Jonah Hill (Lion Man), Phil Stutz (Hero), and Mothers Who Take Up All the Oxygen (Works in Progress)

Wow. I watched the Netflix show Stutz on the recommendation of Jen, a fellow adoptee. It was like watching my own heart beat. It felt that surreal. How can I be having this opportunity to watch the inner workings of my own heart?

(Netflix, you can keep raising your rates all you want. You’ve earned every penny.)

This is what I also saw: I saw two men who were fighting with every fiber of their being against the messages they had picked up from their mothers when they were small (and maybe when they were not so small): you are not safe with me. To watch Phil Stutz endure the loss of motor control because hisParkinson’s was at the driver’s seat, was like watching a physical representation of what happens to the mind when a mother does not mirror her child in a way that supports health and growth.

Jonah Hill, who looks like a sun god, talked about his struggles with identity and weight, and then he had his mother on the show. You could see why he’d been in therapy all these years. When a mother did not get the mothering she needed, watch out. As a mother who also takes up all the oxygen in a room and as a daughter of the same kind of mother, I feel the endless hunger of both. God protect the child of that mother.

I feel like “Stutz” is a miracle. I feel like Jonah Hill and Phil Stutz are giving the world what it so desperately needs right now: tools to feel okay. We are bearing so much! A pandemic, a planet that looks like it’s melting before our eyes, leaders who want to destroy to build their own idea of self.

I will watch “Stutz” many times. My body needs what it reads as the honesty of those two men’s faces. My body needs to hear about love and gratitude. My body needs to see creation happening—and love. My body needs to watch other bodies climb out of the hell that is called being the child of a mother to become a self that wants to share its boon with the world. Maybe that’s why Joseph Campbell said women don’t have hero’s journeys the same way men do. Maybe he also had to survive his mother. Maybe, for some of us, mothers are what we have to survive to become ourselves.

Maybe it’s another way the universe has of creating human diamonds: it puts unimaginable pressure on a body in the form of craving the love of the unreachable mother so the body can crack and go out and do something life-changing for others.

The last two minutes of the movie were like getting to see a peony bloom in winter.

Grateful, grateful, grateful.