Saving Mr. Banks

I seem to live in a single-motherhood bubble, in which I may hear about what is going on in the world, but where I am clearly unable to follow the crowd while attending to my child and our life. That being said, it has taken me a whole six years to watch Emma Thompson give life to author P.L. Travers, and here I am now, with this need to express some thoughts and some personal truths, holding the heart hostage and the soul on fire. 

P. L. Travers is all of us, really. If you carry any piece of your childhood with you - any piece that wounded you in any way - regardless of your present age, we all know and can relate to the loss Ms. Travers experienced in her young years, and the way her imagination and her creativity took flight and mustered a character such as Mary Poppins. She profoundly disliked Disney's portrayal of the nanny, whom she found had not been presented in its entire dramatic and harsh light, under which she had created her. There was more to Mary Poppins than met the eye to Ms. Travers, more to be acknowledged, more to be perhaps apprehensive of, which followed the footprints of her own childhood recollection as it related to events experienced by a 6 year old Helen Lyndon Goff -  later known by the entire world as Pamela Lyndon Travers. 

The story of her father, as portrayed in "Saving Mr. Banks" is actually true. There appeared to be a correlation between the Mr. Banks of "Mary Poppins" and Ms. Travers' father, who was a banker as well. I will not presume to know what Ms. Travers was thinking when she created Mary Poppins, but I do know and understand the need to redeem our heroes and save as much as possible from their influence in our lives. My father didn't die when I was 6, he passed when I was 27. He was neither an alcoholic nor a banker - but I often experienced an emotional absence that impacted me more than I can say, in as many ways as you can imagine. This is where I draw my empathy trail toward Ms. Travers. This is where I find her shoes and I walk on them, very much aware of the heaviness of these shoes, and the fragility with which we should always handle someone else's pain. 

I remember being just a kid, not even a teenager yet, the very first time I watched 'On Golden Pond", a screenplay by Ernest Thompson adapted for film in 1981. It was the one most excruciating moment of my young life at the time, watching Henry Fonda's Norman's effect on Jane Fonda's character. As father and daughter in real life, I saw more than what the script was telling us even then. I saw myself in Chelsea, in Jane. I saw my father in Norman, in Henry. The oceans in between in their communication issues. The longing for more from their broken father-daughter relationship, and the almost automatic opposition from a father that simply could not do more than what he was doing with what he had to give, even though he loved her. The broken expectations. The weight of disappointment. The need for  approval. The wounds inflicted by a perpetual absence of validation. And  yet the love, the unyielding love. I involuntarily revisited these emotions while watching Tom Hanks and Emma Thompson dissect what P.L. Travers may have been feeling. Accurate enough or not in its story line, my mind traveled to the Queensland of her early childhood, where her father lived and died, and I felt her anguish and her pain.  It gave me pause. People can be so unwilling to empathize, so unaware of the merits of one's beating heart - pumping life even when it broke long before you could know how to mend it. 

I believe she wrote to escape. I believe she wrote to create a safer environment in which she could not get hurt. I profoundly identify with Ms. Travers’ need to write. Like her, I have done it since I was a little girl. A cathartic instrument of hope and redemption. A purging tool through which emotions reveal their true selves, and healing opens a small window. If I can walk away with anything valuable from Mary Poppins, the writer that imagined her, and Emma Thompson's portrayal of P.L. Travers is this: don't be so quick to dismiss someone's awkwardness. Don't plant your heels so deep into the sand that you can't pivot and change your perspective, where compassion takes control and you become a healing vessel for someone else's why. We all have a Mr. Banks.