A letter to the MAMAs
Tuesday, May 29, 2024
Dear MAMAs,
I have a problem.
This morning I had an appointment with an orthopedist regarding the searing, jolting pain that was radiating from my right lower back around my right hip bone. As I sat before this young male doctor, whose young female assistant stood near a wall typing notes into a laptop, he asked what had happened to me. Had I lifted something, moved something, done something to cause this pain?
And in my answer, I began to tell a story: a story of the lunges in my fitness class last Friday that involved a weight held aloft above the head by the arm on the same side of the body as the leg being thrust backwards (I did not like these and eventually did them without weights); how I then carried bricks, only four at a time, from someone else’s garden to my car, then from my car to my wheelbarrow, then into my garden, to shore up the garden border; how it was so hot in my house that evening that I could not sleep and found myself wandering in the dark to the guest room of our house, which makes it sound like we have a fancy house but we do not, we have a very modest house, and I slept on that bed, which has a different kind of mattress than my bed, and when I woke up there on Saturday morning, I thought Oh, Fuckdiddles, my back really hurts.
Fuckdiddles? The young doctor asked.
I teach actors, I replied, and we sometimes use fun profanity.
I’m a fan of the F word he said, but I’ve never heard Fuckdiddles before.
I then explained how twelve years ago, I injured my back with a microtear between two vertebrae. I completed a year of PT back then, and since then, have only had modest flare-ups with overuse, that can usually be soothed with a resumption of the PT exercises I did way back when. Except this injury was so severe I could not even do any PT. My leg would not lift. The pain spread across my back and into my hip with such snake-like constriction that, if I lay on the floor, as I did on Sunday night, my hip seemed to not even touch the ground, so wound up it was by the grip of the surrounding soft tissues.
I thought that the injury was long healed, but since its original occurrence my body has changed. I am staunchly middle aged now and I also had a baby, albeit seven years ago, but, and I looked directly at the female assistant as I said this, once you give birth your pelvis is never the same. Never. I also said that peri-menopause is horrible, and I wondered aloud if this was that tendonitis that happens in your hips due to lack of estrogen that I keep hearing about from other peri-menopausal ladies, but who knows because no one really knows that much about menopause because, and again I looked at the female assistant and added, no one really cares because it only happens to women.
What kind of actors do you teach and what do you teach them, the young doctor asked.
Eventually, I got a prescription for PT and the exciting task of trying to find a PT who takes my Marketplace insurance.
The problem I have is not just this debilitating back pain, which has reduced enough now, as I am in day 4, such that I can use the bathroom without crying out in what easily resembled early post-partum days agony (with pain in slightly different places, but the impossibility of the action at hand equally impossible to complete). The back pain is just one part of it.
I made that young doctor, himself a father of two children under age three, laugh. His assistant, who told me her mother was complaining of peri-menopausal symptoms that she thought her mother was exaggerating, to which I replied, PERI-MENOPAUSE IS REAL, also laughed. They pronounced me the most entertaining appointment of the day, thus far. We looked at my degenerating vertebrae in my x-rays together and discussed how unfortunate it was that my allergy to aspirin limits my ability to take any kind of anti-inflammation medication.
There was medical advice exchanged.
But really, they asked me questions about teaching actors, about acting technique, about acting, and I answered them, thoroughly and succinctly:
I endeavor to each actors how to have more fun on stage. Too often, the love we feel for telling stories as children is squeezed out of us by the significance of our training. This can happen in any form, any vocation. We love what we love so much as we begin to study it and then the rules of it, the formula, the precision, the pursuit of work related to it, squanch our souls into oblivion. So much of what I try to do as an educator is create opportunities for my acting students to remember that all theatre is just one big pretend. Verisimilitude is not the most important thing. There are many great actors out there who are very skilled and a bit boring. There are only a few who are very skilled and astonishing. In their astonishingness, we find a bit of danger, not that someone is going to get hurt, but that we are actually not sure what is going to happen next. This has us lean forward in our seats. There was more said, but this was the main point: pleasure in the exploit, a profound aliveness that makes the contract between audience and performer relevant, resonant and transformative.
That I held forth on this during my medical appointment with an orthopedist about back pain tells me some things: that 1) I feel so passionately about what I do; 2) many civilians actually have no idea what goes into training as an actor/artist 3) I am lonely.
I miss the work I find most satisfying.
