Warning: This post contains spoilers for Season 3, Episode 8 of The bear.
There is a moment during season 3 of The bear in which it is clear that one of the episodes was written by someone who has been through childbirth or at least been present during someone else’s labor. While a desperate Natalie works, a stranger in uniform named Dr. Levin gives her the most frustrating lack of an answer to the most pressing question she may have ever asked in her life. When trying to decide whether to take Pitocin to speed up her slowly progressing labor, which would force her to get the epidural she doesn’t want, she asks, “If you could guess how much longer you think the whole thing will take …?” To which the doctor responds, “Well, however long it takes.” Then he gets a distress call and says something cryptic and scary into a walkie-talkie about “Opening the OR for a possible accident,” forcing Natalie to consider the worst possible outcomes of her current situation before rushing out of the room. living room.
He’s not wrong. The work, in fact, takes as long as it takes. And perhaps time is so of the essence that he can’t afford to spare Natalie (Abby Elliott) this terrifying detail she’d rather not know about. But the moment viscerally captures aspects of so many women’s birth experiences: the isolation, the fear, the impossibility of making decisions that feel completely consequential in the moment, even if, years later, whether or not to get an epidural is just a knock on the wrist. a story of triumph or terror or both. Giving birth for the first time, having nothing to do but the nascent maternal instinct, and lots of web pages with conflicting information cached in your browser history. Too much noise (the beeping monitors, the unsolicited advice), too much downtime (the endless waiting for nature to take its course), too much pain, and too many social messages about how to deal with it. “Ice Chips,” which was written by showrunner Joanna Calo, addresses all of this and offers a counter-narrative to so many childbirth tropes we often see on screen.
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The episode is about the relationship between Natalie, aka Sugar, and her mother, Donna, aka DeeDee (Jamie Lee Curtis, once again utterly captivating), even more than it is about Natalie’s path to motherhood. Of course, this path is significantly shaped by this relationship – which she explains to her mother in the hospital room, has always been defined by fear. Her mother scared her and her two older brothers, she says. Natalie “would get sick to make you feel better.”
That’s why, she explains, she went months without telling her mother about her pregnancy. The only reason Donna is here now is that literally no one else answered the phone when Natalie went into labor, lifting folded boxes of paper towels from her trunk in the Restaurant Depot parking lot. Not her husband Pete, who for some forgotten reason went on some kind of week-long trip when his wife was two weeks away from her due date (Pete, literally what?!). Not Sydney, or Carmy, or Marcus, or Richie — we just saw everyone lock their phones in their lockers in preparation for dinner at The Bear.
Some time before Dr. Levin’s entrance, the episode begins with Donna irritating her youngest son as she suffers from contractions. She offers training on unwanted births and regales hospital staff with stories of her own heroic births (“Did I tell you I walked to the hospital?”). She laughs at Natalie’s birth preferences and tries to convince her to change them. (“Natalie, I’m just telling you, as someone who’s been around the block, this particular block hurts like a motherfucker. But you do what you want.”) But with each contraction, the episode evolves into more conversation. honest relationship we have ever witnessed between the complicated matriarch and any of her descendants.
Donna briefly hints in this episode that her own mother is not someone she likes to remember; There’s a sense, then, that as we watch Natalie finally share the feelings she’s been tiptoeing around for years, perhaps we’re watching this cycle break before our eyes. “I just don’t want her to feel what I felt,” Natalie says of her own daughter. “Oh, she won’t,” Donna reassures Natalie. “You don’t know that,” she protests. Donna: “Oh, I want to. I accept, I accept.”
It’s a touching breakthrough in a strained relationship. We hear the stories of the three Berzatto children who came into the world and see the ancient practice of maternal wisdom being passed down between generations, even if it is met with looks and groans. Perhaps most poignant is Donna’s account of Natalie’s “beautiful” delivery—in contrast to Carmy’s, who was “fucked up, all over,” and Mikey’s, during which she felt he didn’t want to let go. assume in no way. Natalie involved a vivid dream about an aquarium, and Donna’s ex-sister-in-law playing her “Baby I Love You” by the Ronettes, which is ultimately this episode’s soundtrack.
But it’s also 40 minutes of television that will impress anyone who has gone through labor or birth or who has been at the bedside of someone who has. In many ways, Natalie’s labor was different from any of my labors, which was more precipitous, took place in New York City’s notably smaller birthing rooms, and did not involve the same specific type of maternal trauma. Still, there’s a sense of calibrated authenticity to the experience that’s relatively rare in on-screen depictions of work.
There are quiet conversations between contractions. The way birth preferences written down when this was all just a hypothetical scenario are discarded as reality emerges. The eternal periods of time where not a single person in uniform shows up to check on the scariest hours of a person’s life. The animal noises, the arguments, the feeling that watching curves gently pulsing on a monitor might beat them into submission. The pure, delicious relief of a cup of ice chips.
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Last year, my colleague Eliana Dockterman wrote about the proliferation of pregnancy trauma in pop culture, Dragon House for Fleishman is in trouble, Yellow jackets for The last of us. “To some observers and listeners, these tales may seem like long-awaited validation of women’s stories,” she wrote. “Fertility, pregnancy, birth and motherhood involve pain. It’s time we confront this.” And in some cases, like Dead Copies It is This is going to hurtshe wrote, they address systemic issues that harm women, babies, and families.
“Ice Chips” is a departure from this trend. The scars and traumas that drive it are largely of the emotional kind. She moves through mundanity, presenting work as simultaneously oppressive and normal, dramatic and familiar. How do I work in the sense of hard work, which is nothing more than a central theme in The bear. You can count on the acceleration of the contraction monitor’s beeping to ratchet up the tension, but birth here is no cheap narrative device. The arc isn’t as clearly plotted as the culmination of a toxic mother-daughter relationship to make way for a new, healthier relationship – Natalie and Donna will need more than one good talk to repair their bond, if they ever truly can. But it’s somewhere in that estimate.
And in the end, we don’t get the usual payoff of a birth scene – a baby’s first healthy cries. We don’t see the final pushes and grunts, nor the pink and blue stripes of the universal hospital blanket wrapped around a bundle of joy. The final scene is of Donna, flanked by the Fak brothers in the waiting room. She is sitting at ease now, having coached her estranged daughter on an important occasion. To offer advice to a perplexed Pete, finally back from where she never should have gone. She managed to keep her luggage long enough to be useful and comfortable. “You’re a grandmother now,” Neil says. “You’ll be good.” She wasn’t the one who gave birth, but somehow, she was reborn.
This story originally appeared on Time.com read the full story
