When I was a little girl, I spent a lot of time playing in the bush; exploring the rubble and scrub, making cubby houses from sticks, creating poems, singing songs, chatting with pretend friends who skipped alongside among lofty gums. It was a simple, imaginative, calm and creative adventure that made me feel free and full of joy…
Listen to Bec read her letter below:
Someone once told me that the times in your life that you distinctly remember are the times that really make you feel. That rings true for me – my memories of these magical moments in the bush are easy to access and I can transport back to the feeling almost instantly in the same way that I can remember the minutia of every moment and how it felt giving birth to both of my children.
Not only can I visualise the specific details of the environment and the second-by-second activities, but I can explicitly recall how I felt… the sheer heart-bursting love is ever etched into my bones and body. As someone who struggles to remember where I was, what I did and how I felt this time last week the fact that I can acutely recall details of events from years ago because I really felt something in those moments is interesting.
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As with everyone, the last few years since COVID have swallowed me whole like I was a tiny fish in the giant jaws of a Great White shark… a relevant reference given I accidentally returned to my home state of WA during this time. In 2020, work on a film took me from Sydney back to the West when I was six months pregnant. Border closures forced my husband to flee Sydney to join me so he wouldn't miss the birth of our first child who was due one week after the film wrapped in April 2021. With all the chaos of the closures and a newborn in hand, we decided to stay put and figure out life logistics out on the run. Combined with my metamorphism into motherhood I quickly became a blubbering breastfeeding mess trying to make sense of who I was, where I was and what I could do to claw onto a career in filmmaking that I'd spent so many years trying to carve out.
Watch: A spoken word video starring Laura Bryne articulating the contradiction of pressures that mothers face in their daily lives. Post continues after video.ideo
The stark shift in my identity and the shock at feeling so lonely and alienated from a professional point of view really knocked me off balance. It seemed cruel that just as I was starting to make career inroads I was instantly catapulted backwards. I frantically tried to figure out how to work in this new way; isolated, solo, severely stunted by sleep deprivation and self-consciousness. A bad habit of scrolling social media while breastfeeding resulted in paralysing FOMO and rallied further fear about just how far I was falling behind. I was fully committed to 'keep on keeping on' and I premiered a passion project, HOMESPUN, three weeks post-birth in a postpartum fog to a sold-out cinema. Additional to the expected stress and nerves relating to the big reveal of a big, personal project I was trying to figure out how to navigate new anxieties relating to becoming a mum.
In my attempts to 'stay in the game,' I hobbled through many moments of gut-wrenching guilt, shame, and self-sabotage – like the time my 8-week-old baby started snoring when I was directing a high-stakes interview with people who had put their hearts on the line, or when an influential commissioner walked away from me mid-pitch as I staggered through a synopsis, utterly exhausted from a rough regression, the rejection was so red hot I retreated to the toilet to privately cry as violently as my baby before gathering my breath to face more steely faced stalwarts… or the excruciating shingles that lingered for what seemed like forever because I mistook the pain for baby induced back ache.
Words from well-meaning mums, "you're a wonder woman, there's no way I could work as much as you do," didn't feel encouraging, planted alongside the recurrent reminder that "you'll never get this time back"… well-intentioned words exasperated my emptiness. Underneath the 'doing it all' mask was a broken-down, burnt-out mother who felt like she was doing it all badly.
Every day I stared into the mirror tearing strips off myself for the weight gain, and weird hairline, I slapped on makeup to minimise the bags and blotches for the zooms I attended while I fed a baby below the table, off-camera, and every night I wondered how I could hold on… to motherhood and to professional ambition.
The one thing is, I did know for certain was that things were no longer predictable and my life as I had known it had changed. Seems fairly obvious that having children will inherently change you and how you exist in the world, but this realisation doesn't necessarily land for people at the same time. For a long time, I tried to outrun the reality to meet work obligations. I don't like letting people down and I've traditionally taken too much on and I haven't been brilliant with boundaries.
