Words by Layla Bird Revoldt
When I think about the miscarriage ten years ago, I think about the way a child, at that point, could have devastated my chances of breaking a cycle of poverty. Children are expensive! And the US government does not make a hard situation easier, like most things. Whatever the cost of that cheap sake, it was the investment of a lifetime. On the other hand, I see the value of having a child and definitely want one someday. I have a lot of suspicions about what I might enjoy most about having a child. I think the main thing will be the intensity of my closeness to humanity. I think I will unlock a lot of new information about what it means to exist and have the pleasure of getting to know a cool little person in the meantime. I cannot wait until the day I am financially and emotionally ready to have that experience. However, given my food chain status, I have to always be wondering about financial liability. I identify with the new tiktok term, ‘Old Poor’. It is the foil to ‘Old Money’. Someone ‘Old Poor’ has the mindset of being a poor person forever, no matter the change in their financial status, they can always remember the game of their original class. I remember being in elementary school, sleeping in a tent in the woods when we were between apartments, listening to the night and crunching the numbers. The numbers never looked good for me. Sometimes my dreams trick me into thinking I am sleeping outside with the creatures again, and then I wake up in my brownstone in Brooklyn with humble pie scented morning breath.
Film is an expensive medium. There’s a financial barrier for entry. So what is an Old Poor woman conceiving films to do? In my early twenties, in NYC, I had secured a couple financially lucrative marriage proposals, but I turned them down. Impractically, I do believe in love. Alternatively, I figured if I used my Rust Belt work ethic to do plenty of free or extremely discounted labor for rich people, I might be rewarded someday unexpectedly. Nope, that’s not how rich people work! Turns out they really don’t think like the Old Poor, so I should never assume any of our mindsets would ever be the same. Then I thought, well maybe I should just throw myself off the Brooklyn Bridge and then for the eleven, elongated minutes before my brain finally expires, I might experience a just world, where things are barely fair enough that this life mission feels within reach.
Since my first three plans didn’t work out very well (or didn’t seem like they would) I actually decided to rescue a dog. At least the dog would buy me another decade of hope on this planet and fill a little void of nurturing in the meantime. I can confidently report that a canine companion is an essential tool for a woman conceiving films.
Right before I indulged in the sweet financial luxury of getting a dog, I went alone to the movies to see a new film, Nightbitch (2024) directed by Marielle Heller. It’s based on the book of the same title by Rachel Yoder. Anyways, it’s about a woman (played by Amy Adams) that is struggling with her life in the context of motherhood, and becomes completely feral. Like a dog. She studies and morphs metaphorically with dogs; watch it, and you might see what I mean. My dog is a little woman but she is not bound by some patriarchal bullshit, and apparently I need that modeled for me, intimately, all day everyday.
Here at the end of this forbidden trilogy, I wonder what it was all for. I wonder why I am like this. I fantasize about that seventeen year old sake slumber in the dead of Michigan winter, in our old drafty ass house in downtown Flint, cuddled under every blanket we owned, too alcohol comatose to be woken up by the bit of frostbite on the tip of my nose; my uterus, hard at work delivering some swift, poetic justice.
