Motherload moms bare brutal realities

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      “This show is, of course, hilarious,” Emelia Symington Fedy says of the collectively created Motherload, which is about the joys and burdens of motherhood. “But the things that are hilarious are the things that will make other mothers go, ‘Oh, my God! Oh, my God!’ ” In Motherload, for instance, Symington Fedy refers to her postchildbirth vagina as the Grand Canyon. And Sonja Bennett talks about another side effect of the birthing process, “those pesky anal skin tags that catch on toilet paper and collect poop… You know?”

      Interviewed on the stage of the York Theatre, where they are rehearsing, the four women who wrote and will perform Motherload—Symington Fedy, Bennett, Jody-Kay Marklew, and Juno Rinaldi—make it clear that they have found a lot of fun in their frankness. They also make it clear that, in their honesty, they are sharing relief—from loneliness.

      Marklew, who has a six-year-old daughter and a 16-month-old son, explains: “I spend a lot of time taking my kids to play groups and play gyms. But I find that that world is such a bubble. The other moms and I want to share, but we can’t actually have a conversation because we’re like, ‘Are you holding the right bottle? Are you breastfeeding or are you not breastfeeding? What kind of mother are you?’ There are all of these judgmental, competitive things. And I just want to connect with women and say, ‘My kid doesn’t sleep. Sometimes I hate my husband, and I haven’t had sex in six months.’ ”

      In Motherload, each of the performers shares a core story. On her blog, Symington Fedy, who is producing the project at the Cultch, writes: “I started working on grants for this show while my mother was dying in the next room, just so I could place my eyes on the horizon. I continued working on finding funding for the production as my new baby slept on my chest.” In Motherload, Symington Fedy’s story is about learning to mother—without having her mom around. She ends up improvising. “My son had chunks of placenta on him for six weeks after he was born,” she confesses in the script. “I didn’t think to bathe him. He smelled fine to me.”

      Marklew, on the other hand, gives the impression that, for her, being a mom is a natural calling. “My meta­morphosis into becoming a mother just really clarified my life,” she says. She gets her kids to do things by pretending she’s Mary Poppins; she claims it works like magic. But even for Marklew, equanimity didn’t come easily. “My father was an alcoholic, right?” she explains. “So there were amazing things about my father, but reliability wasn’t high on the list. I want my children to know that I’m here. I’m here. The love is here. Because that’s all you need.”

      Rinaldi might argue that money would also help. A gifted writer and performer who moved from Vancouver to Ontario with her family a couple of years ago, Rinaldi says, “I didn’t expect to be shining shoes at 37” in order to pay the bills. But she did that for a while. Her story is about coming to terms with the gap between reality and expectations—and about negotiating the work-family balance. Right now, she’s finding the challenge of being both a mother and a working artist particularly painful—because her husband and two sons are all at home in Hamilton. “How I orient myself in the world now is with those three other people,” she says. “I feel right when we’re close.” Asked if she wishes that she had taken a different life course and become a teacher, for instance, as opposed to an artist, Rinaldi thinks seriously before responding: “My immediate thought is no, because then I wouldn’t have met my husband, Mike. My life is not what I thought it would be, but, in a way, it’s better.”

      Bennett is probably telling the riskiest tale. It’s about her dawning recognition that her son’s sometimes aggressive behaviours are linked to her own temper and propensity for violence. For a long time, she didn’t see it that way. Bennett says, “It was easy for me to go, ‘This is totally separate. I’m only yelling at my husband when the kids are asleep, or I’m only yelling at the lady on the phone, and they’re not connected because I don’t yell at my kids very often.’ ” But her perspective has changed: “They see. They feel. They know. Even though I’m not yelling, my son can see that my upper lip is vibrating because I want to. He can sense the violence in me whether I’m acting out on anything or not. My journey is ‘My son is me.’ It’s about facing myself, coming to terms with my own faults.”

      The Motherload artists know that they’re taking risks in presenting this material: they may be judged. But in being honest, they are reducing their loneliness. As Symington Fedy puts it, “At least we’re together in our unknowingness. And that includes the 200 people watching. I hope that sharing the isolation that I felt when I had my first kid and I was all by myself allows another woman, who comes to the show and who might be feeling isolated, to take some deep breaths.”

      Motherload is at the Cultch from Wednesday (February 4) to February 21.

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