Matrescence is a word that is slowly finding its way back into vernacular after decades without recognition in Western society. This transition goes further than the narrative surrounding pregnancy, birth and motherhood women have been fed for centuries. It goes far beyond the development of the foetus, how the baby turns out and looks instead at unexamined moral assumptions about motherhood – and explains the metamorphosis and how it ends. As a chimera with her child’s cells knitted to her body and bones and her brain colonised, forever connected.
Victoria Mapplebeck’s feature debut Motherboard, shot over two decades on a DVCAM and five generations of iPhone is a collaboration between a mother and her son but attempts to depict the multitude of changes a woman goes through above beyond the physical mutation of growing another human. At 38, pregnant and alone after being dumped by a man reportedly not for fatherhood she begins to document her journey of motherhood post-birth. A filmmaker-cum-academic, Victoria is no stranger to an absentee father, her own walked out on her mother when she was a toddler.
Her baby’s father, upon meeting his child on the first of less than a handful of times, demands a paternity test before announcing his move to Spain and over the years his apathy does not change. One feels nothing but shame for him. Jim grows into a seemingly great little human in spite of him – that thumbs-up during the scan in the first scene of the film telling us all we need to know – and because of his mother and grandmother, Betty. He is mature beyond his years, sensitive and pragmatic even before he reaches ten years old.
While absent fathers are nothing new in this family, Victoria does manage to repair some of the fractures in her relationship with her own father in a particularly moving moment, Jim’s interest at 13 in developing a relationship with his other parent coincides with Victoria’s cancer diagnosis and the rounds of chemotherapy she must face. There is no sugar-coating, no bemoaning of the selfish human she pro-created with (at least on camera) or any self-pity: “I don’t care if I die. I just want to get [Jim] to adulthood.”
This documentary uses live-action footage, voicemails, voiceovers and text messages to paint a fiercely unsentimental look at motherhood, and the frustrations that go along with it not to mention the guilt and unfiltered messiness of life with a child and the attempt to navigate a career alongside. It is really beautiful seeing Jim evolve – over 90 minutes – the small squeaky voice giving way to a deep resonant tone, the small day bed replaced with a double to house his growth spurt.
We bear witness to the teenager, moody, monosyllabic, fighting the onset of depression amid a pandemic-induced lockdown and drug experimentation. That these struggles occur during the time Victoria starts to take baby-steps back into the filmmaking world, pitching her film to the Venice film festival are merely coincidence or because of are never really explored. However, understandably, it leads to some really intense and terse moments between the two, and on the other end of the phone there’s a voice of reason in Betty.
Victoria. Betty. They are the constants. Two women who raise(d) their children (mostly) alone. The former never stops needing the latter, who is often on hand to offer sage advice, empathise with, offer thoughts on films, or bake a shepherd’s pie, and Jim has another mother to go to when things get a little too tough between him and his own mum.
Motherboard frames the joys and expectations of motherhood and to some degree womanhood as the woman of this piece attempts to carve a place for herself in the world, recouping earlier sacrifices after the maternal block (Jim refers to it as a mental one). It is humane, warm and candidly relatable.
At the heart of it, there is no denying the connection between this mother and her child.
The Framing Device 