Home Alone 2

The Pigeon Lady


So every year as a Christmas tradition, my husband watches the first two Home Alone movies. It’s just what he likes to do. I wasn’t raised with the Home Alone movies, so for me, it’s a series I watch every…thirteen years or so? I mean, it’s not bad, but it’s not like “we have to watch it!” You know?

But I think with Home Alone 2 it cuts deeper than that. It touches on the importance of family, which I have outgrown the importance of flesh and blood family, and I am at the point where very few people reach out to me on a daily, weekly, or even monthly basis to see how I’m doing. So there are not many people I would call friends. I identify with the pigeon lady scene in the opera house. She got used to being let down by people in general. Her family, her friends, people she hardly knew, then she just stopped trying. 

Since it wasn’t the first time watching it, I saw things I didn’t notice before, like her first lines weren’t until the creepy music started backing off and Kevin started talking to her as a human instead of a monster to be scared of. It seems like the first two movies made a very strong point that fear of the unknown can be worse than fear of what happens when you just try. People will break your heart. That’s just a fact of life. But maybe, like Kevin’s roller skates, if you don’t use your heart, you get out of practice, and it’s that much harder letting someone inside. Sometimes, you might just make a new friend!

I’ve become so good at intelligently talking about my trauma that I’ve bypassed feeling it. This movie made me feel just a tiny sliver of it, and that’s why I hated it. I can talk to you about attachment styles, the traumas in my life, and how people have harmed me all day long, but actually feeling that pain…I’ve been avoiding it. I’ve become a master at it. It’s time to start to learn how to feel it.


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