aftersun

#twentythree

In this newsletter I will be discussing the movie Aftersun a lot. This isn’t a review or recommendation on the movie but more about how this movie has flipped me upside down when it comes to my recent discoveries of my birth family. I do put a spoiler warning when it gets to the spoiler part of the movie. 

The first time I ever thought about my birth father was when I was 17 years old and it didn’t even happen organically- someone asked me a question about him and I remember being absolutely taken aback in that moment that I had never once thought about his existence. I’ve tried to figure out why it took me that long to think of this man and also how long it would have taken if someone hadn’t brought him up first. I’ve never had a terribly good relationship with my adopted dad, which I’ve written somewhat about here in a previous newsletter. My relationship with the idea of a dad was always fraught with my introduction to the angry and jealous God of Christianity and then further cemented with my own dad’s frigid nature. I’ll never forget finding out my friends had dads that spent time with them and laughed, played basketball with them and even just asked about their day. I will say not a day has gone by in my life where my dad hasn’t told me he loved me but I don’t think my dad could currently tell you the color of my hair (but like most dads he can tell you the make and model of my car). 

I recently watched the movie Aftersun, which I had preferred to see in theaters but a torrentially rainy and cold Friday night with canceled plans begged me to spend the 5.99 on Amazon Prime to watch it. I had been very excited to watch an anything Paul Mescal movie and knew it had something to do with being a dad- which had been throwing me off because he just seems too young for that. But I get it, young dads exist so I settled into watch. 

And now I have not been able to stop thinking about this movie in the weeks since I pressed rent on Prime and when it does cross my mind I have teared up every single time. Yes it’s an incredible movie and Paul Mescal and his co-star, Frankie Corio who plays his daughter Sophie, absolutely kill it but the thing that hit me so hard was the realization a quarter into the movie that the age difference between the dad and the daughter in the movie is around the same age difference as my birth father and me, information that I just gotten back in December. For some reason my birth parents giving me up for adoption at such a young age has fostered a lot more forgiveness from me about them leaving me. But watching this movie and the relationship between the dad and daughter instantly made me mourn another “what could have been” relationship if I stayed with my birth family. 

I do wonder what it would have been like if my young dad kept me and I could go over a thousand scenarios of the what could have beens. But I also realize the reality is that the imaginary young dad I could dream up is most likely not the one he would have been on paper.

So here comes the big spoiler warning if you haven’t seen this movie, and I am begging you to see this movie so if there’s a world where you could close out this newsletter, watch the movie and come back then please enter that world now (and if you do enter that world you are a far better person than I, because I would simply close out the tab and completely forget to watch the movie or come back to finish this newsletter because I would have gotten distracted by my endless search for green Adidas Gazelle shoes with the gum sole in size 8.5 for women and 7.5 for men). 

As the movie progresses little hints are dropped about the ending but once I could put together what all those hints meant and where the movie was going, I lost it. Understanding this was their last vacation together, and now as an adult all she can do is think back to those memories as she desperately just wants to hold one more time. There has not been one single instance in the last week where I have not thought about this situation when it comes to my own thoughts about my birth father. How in a way my own young dad left me to wonder what my life would have looked like if he stuck around. How he married my birth mom and they had another kid together, and how maybe he did want to be a dad after all. And if he did decide to stick around would I have better relationships with men and the idea of dads- again all places my mind wanders that I know is rocky territory. 

The overall movie and my situation are completely different but little bits of it nodded to my own personal experience which has further heightened my sentimentality to the film. The movie takes places in Turkey, which is a fun little nod to the 13% Turkish DNA on my 23andme, and in the 90s which would place my age and the Sophie’s age around the same. So I couldn’t help but see myself in her role and feeling for the first time in my life some connection with my birth father- a young dad who chose to remove himself from his daughter’s life, just like my birth father did to me.

Charlotte Wells, who wrote and directed the movie loosely about her own relationship with her father, said in this Variety piece she “wanted to explore a different period in that relationship, like a young father and his daughter on holiday. Even just visually having a young parent, like a young man and his daughter, it just felt like it could be something interesting and fun and compelling” and for me seeing a young father and a daughter together just the two of them was personally the most compelling thing I’ve seen in a very long time.

My hand still hovers over the 23andme app wondering what day I will send the message. Every day I get scared that what if today is the day an illness finally gets one of them or they get hit by a bus or move somewhere that is beyond my reach. I don’t know what I’m waiting for and I’m not looking for a sign that today is the day to reach out. It’s the strangest feeling I’ve experienced, having to grapple with the pressure of time running out while simultaneously trying to make sure my mental health is in check. 

I’m most likely going to watch this movie again and again because it currently feels like the only connection I have to this man. It’s self masochistic but as an adoptee we don’t get much. I recently had a conversation with another adoptee about how we are just sort of thrown into a world of figuring out our entire identities with no solid resources or help. And as you get older the feelings become stronger but a reunion feels less tangible. So just let me watch my devastatingly sad movie about a young father and daughter on vacation as I hover between sending The Message on 23andme and also watching Harry Styles sing about fruit in Australia on TikTok. 

new things:

I’m working on a few new fun things to come in the next few months (a little podcast! some new smaller newsletters to go out between the big ones!) but would love to know what you want to hear more of these days. So if you have some time let me know what sort of things you’re enjoying from newsletters and wouldn’t mind fishing out of your spam folders if I were to include in this newsletter subscription. (Also content is still all free but in a few months some of it will be going paid, but in the meantime if you would like help out this newsletter you can sign up for a paid subscription here- thank you!)