‘A Quiet Place’ and ‘A Quiet Place 2’ understand that parenting is a horrifying ordeal not suited for the faint of heart.
Editor’s note: There will be spoilers.
A Quiet Place (2018) and A Quiet Place 2 (2021) are films about the terrors of parenting.
Yes, they could be read as an allegory of sorts about the impossibility of quiet and focus and family time in a smartphone-enabled, WiFi-everywhere apocalyptic wasteland.
Yes, they could be read, especially in the age of COVID, as a morality tale about what it takes to keep you and your family safe against the pestilence that stalks the land. The Abbott family is a model for social distancing, but all your precautions can’t stop what’s coming.
To be fair, the films could be speaking to all of these things, and I am definitely sympathetic to these latter two readings. But I see both of them as primarily subsets of the first: namely, that parenting is a horrifying ordeal not suited for the faint of heart. No Country for Old Parents, ya know?
Consider the bear trap scene in the second film. Take away the abandoned-factory setting and alien-monster-lurking-around-every-corner reality, and it’s a scene every parent has found themselves in. One kid has unconsolably hurt himself, and then the baby starts to cry, and in that moment the stakes actually do feel like life-and-death. And the alien monster that is swarming to the cries of your children? That’s really just your stress level boiling to the self-devouring point.
Or consider the opening scene of the first film. The youngest Abbott disobeys his parents (with help from a sibling—stop me if you’ve heard that before) by playing with the toy they told him not to play with and suffers the consequences of getting his head cut off by an alien monster with swords for arms and the speed of Terry Tate Office Linebacker. Which is basically every parents’ worst nightmare: if your kid plays with X toy or doesn’t make the traveling soccer team by age 3 or doesn’t properly appreciate piano lessons or if you give them a smartphone before they’re 30, then an untold number of horrors will befall their sad, pathetic lives and it’s all your fault.
“If we can’t protect them, then who are we?” Emily Blunt’s Evelyn Abbott asks her husband, John Krasinski’s Lee Abbott, near the first film’s climax.
This is the terror of parenting. No doubt millions of parents across our country ask themselves this same question, if not every day then most days. Make one wrong move in your parenting, and poof, there goes your kid. The pressures and presumptions of parenting are heightened today in ways that previous generations of parents never had to deal with. (I’m looking at you, Instagram, with your Mom Bloggers and curated self-presentation to the desperate, impressionable parenting public.) We are wrecked with this notion that anything less than undaunted diligence and its attendant results will therefore result in the demise of our kids and everything we’re trying to create with our families.
This, I might add, might be more pronounced for families of faith. “The culture” stalks the woods like the monsters in the Abbott’s cornfield, waiting to devour your children. You’re working your ass off trying to bring them up in the faith during an age when goodness and truth and beauty and even the notion of family are as dubious as a very-pregnant Evelyn Abbott doing laundry at the bottom of a creaky flight of stairs in old farmhouse with your husband gone fishing while CIVILIZATION-DESTROYING MONSTERS LURK IN THE WOODS.
So what are you going to do?
First, give up the illusion that you can control what happens to your kids. This requires humility and repentance. In your parenting, you will get some things right and some things tragically wrong. And if you are a foster or adoptive parent, you have likely already realized that many of the dynamics you face as a parent to kids from hard places have nothing to do with you. These children need attachment, healing from trauma, stability, plus everything else “normal” kids need. It feels impossible. It feels at least 15 percent terrifying. And, yeah, it kind of is, regardless of your family history.
But not if your kids are God’s kids before they are your kids.
If that reality can settle into the deep, quiet places of your heart, then you can meet the terrors of the day with open hands, calm strength, and patient wisdom.
Then you can be like Lee Abbott. You can tell your kids that you love them. No matter what good things or bad things they do. And you can tell them that everyday. You can pray it over their doorposts after they’ve gone to bed.
Then you can be like Evelyn Abbott. You can let the things that scare you the most come right into your home. You can let them get so close they can hear you breathing. And then, when you realize that your kids need more than your protection and that their weaknesses and traumas and sinfulness are actually prisms by which you can better see the world and better understand grace, you can blow the heads off the monsters with Holy Spirit-sized shot and chamber another round.