. She is chatty and high-pitched and from Bulgaria. She puts a large rubber mat under me. I look at her questioningly. She shrugs and says, “It’s so strange with placenta previas. Always with previas, it happens in the middle of the night! You hear the alarm go off, you come into the room, and the woman is just sitting there and the entire bed is soaked in blood! It’s dripping all over the floor! Goodnight!” She gives me a cheery smile at the door. I turn to look at David, who has set up a camping mat on the floor. My eyes are wide with fear. He gives me a supportive smile, but it’s hard to say anything that can undo the gothic Eastern European horror-movie bedtime routine we’ve just been treated to.

Eve is sleepy. A nurse tells me that if Eve doesn’t latch on soon we will have to go to formula. Based on my experience with the floral-scarf breastfeeding Nazi, I hear this as “If you don’t figure out how to get your baby to latch soon we will inject a fetid, evil potion that will leave your child without a soul, wandering a barren hellscape of a life, alone.”

Plácido Domingo sang me an aria from three feet away. Not knowing who he was or what the hell was happening generally at that point, I assumed he was lip-synching to a very loud recording. I had just never heard anyone sing so loudly. This, by the way, is the closest I have come to the experience of being on an acid trip.

In my years as an actor, I often saw young white male filmmakers even putting on false eccentricity and temper, as though that would make them more credible as an artist. It’s so pervasive, this idea that genius can’t come without trouble, that it has paved the way for countless abuses. As an adult, I find myself wholly intolerant of the fetishization of this archetype of genius, having seen, first-hand, great works made by decent, conscientious people, and having witnessed sharp impatience with female or BIPOC filmmakers who show any similar signs of irresponsibility.

So much of coming to terms with hard things from the past seems to be about believing our own accounts, having our memories confirmed by those who were there and honoured by those who weren’t.

At six, Eve is already starting to sense hypocrisy, falsity, and exaggeration. Once, as I yelped and applauded a somersault Aila was showing me, Eve said, “That reaction you’re having on the outside isn’t the same as the one you’re having on the inside.”

Many kids adore performing, and why shouldn’t those kids perform—particularly in children’s theatre groups or school plays? But why any parent would put a child, for any substantial length of time, in an environment that was designed with a profit motive, making the prioritization of their child’s well-being an impossibility, has been, for most of my life, a mystery to me.

“But he loves it so much! He wants to do it.” To which I reply something like: “Yes—and lots of kids want to be firefighters or doctors too. But they must wait until they are no longer children to assume the pressures and obligations of adult work.”

It’s something our society made up its mind about a long time ago: children shouldn’t work. Why this principle doesn’t apply to an industry known for its exploitation and self-serving nature bewilders me.