I recently watched Twilight.
When the book was first released, I was a hipster who liked Death Cab before they became popular. Transatlanticism was the album I listened to before I moved in with my college boyfriend, and as soon as I started to hear Benjamin Gibbard’s voice on the radio, I took them off of my playlists without a second thought. I wasn’t a cheap mainstream brat.
And though I would never admit it, I never looked as happy as they did.
So when every other traveler was holding the thick black book open over their lap with the porcelain hands cradling the tempting apple, I looked the other way. And when I heard the author was out of Utah, I decided to read Gone with the Wind to avoid reading teenage trash. (I told myself I was better than that.) I liked to be one of those shocking 15-year-olds that knew that “frankly, Scarlet, he didn’t give a damn”. If you don’t get that quote, let me be the cool 31-year old and tell you it’s the most famous line from that 1,037 paged book.
Years later, I justified reading the Twilight Saga by telling myself (and anyone that cared to know) that I had to read all three books to properly dislike them. I read them quickly, and secretly chose Jacob over Edward. (Though if I were to say if David was a Jacob or Edward, he is definitely more the vampire type. So take that for what it’s worth.)
When my friends listened to Taylor Swift and talked about Bella Swan, I needed to rise above the chit-chat with something sophisticated and political. I rolled my eyes and decided to read The Fountainhead. And when the movies came out, I watched them because they “were the only movies I hadn’t seen on the plane.”
All of these paragraphs are really here just to say that I was quite a snob.
“I Will Follow You into the Dark” makes me cry every time. And Bella Swan was the nobody girl that every girl wanted to be. Myself included.
But at the time, it was all too “young” for me.
I recently watched the Twilight movies. I can’t say it was because it was the only thing I hadn’t seen on the plane because I was tucked cozily under a blanket on our couch with a handful of streaming services bending to my will to offer me something worth my limited free time after my son had been put down for the night. But I did have to have an excuse as I selected “Watch Now” on the screen. As my husband walked by to grab some chips and salsa for the game he had on in the other room. As he looked at the screen and then at my face, I provided context.
“I’m doing some research for my young adult fantasy.” I gestured with an open hand towards a young Edward Cullen and Bella Swan in an embrace with somber, if not empty faces.
“...Sure.” David smiled.
“It’s research!”
“Just…enjoy it. Okay?”
When he walked by again and Bella was getting a piggyback ride from the hundred year old vampire at impossible speeds, I had to speak up for myself. I needed to explain why I was watching such a ridiculous screen.
“It’s so stupid.” I said. Again, my open hand held out towards the screen. I realize I wasn’t explaining anything, but just making sure the sole witness to my choice of entertainment knew that I despised the story that was unfolding in front of me.
“Jade. I think it’s so cool that you’re watching it. And I think it’s so cool that you’re loving it.”
“I’m not loving it! I don’t love it.” Did he even hear me call it stupid?!
“Okay…Okay…” He lifted his hands up in the way of surrender—in the way a husband says his wife is right without truly believing it. “I’m just saying, if you did find yourself loving it…that would be okay. I wouldn’t think less of you.”
I continued my relationship with the Twilight Saga over the course of mere days. I watched it while my son napped, while I washed dishes and folded laundry, and dare I admit, I even brought it to bed with me to watch for a few minutes before falling asleep. (I go to bed very early, so bedtime shows have an extra slim window for me.) And suddenly I found myself on a weekend while my son was asleep, witnessing Bella become pregnant.
It dawned on me that when I had watched this last, I didn’t have a child. I wasn’t married. I’m quite sure I hadn’t even had my ears pierced. And it changed things for me.
While Edward’s concern for Bella was flattering, I was focused on the defiance of Bella. As a mother who has miscarried and lost a child before I was able to hold them in my arms, I stood by Bella in the same way Edward’s vampire sister, Rosalie, did. I was ready to support the blood drinking of anyone that got near Bella’s baby. I watched Bella hope for the impossible and plan for the worst. When I watched this in my teenage days, I saw Bella weighing some simple options. She might defeat the bad vampires and all was well or she might lose to them and let Jacob run away with her daughter.
As a teenager, the stakes were quite low to me. As a mother, the stakes had never been higher. Just having to battle other bad vampires was already traumatizing her child. Losing was unacceptable, and yet it still had to be accounted for. That’s often what I find myself doing in motherhood. Hoping for the best, refusing the worst…and yet having to walk through the steps of the worst case scenarios because that means I’m gone. And what mother would I be without a plan for my child?
To say that I cried nearly all through the last movie would speak to the endurance of my emotion, but not the intensity. My husband passed through twice, and not for chips or chocolate milk, but to pass me not one, but two boxes of tissues. That night my eyes burned, and when I woke up the next morning (although all had ended well for Bella and her family) my eyes were dry.
And I thought long and hard about the happy ending, which seemed to be the most impactful for me. And maybe I don’t exactly know what it says about me, but the image spoke to me.
The Cullen family didn’t behave like a multi-generational family in the 2020’s, but like a wolf pack. All of the siblings, virtually immortal, stayed together over the years (even after they found their eternal partners) and lived on the same property in their own houses. My family, my mother and sisters, are scattered across the country. Bella and Edward were given a home as a wedding gift from Edward’s parents. It was a cottage in the forest, fronted with vines, warmed by a fireplace, filled with shelves of books, and a nursery that grew along with the rapid aging of their child. My husband and I had made several offers on homes in the last few years and been priced out by large gaps of cash. Our bedroom is in the basement and our couch in our kitchen. We have many books in storage, but no room to shelve them. Not yet.
Edward’s power is that he is very fast. He’s also a vampire and so dying basically only happens by the act of another vampire. My husband… last year… Well you guys already know my story. Their daughter is also half vampire. While not quite as everlasting as Bella and Edward, she is still presumed to live well over a 100 years old and not be vulnerable to the typical mortal dangers that could be life threatening for the average human. My son caught the COVID virus and had to be hospitalized with multiple IV’s in order to break his fever. My husband and I stayed awake nearly three days straight, listening to the sound of his heart beat from the glowing monitors and watching the rise and fall of his little body that laid behind the metal bars of the hospital crib. Oh, and besides the fact that, although childbirth nearly kills Bella, when she finally wakes up fully transformed—thicker, longer eyelashes, the perfect shade of lipstick is now permanent, and sunken bags under the eyes have disappeared—can we talk about how the need or even desire for sleep is a thing of the past? While sleep deprivation for new parents is basically a right of passage, it’s become a state that’s literally impossible for her to achieve?
The night I finished the saga, I went to bed. I took a deep breath in and then a deep exhale. Unlike Bella, I needed to try to capture a few hours of sleep before my son woke up—especially if the night turned out to be one of the tougher nights…I found myself eerily remembering the night in my adolescence when I cried because I had come to terms with the fact that Spiderman wasn’t actually real. That evil was still out there in all forms, but there was no man that swung from the skyscrapers shooting webs out of his forearms while he made the sign “Rock on” with his fingers.
I was unsettled. I was feeling childish. I knew I wanted things I could never have. As a big fan of Dracula and now currently reading The Interview with a Vampire, I fell asleep coming to a conclusion every blood sucker seems to wrestle with, rarely finding resolution:
I could give a shit about whether or not my soul was damned: I want to be a vampire.