The mundanity and monstrosity of early motherhood – Ella Becroft

Ella Becroft was so disturbed by some of the negative feelings she experienced in her first year of motherhood that she couldn't even write honestly in her diary. Photo / Dean Purcell

As a new mum, Ella Becroft was primed to love her kids. Nothing prepared her for what happened next.

I am a mother of two – one 8 years old, one 4. I love my children completely and totally with a love that is beyond language. When they were born, I felt flayed, the top layers of my skin stripped off, leaving me raw and unprotected. My ribs were cracked open, my heart now outside of my body.

It’s funny I feel the need to say that, before I can talk about the harder parts of being a mum.

I’ve been exploring the mundanity and monstrosity of early motherhood for my new theatre show, Wrest, a surreal crime thriller set in a neo-noir world.

At the scene of a violent crime, a woman watches herself split in two, her life ending and beginning at once. An uncanny doppelganger emerges as the original woman mysteriously disappears. Stalked by detectives seeking answers, the doppelganger hunts visions of her original self, determined to rebuild.

Wrest combines the creative team’s stories of pregnancy, birth and early parenthood with scientific, medical and psychological information.

A collision of theatre, dance and cinematic imagery, it intertwines visceral body horror with profound empathy, challenging traditional storytelling boundaries and pervasive cultural narratives.

Olivia McGregor (above) and Ariāna Osborne (below) in Wrest, which illustrates the loss of identity many new mothers feel by the creation of a doppelganger who emerges as the original woman mysteriously disappears. Photo / Yin Chi-Lee

What we accept as the normal experiences of birth and early motherhood can be confronting for many women. It doesn’t always fit with what we’ve been taught, leading to a sense of being fundamentally misinformed about the female body and the reality of becoming a mother.

When we started making Wrest, I got out my baby diary from my firstborn, seeking something that would speak to what I remembered of that knotty first year. After three months, the somewhat regular entries dropped off.

My baby had stopped sleeping. For more than a year, I didn’t sleep for longer than three hours at a time. Usually much less.

I remember the deep despair, the helplessness, the anxiety that I was harming my child in some way. In the diary, I am so polite, bracketing any negative sentence with many of love and happiness. But when I turned to the back of the mostly empty diary, one page spoke to how alone I was feeling.

A woman standing next to an open baby gym, toys strewn, in an abandoned lounge. Wide. She is purposeless.

I couldn’t put these words in the front of the diary, so I hid them. I remember thinking I would tear that page out, put it somewhere else. I didn’t even feel comfortable expressing negative thoughts about motherhood in private.

The diary entries end, and a new document takes their place. A note on my phone with a list I kept for 18 months, tracking every sleep and every wake of every day and night: 7.30-8.30: 1; 8.45–11.15: 2.5; 11.30-1.10: 1.5; 2.15-4.15: 2; 4.30-5.15: 45mins (7h45m); 7.50-8.20: 0.5; 10.35-11.15: 40mins; 11.25-11.40: 15mins; 1.10-1.45: 45; 3-3.40: 40.

After a year of not sleeping, I started to see women moving in the shadows of my room. Long, stretched-out figures.

Like the majority of people who have given birth, I suffered intrusive thoughts, visions in graphic detail of the baby being harmed. Standing at the window, I would see the baby fall from my arms and slam against the concrete below. Walking down stairs, I would see myself fall and land on top of my newborn.

Red Leap Theatre's artistic director, Ella Becroft, at rehearsals for Wrest. "To see my hidden experience on stage, something once shrouded in shame and despair, feels incredibly profound." Photo / Dean Purcell

I was shocked and horrified by my own mind, which seemed determined to show me every danger, every threat, every possible violence that could occur to my child, so I would know how to keep them safe. Such a confronting defence mechanism – terrifying me into a state of hyper-vigilance.

I would lust for serious illness. My best friend and I talked about how we wished we could get sick enough to be hospitalised and forced to spend several nights away from our baby and sleep, sleep, sleep.

Going to get a bikini wax, I told the beautician as she tore hair from the sorest of places that this was a nice rest, a nice break. She told me there must be something wrong in my life if that was the case.

I have only very recently learned about matrescence, the changes a person goes through in pregnancy, birth and early parenthood.

Lucy Jones writes, in her book, Matrescence, “We still barely acknowledge the psychological and physiological significance of becoming a mother: how it affects the brain, the endocrine system, cognition, immunity, the psyche, the microbiome, the sense of self. After childhood and adolescence, there is no other time in an adult human’s life course which entails such dramatic psychological, social and physical change.”

When I went back to work as a theatre maker after my first child, I was shocked by the changes to my mind, my social skills, my body. My creativity is what I value most about who I am, it has been at the core of my identity since I was a child.

Now I was unable to think, to generate ideas, my confidence evaporated. Completely adrift, I felt like an awkward 13-year-old again. I didn’t recognise myself. I started mimicking other people’s laughs, their mannerisms. I felt like an alien. A doppelganger of my former self.

Scrolling through Instagram, I see a perfume ad for Mother’s Day. “As a new mom, I’ve been introduced to A LOT of new scents …” A mother in white cashmere (or is it silk?) bakes cookies and pikelets bathed in a golden light, smiles knowingly at the camera. Her skin glows. Her hair is sleek. She smells of English Pear and Freesia.

I find another reel of a mother – naked, bloody, her baby in her hands, the umbilical cord still winding its way out of her body. She looks terrified, bewildered, as if she is lost in a dark wood. The nurses around her laugh at her expression. A rinky-dink tune, like a circus act, plays over the video. “When you’ve just had a baby, but you’re too busy disassociating to enjoy the moment.”

I had heard a lot about the all-encompassing euphoric love I would feel as a mother. I didn’t know about the other things I would face. I didn’t know how disconcerting and at times devastating this metamorphosis of myself would feel.

In making Wrest, we have taken my sleep log and created scenes with it. To see my hidden experience on stage, something once shrouded in shame and despair, feels incredibly profound.

There is a distinct power to a woman standing up in a public space and speaking out loud her personal experience with pregnancy, birth and motherhood in a way that sits outside the accepted socially constructed narrative.

Wrest will work towards changing the conversation around what a “normal” experience of motherhood is. It will take deeply rooted feelings of failure, horror and vulnerability and acknowledge these as a universal experience that should be talked about openly with generosity.

This isn’t every person’s experience of motherhood. There are many ways to mother and parent. There are many ways to build a family. Mothering encompasses such an enormous wealth of stories and experiences. I love my children, they bring me endless joy. But parenting is layered, and everything should be talked about in the light.

• Wrest is on at OneOneSix in Whangārei, May 29-31, and at Auckland’s Q Theatre, June 6-14. Bookings at redleaptheatre.co.nz

Auckland-based director, editor and photographer Ella Becroft is the artistic director of Red Leap Theatre.