Actress and producer Emelia Symington Fedy cocooned herself and her baby in her car during a miserable downpour Friday morning to talk to the Courier.
Her baby started crying mere minutes into the interview, but Symington Fedy remained unfazed.
“He’s number two,” she said. “So I’m comfortable with him crying.”
Coping with motherhood the first time around was another story.
Symington Fedy had just lost her mother and found herself wandering up Commercial Drive with her newborn feeling isolated, sad and alone while other mothers and babies buzzed around her.
So she gathered other actor-mothers with different parenting styles together and asked them to share their innermost thoughts and experiences. They raised money to pay for childcare and spun their intimate stories into a show, Motherload, which premieres at the Cultch and runs Feb. 3 to 21.
Motherload is meant to be a Mom’s the Word for a new generation.
“It’s been exactly 20 years, to the year, of their first show,” Symington Fedy said of the acclaimed and long-running Arts Club production. “It’s time for a new one.”
There weren’t 1,500 models of strollers to peruse 20 years ago and no apps alerted parents about their children’s stage of development.
“All of our husbands have this rule that you can’t ask Dr. Google,” Symington Fedy said. “You go ‘child,’ ‘rash,’ ‘face,’ and it says, like, ‘death.’”
Symington Fedy, accomplished stage actor Jody-Kay Marklew, comedic actor Juno Rinaldi, film and TV actor Sonja Bennett and another mother who had to drop out because her child has a rare disease, spent a year-and-a-half creating Motherload, while pumping milk and holding babies on their breasts and laps. Courtenay Dobbie, artistic director of Caravan Farm Theatre in Armstrong, directed and choreographed.
Motherload highlights the bittersweet experience of discovering a profound sense of placement, or home, and mothers’ struggles to maintain their identity.
“My truth about being a mom in this piece is that I’m a much better mom when I’m working,” Symington Fedy said. “To accept that, in this day and age when being so there for your kid is so highly valued, I felt like a bad mother for the first year.”
Marklew is her opposite.
“She is the quintessential blissed-out stay-at-home mom that you’re just like f*** you, how can you be so happy and content,” Symington Fedy said.
There are scenes about what a sleep-deprived mom would love to scream at her whiny child, another about sex and motherhood, “or how there isn’t any,” and what it’s like to realize that your son’s behavioural problems mirror your own.
The four women refer to their own childhoods, their relationships with their mothers and how they were as daughters.
“As my first son was being born, my mom died,” Symington Fedy said. “The one time in my life when I wanted my mother, and she wasn’t there, and I had to learn how to parent without her, and how I didn’t do a very good job in the beginning.”
The production includes actors’ home videos and photos, old and new.
“Our projection designer, Cande [Andrade], he’s working with all these photos we have of our mothers and so you see us and then you see our mothers on this big 12-by-16 [foot] screen,” Symington Fedy said. “We’ve seen him, playing with the projections, crying. It’s emotional to see these huge images of family on the stage.”
Symington Fedy says comedic actor Rinaldi shares the tale of her severe post-partum depression in a way that’s simultaneously hysterical and heartbreaking.
It’s the hysterical that Symington Fedy hopes will be the takeaway.
“My main goal in this show is for moms to laugh their asses off,” she said. “And to go, ‘Oh these women are saying everything that I was terrified of being. Oh, so if they’re willing to say this, I’m not so bad.’”
She’s confident Motherload will be worth securing a sitter, washing your hair and donning a spit-up-free shirt.
“You only make a few special plays in your life,” said Symington Fedy, who also co-runs Chop Theatre. “And I know this is one of them… I know when we’re on stage, we’re going to be savouring every minute, and then we go home to our messy houses and the poop all over the floor.”
For more information, see thecultch.com.
