Right after Christmas last year I got an email from Jodine Chase asking if I could help with something. The Infant Feeding in Emergencies Core Group had a webinar at the end of January, and instead of doing a live role play over Zoom they wanted a short film. Could we pull one together in North Carolina? The filmmaker was only free the week of January 5.
My first answer was close to no. Schools are closed. Childcare is upside down. We normally want about thirty days between an ask like that and the day of filming. We were being asked to do it in ten. So, rather than asking a parent within my network, I offered to be in the film myself and to drive to Chapel Hill.
Peggy Koniz-Booher wrote back and answered every single concern, in blue, point by point, right down the middle of my own email. She had already solved the location. She was driving down from Maryland to run props and wardrobe and, in her words, to be the gofer. Her son Adam Booher, who is a professional filmmaker in Chapel Hill, had agreed to shoot and edit the whole thing for nothing. Adam has a toddler who was still nursing at the time. .
There is a piece of this I did not expect. Peggy worked for years with Miriam Labbok, back when Miriam was in Washington, before she came to Chapel Hill and founded the Carolina Global Breastfeeding Institute. The work I do in Durham is Miriam’s work, carried forward. I did not know until that week that the woman asking me for help had been there at the beginning of it. It is a small field and it keeps folding back on itself in ways that make me want to sit down.
So I said yes.
We filmed on Friday, January 9, at the church my father-in-law attends, and a place where I went to La Leche League meetings when my own babies were little. I played the breastfeeding counsellor. Lua Reed took the other role. A doll played the baby, because filming a real infant at three months is its own kind of weather. The scenario is a generic emergency setting, deliberately not any one country, because the audience for this thing spans thirty of them. The first scene is an infant feeding assessment. The second is the follow up, and that is the one that matters, because that is where you can actually see what trauma-informed care is. Not the definition of it. The doing of it. What she does before she asks anything. Where she slows down. What she does not say.
On January 28 it went out to the IFE Core Group webinar with live interpretation in Spanish, French and Arabic. It ran again on February 11.
I have been sent a lot of kind messages about it, and I want to be careful about where the credit lands. I stood in a backyard and did a thing I already know how to do (talking with a mom). Adam gave up his week and his equipment. Peggy drove down from Maryland and chased down a doll. Jodine put the whole introduction together in the first place. And Lua showed up in January to hold a plastic baby for a camera because someone needed a mother and she said yes.
What I keep thinking about is how badly we needed this to exist. We spend a lot of time telling people that trauma-informed care matters and almost no time showing them what it looks like at eye level, in a chair, with a tired woman and a hungry baby and eleven other people waiting. Ten minutes of watching somebody do it well is worth more than an hour of being told it is important.
The film is free and it has subtitles. Watch it here, along with the discussion questions we use when we show it in a training.