And, I am pretty sure my debilitating back pain is not isolated. It is my body’s way of saying STOP CARRYING BRICKS! Stop carrying the bricks of your divorce, of your ex-husbands significant two years and counting accumulation of arrears! Stop carrying the constant need to job search! You just got back from a highly fulfilling (if exhausting) job! Celebrate this triumph! Stop carrying the desire to paint your bathroom a brighter color, to plant pretty perennials in your yard, to find pants that fit or get a better haircut. Stop distracting yourself from the way your child so clearly needs you, his one fit parent, to attend. Stop resisting this need for attendance. This is what you must do, his life depends on it. Stop imagining that you have a life meant to be any bigger than the domestic domain you inhabit. Your bedside table is stacked with impressive tomes from feminists, mothers, thinkers, doers, artists, people who gather and assemble stories and ideas that others are reading.
Keep it simple, my cranky back is telling me.
Stop trying to add to the pile.
When I began The MAMAs in 2021, I was so clear that I was generating the community that I needed, surmising that other Mother+Artists needed it, too. We needed a place to bring the totality of ourselves, to see each other and hold each other up. This affinity work is so fulfilling, but it is also work, and I find myself fully faltering in my ability to maintain it with the consistency I want.
Communities deserve structure. They deserve boundary and clarity and purpose and commitment. They don’t happen overnight but when the Call and Response of them is steady, open and inclusive.
I still and will always believe that Mother+Artists deserve to have all the flashlights shining in our direction. I am just not sure I am the one who can keep shining the light.
I set this plate spinning and I can take it off the stick again, as I did for six months last year when my son’s school issued its shitty assertions about his learning abilities, limits and prospects.
I don’t know how to keep pushing this tiny boulder back up the hill when so much of my life feels like it is falling down beside it.
While my back was totally out (today I did manage to put on jeans, a huge accomplishment!), I watched season 3 of Hacks, season 3 of Bridgerton and a fabulous show called Bodkin on Netflix. I endorse all three. My son was with his father for two nights as I lay in agony with streaming as a paltry distraction. Except a good narrative does have a way of healing, even if temporarily. Really good storytelling, really good performance, surprise and nuance and irony and humor and cinematic elegance, these things have always sustained. And my delivery of my woes, my epic storytelling in the orthopedist’s office – if you know me, you know this is one of my gifts, priorities, preferences, things I do well. I can tell a great story. I can hold an audience. I can shift your mood and your perspective on things within three minutes in a doctor’s visit that is not at all supposed to be about your mood or perspective or opinion on actors or acting or the transformed pelvises of post-partum women.
What do I do with this capacity on my own? Does it not require something of me, of an audience, a compatriot, a receptor? It does not exist in a vacuum? This is my talent that grows the more I give it away, and if I hold onto it, keep it confined, it atrophies.
This is my uncertainty. What am I for, if not this? What am I doing, if not this? What scale does it deserve? Is it a question of scale or of mere existence? Is a doctor’s office monologue enough or starkly not enough?
And how do I do whatever it is I am meant to do under my current circumstances?
A decade ago, when I was the Orchard Project Core Company Program Director and Master Teacher (fancy title), I would give my ensemble an assignment to write a manifesto. I would always complete the assignment along with them. In one offering, the one I most treasure, I wrote, in part, this:
“Bring me your glory and your disaster and your tiny secret dreams and we will make music that can summon the masses from their slumber. It is time to wake up to the magic in a single fingertip’s touch, to the delicacy of cobwebs, to the simplicity of truth, to the joy of belonging. Spread your lunch out on the table and we will swap history and preference and pleasure and cover our laps with napkins as we consume this shared meal of expressivity, exploration and experience.”
For forever, I have thought of art as a kind of invitation, a shared meal of exchange. I have used similar imagery elsewhere in my writing, summoning people to savor lemonade and cookies on a landing, to share stories with hands held, wrung, and set free in the wind. This is how I always imagined The MAMAs as well: a pause for pleasure and reveal and reflection and buoy as we descend or ascend the stairs we inevitably must travel up and down and up and down in our Mother+Artist lives.
I don’t hold you accountable for the labor I gave myself in my wish to gather us all together. There is not a person reading this who has not had her own doctor’s office moment, injury (physical or otherwise) included. Your gifts have not disappeared in motherhood, either.
I am simply, and terribly at that, attempting to resolve this reckoning my immobility has brought to my attention. That I can only do so much, have so much, and this sense of limit, in all my projections of limitlessness, is giving me pause. And in that pause, I don’t know what that means for The MAMAs.
For bearing witness to my figuring out for now (for everything always changes), thank you to those who have been privy since the beginning and those who are newer to such things.
Our motherhood is sacred and visible, as is our art.
Catherine