The stories woven together in the premiere production (at Hartford Stage) of Motherhood Out Loud—co-written by fourteen playwrights, co-conceived by Susan Rose and Joan Stein and directed by Lisa Peterson—tell us many truths about motherhood and perhaps the most important one is this: there is no single universal truth about motherhood.
Sure, there are many universal truths and at one time or another, they may strike you as so completely and utterly true with a capital ‘T’ it’s inconceivable to imagine others not feeling exactly the same way. Say, the days are long and childhood goes by in the blink of an eye. During the moment you’re feeling all, wow, how did my child shoot up, another mother is counting the moments within a second in hopes that whatever garden variety sleeplessness or tantrum or terrified wait in a hospital will pleasepleaseplease be over.
In the stories shared during Motherhood Out Loud, many themes are touched upon from the no-one-told-me-really sense that childbirth is a big deal all the way to the baton pass when a child realizes his mother needs him to take care of her when her memory begins to fail. I delighted in the stories—some completely funny, others that made me teary.
Amongst the stories I loved were the ones I totally related to—the mother of the little boy wanting to wear a dress and the process of wrapping her mind around that—and ones that placed me into others’ shoes—mother of college student unable to fully accept the sudden silence despite preparing for her son’s launch, or mother of a soldier needing to imagine the worst in order to become somewhat prepared and ward off the bad all at once.
What resonated to me perhaps most was the way that as we care for our children, we are the ones being given the gift of learning: about our children and our families and ourselves. This interplay—nurturer, nurtured—goes on in so many different ways. I was also struck by how improvisational satisfying parenting really is. No one knows how to do this thing called relating to a small, dependent person. You kind of have to learn as you go along. You have to get to know your small person in order to raise her or him best. And you have to remain open to learning rather than knowing.
Although this initial run of Motherhood Out Loud has ended, the way the piece is structured—the play was collaboratively written as a set of monologues to be performed workshop-style so a fluid cast can perform it (think, Vagina Monologues)—means there’s a great deal of promise for its future. I hope so, because the perspective that motherhood is not monolithic is a critical one to push out into the world.
The theme—motherhood is not the same for all mothers or more broadly parenthood is not the same for all parents—was much on my mind over the past week as I read a very moving anthology, Gravity Pulls You In.* These essays and poems about parenting children on the autism spectrum describe parenthood that might look or feel different from the expectations about parenthood one might call universal are; these parents may not wait the same amount of time for first smile or first word than the parenting guides allot, and they may even have stopped waiting. While it’d be easy—on the surface—to say that all parents have to let go of waiting and timetables and eventually love kids on their own terms, that’s really more true for some parents than others. Some of what these writings describe are experiences it would seem must remain foreign territory for all: hospitals and health crises or violent outbursts. In the book’s preface, co-editor Kyra Anderson describes the sense of being plucked from her orbit and being tossed into a new solar system when her son was diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome. I have often said to friends the second child is less jarring—as if that’s universal—on the premise that once you’re on the planet parenthood, at least you don’t have to move. Anderson would either dispute me or remind me the planet is very large, indeed, larger than I imagined when I shared that truth of mine, as if it was the truth.
I found so much nourishment from these essays and poems. There were some that simply took my breath away, like Maggie Kast’s “No Pity,” an essay that describes her long hospital vigil for her grown and very ill son or Kristen Spina’s “Birthdays,” with its very specific description of preparing to attend birthday parties with her five year-old child or Laura Shumaker’s “The Visit,” describing the completely bittersweet and thorny experience of parenting an 18 year-old with autism, including the unexpected moments of seeing him shine, if not necessarily directly for you.
What moved me even more than the individual pieces of writing was the aggregate, the way these stories illuminate how there are ways we can all better support and even celebrate the not-quite universality of our parenthood experiences (and really, let’s face it, of our lives). It’s the conclusion co-editor Vicki Forman draws in her beautiful essay (one I’d read, cried while reading, and admired before too) “The Mother at the Swings,” that finally you share your experience with the interested mother at the swings who imagines the swings are the same for all children, deep down, so that she can better understand you, and better understand the next person she meets who “happens to be different,” and so that she can help her own child learn “how to embrace and treasure what makes us all different. And the same.”
* I’ve been given a copy of this book by the co-editors to give away to a reader; if you’re interested, leave a comment on this post and I’ll write the names on pieces of paper; a very willing seven year-old will draw a name at random out of a baseball cap.
