Essential Baby blogger Amity Dry
Recently I performed a one-woman cabaret show in the Adelaide Fringe Festival, titled 'Mother, Wife & the Complicated Life'. I had seen a lot of shows about single girls and the dating scene and I thought there needed to be a show about what comes next, so I created one.
Every mum knows that our day to day existence is full of funny and poignant moments, so it wasn't hard to find a shows worth of material in those little gems! So I took my experiences and those of friends of mine and I wrote a show that celebrated all that is wonderful, exhausting and incredibly frustrating about marriage and motherhood.
I kept the show under wraps as I was creating it, to the point that the opening night was the first time any other mum had seen it. Talk about pressure! I hoped I had managed to create something that would resonate with the audience and feel true to their experiences, now I just had to wait and see...
Thankfully the show was a huge success, but what I found most rewarding was the reaction from fellow mums in the audience. One by one as they left the show they took me aside and asked me how I knew about their life! "Did you read my diary?" they asked. "Have you been spying on me" they laughed.
I realised then, as I had suspected while writing the show, that we are all really the same. Being a mum is such a uniting force, it is the ultimate common ground. It doesn't matter what your background is, what your current or previous career was, what your income, where you live or what your life choices are - once you're a mum we are all inherently the same.
It is why you can take a group of strangers and put them in a mothers group and find they will all chat happily for hours on end and go on to form life long bonds. Or why a group of women with nothing else in common will rally around and support each other in online groups like Essential Baby, because we all relate to each others experiences and feelings.
Our hearts burst and break at the same moments, the same things frustrate and infuriate us, we all crave a moment to ourself but wouldn't change being a mum for all the alone time in the world. And we all miss using the bathroom on our own!!
Another thing I found interesting about doing my show is that I realised I could not have done it before I was a mum. And not just for the topic, obviously! But because being a mum has made me braver, less worried about what people think, more likely to take a chance. And not just because once you have given birth nothing is ever as scary again!
But because my perspective has changed. If I fail at something now, what do I really lose? As long as my child is happy and healthy everything else seems secondary. Which is kind of freeing and fantastic. It means I can risk more and be less afraid of the consequences. But only in an emotional sense of course, when it comes to actual physical risk I have gone the opposite way. I would never take a risk that could take me away from my child, so in that way I've become more afraid and cautious.
So it got me thinking, how have you changed since becoming a mum and is it in ways you didn't expect?
Obviously my career is a little out of the norm and you're not all putting on cabaret shows (except maybe in the shower!) but I'd love to hear how motherhood has changed your perspective in both your career and your life choices? Do you find yourself caring less about issues at work because you realise they don't really matter. Or has it given you a new-found strength and focus in your home as well as your career? Motherhood certainly teaches you patience, but does that translate to other areas of your life or is it only with your kids? I know my patience doesn't always extend to my husband!!
It will be interesting to see your responses. If motherhood unites us I wonder if the changes we experience are the same too? I will look forward to reading your comments and finding out!
Comment on Amity's blog here.
Read Amity's other blogs here.
