Performing Ethos: International Journal of Ethics in Theatre & Performance - Performing Maternities: Part 1, Nov 2022

Motherhood during the COVID-19 pandemic has brought forward a host of parenting challenges to the forefront and crystallized the already existing invisible workload and stress on mothers. With the usual support system in the form of schools, day-care, extra-curricular activities all vanishing overnight since March 2020, the process of mothering has been affected with higher physical and emotional labour and a greater responsibility for managing care of the children and household while playing a multitude of roles – mother, partner, guardian, friend, employee and employer – ensuring everyone is safe! Unfortunately, the pandemic has adversely affected professionally employed mothers around the world, often making them rethink their careers with the increase in overall workload and juggling the demands of work and childcare and household chores. This chapter is an endeavour using an autoethnographic method towards understanding the lived experiences of performing motherhood through the eyes of an Indian academic mother. As an academic mother, there have been challenges towards dedicatedly engaging with teaching online, learning, research and publishing, and productivity demands while actively mothering a young child and making sure the house runs like clockwork, all played out in the unfamiliar ground of pandemic survival. Even though there have been advances made in the current Indian sociocultural landscape, there are still tropes of patriarchy present within the system, which further exacerbates the mothering challenges. Using a social-constructionist lens, this personal account will present a slice of change within the traditional Indian family system through the lens of gender equality – equal parenting and shared responsibility within the household. Along with this, how building elements of self-compassion and mindfulness practices in the author’s daily routine aided in skilfully manoeuvring the grips of COVID-19 fatigue will also be presented. I hope this personal narrative will extend support to fellow Indian academic mothers towards advocating for more structural changes both within themselves, while highlighting the need for self-care and grace as well as within their homes towards a more balanced and shared responsibility of performing motherhood through the pandemic.

I write to put the imagined threats and horrors of the very early days of motherhood into words on paper rather than leaving them as self-depleting, snowballing, internal echoes bounding within a recently emptied body. My contribution to this publication consists of four poems. Poetry provides a space for honesty. It can be pretty and seductive but just as often grimy and fearful and, in all honesty, it is most likely neither fully but a messy mix of it all. For me, the fear and worry that took place within the domestic in the very first part of motherhood was particularly connected to breastfeeding and the perceived pressures of extended family. The poems might highlight difficult feelings that seem less than ideal. But through bringing these to the fore, I want my poetic work to challenge ideals that surround the maternal role. The aim is to give mothers some much-needed recognition at a time when it is so easy to feel alienated and strange. I am also so aware that I am writing for my growing daughter. My most valued future reader. At the time of writing, the poems provide a welcome, an introduction and an important lesson that dog food is inedible. Which brings about another priority of mine, extending across all my work. Though the core matter of my work is so serious, humour and light heartedness provide an amazing tool to reach towards the audience and bring it close.

This article describes the birth of a lullaby. It follows a long history of songs used to lull babies into a quiet or sleepy state. This particular lullaby grew from a community-based maternity care intervention on the south coast of England. The project, funded by the Burdett Fund for Nurses and supported by the Foundation of Nursing Studies was co-created by local women and care providers from maternity; health visiting and the Children’s Centre. The format was a weekly information and support meeting called ‘Bump, baby and beyond’ held in a local Children’s Centre. Each week women shared their questions, worries and dreams with the group over lunch and during the activities that followed. The aims – agreed at an early stakeholder planning event – were to help build confidence for labour and parenthood and to make connections with a supportive local network. An initial list of activities was drawn up via focus groups and refined after piloting a ‘rolling programme’. The author, a community midwife, facilitated the majority of group sessions and wrote a poem as a reflection after the eighteen-month project had come to an end. This eventually became the lullaby which can be viewed on YouTube. The article describes what grew from an alliance between women, health and social care workers and the active support of the funding body project facilitator. References are made to maternity services; academic literature about singing and neuroscience and the therapeutic effects of singing. During the global COVID-19 pandemic, singing for relaxation and soothing has an even stronger resonance.

In 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic caused massive disruption and changes to all levels of life in Britain. This article uses autoethnography as a method of research, reflexivity and transformation, to explore the complexities of lone-motherhood during the pandemic. An account is given of how, for myself, the concept of lone-motherhood was socially constructed. Evocative vignettes reflect how I look inwards at my self, as a lone-mother in a pandemic and back outwards at others, hopefully eliciting responses, reflection and dialogue from readers.

Recently, there has been some attention paid to miscarriage in the media, yet societal attitudes towards the stigma and disenfranchisement some women experience after miscarriage are slow to change. Miscarriage is a common event. Statistics show that more than a quarter of all pregnancies result in miscarriage, with the majority occurring in the first twelve weeks of pregnancy. However, there is very little research into its long-term impact on women. The article is loosely based on my Ph.D. research findings on the long-term effects of miscarriage on some women many decades after the event. Here, I want to raise awareness of the long-term psychological effects of miscarriage and to consider the needs of women who miscarry. I also reflect on my own experience of miscarriage more than twenty years ago and I use a reflexive approach in which I embrace my subjectivity and bring it into the heart of my writing. I present my research findings through poetic inquiry, as I feel that poetry is a powerful medium for evoking lived experience. I have represented my data in poetic form, keeping as close as possible to the participants’ original words. This method allowed me to distil my participants’ experiences of miscarriage and to present these in a redolent and intimate way. I include a companion poem, where I reflect on the experience of writing this article and ponder on the impact miscarriage still has on me now. I believe that poetry can be a powerful medium for evoking lived experience and that it gives voice to my research participants allowing them to speak powerfully of their experience of miscarriage. I hope that in the future there will be a deeper understanding from health professionals and by society in general about the impact of miscarriage so that women will be better heard and supported.

This article seeks to collect stories and make heard the voices of mother artists of Asian descent/Asia, about their experiences during the COVID-19 pandemic. The focus is on documenting the implications of their experiences during the pandemic, on their maternal role performance and their studio practice. Some of the points of departure proposed to the artists include disruptions in routines, re-prioritization of work, changes in durational attention given to the work before the pandemic, the psychological and physiological impact of the pandemic on individual health to impede role performance, and the impact of the challenges/changes on the sense of self/identity. At the same time there is also a curiosity about the coping mechanisms they might have sought to counter the situations. I have curated the collection of narratives by inviting Phaptawan Suwannakudt (Australia and Thailand), Nidhi Agarwal (India), Monika Lin (China and United States), Tazeen Qayyum (Canada and Pakistan) and Arisa Chinen (Japan) to share their stories. Their artistic responses will be in the form of text and image.