Sunshine Cleaning is not a feel-good, laugh-out-loud movie like Little Miss Sunshine.  But I think you’ll walk out of the theater saying it was a good movie.

Some of the story lines are unfinished.  Some of them are weak.  But all in all, the acting by Emily Blunt, Amy Adams, and Alan Arkin is superb.

The gist of the story is that the two sisters start up a biohazard removal business where they are contracted out to do clean-up at crime scenes.  It sounds gross…and is…but that’s the whole point.  In reality, I suppose it’s a metaphor for their own life messes they’re trying to clean up.

You know when you read a book, and you think it’s the best ever, and then you read it years on down the road, and you don’t find anything likable about it?  You wonder why you thought it was so great back then.  I think it has to do with your life circumstances at the time.  Back then it spoke to what you were experiencing.  Now that you’re through that life season, it has very little to say to you.

It’s the same with movies, I think.

There’s a particular bathroom scene in the movie in which Rose (Amy Adams) is furious at Norah (Emily Blunt).  She says, “I can’t take care of you forever,” and Norah says, “But you don’t have to.  I have to take care of myself.”  And the tears flow.

You see, there’s a thread of a dead mother in there–one that they both don’t know much about, but still, she haunts their conversations, their lives.

I cried, and I’ll tell you why.  Whether or not my perceptions as a child were accurate, whether or not I truly could have made any difference at all in the security and care of my siblings, I felt responsible.  There were six kids below me.  I knew I had to take care of them.  I knew I had to protect them from the leering men or bullying teenagers who might approach us on our mile-long walks to school and back.  [We lived in a crime-ridden neighborhood.]  I dreamed of pulling them back from cliff edges.  I dreamed of knocking on neighborhood doors but getting no answer.  I dreamed of drownings.  I dreamed of kidnappings.

Needless to say, I grew up with severe tension headaches that immobilized me enough that I had to leave school to go home.

I say all this, because sadly, if I’m being very truthful here, it was one of the reasons I felt I couldn’t have children myself.  I had too many children already, and I had to be prepared to be there for each and every one of them.  Now my siblings would argue that I wasn’t there always, and that’s certainly true, because I was going to school, getting married, and working.  But I would counter that I’m a person who is faithful to phone calls and e-mails and packages in the mail.  Dan and I have given cars when we could.  Dan and I have paid for trips out to see us.  Dan and I have tried to give when we could.

But it’s a huge burden to bear.  Don’t get me wrong.  I love each of my siblings.  It’s just that when you’re that young, you don’t know any better, and I wish someone could have told me earlier (he/she did; I wasn’t listening!) that I had done my sisterly duties, and that I was free to live my own life now.

How sad is that?

But the emotions welled up in me again, watching this movie, and some of the tears, believe it or not, were of gratefulness–that I’ve moved on, that Dan and I have this amazing child, and that I’ve accepted that I can only do what I can do, and it will never be enough.

Which I’m okay with now.