Remote working both positively empowered me and negatively enabled me – it helped me take on jobs I couldn't have done as a mum 10 years ago; I could work unusual times that suited my new baby-led schedule, attend highly professional meetings from the comfort of my home while my baby slept, collaborate with colleagues using incredible online programs that allowed me to create and connect without being in a physical room, in an edit suite or on set. However, while I was able to seize great opportunities that were available from home, I didn't factor in the big chunk of time that I was now directing to baby/toddler-related activities I had never needed to do before… turns out kids are mentally and physically time-consuming. My capacity metre was cooked, and I found myself feeding and working all around the clock. I was determined to be the best mum for my kids and be the best at my day job for my colleagues. I gave one hundred per cent to projects, one hundred per cent to my babies and zero per cent to myself. It was brutal. To unpack the impact of my attempts to survive this time I've written a short film with a friend about a mum who accidentally severs her thumb while juggling the demands of a fast-paced corporate life and her home life. Despite the gory injury the mum pushes on, desperately attempting to meet all the obligations in all the parts of her life while blood profusely pours down her arms. She goes on and on and on until her body physically slows her down. It's an absurdist comedy which is very much how I'd describe this phase of my life.
For me, shingles were the physical catalyst that forced me to consider my own breaking point. I would have liked to have thought that I'm self-actualising enough to have called myself out before I hit this point but apparently not. However, given resistance to putting one's own oxygen mask on first is consistent with many mums I know I prefer to blame society and sleep deprivation rather than myself. The mental load, all the muddy grit that exists below the line that we can't necessarily articulate, and the shortcomings of a society where women are afforded more opportunity than ever before in a world where striving to pursue professional success is still heavily shackled by shame is legit. We aptly titled our short film STITCH UP…
In truth, shingles weren't the only thing that squeezed out my epiphany. It was a turning point, but it had been a while coming. I'd long been focused on how I could extract myself from the vortex that the demands of daily life, especially in the digital realm, had pulled me into. It wasn't just that I was up to my eyeballs in work, deadlines, dummies, never-ending action items and nappies, it was also that I had lost track of what I was actually aspiring to…. what was the end game and why was I so fixated on getting there? The question I'd started to consider in the back of my mind was… would I care when I got there?
This was a confronting question for an ambitious, proactive person who had previously been abundantly clear on precisely where she wanted to get to. I started to observe the connection between the clarity of my goals and my perceived sense of loss about what I was missing out on from a professional point of view. It occurred to me that maybe my 'ambition' had been unintentionally hijacked by the influence of a patriarchal society that places higher value on achievements and accolades out in the world than it does at home. One that doesn't value work within the domestic sphere, so much so that 'stay at home' mums are made to feel 'less than' despite working round the clock to sustain and support their families from morning to night. I found myself falling into this trap… I became conscious of how I'd list off all the things I was doing for work when people asked me how I was going – desperately overcompensating so my career milestones wouldn't be overshadowed by the idea that I was at home doing a sh*t ton of washing, changing nappies, making purees, wiping dishes, packing toys, vacuuming, cooking, potty training, tantrum handling… I was doing all that stuff, all the time as well as trying to type emails, attend meetings, and keep my creative career ticking along. I had to ask myself why I needed to list my achievements like I was reading out my CV… what did it mean that I wanted to be known for the things I was achieving for 'work' rather than at home.? I don't for a second discount my own career triumphs or feel that Mums should be shamed for daring to have dreams that are separate to their kids, however, for me, it was more about asking myself what exactly I was striving for? If the opportunities, I pined for were rungs on a ladder designed to propel me further to 'the top' where did the ladder end? Would I be climbing up forever, constantly reaching for the next rung? Where exactly was I headed and why I was in such a rush to get there?
It's cliché but the one thing that intercepted this incessant battle in my brain about what I was in pursuit of was the extension of a grubby hand towards my face or a wholly unrestrained infant giggle. The curiosity, instincts, imagination, and sense of playfulness of my children pulled me back into a place that felt joyful, nourishing, and natural. The everyday moments of magic sprinkled across my day, gifted to me by my daughters, have helped me delicately dance along the different lines of my life.
Their influence and their exploration of the world, through fresh unaffected eyes, has helped me ease the weight of the pressure on my shoulders and the savage self-talk. Through them, I've learned to give over to the experience, pair back the self-judgement, accept the absurdity of this adventure and embrace the way all the worlds I walk are intrinsically tied.
It's both my personal desire to be actively involved in their lives and their connection to emotion that nudged me into a different way of being and seeing myself. I realised that what I really wanted to pursue was a feeling not a position, role, credit or byline. My intention to spend quality time with my kids puts constraints on my availability which forces me to make decisions about what I can and can't take on. You don't need to have kids to come to these realisations or make these adjustments and it's a bit of a cop-out that it's taken a combo of toddlers, shingles and sheer exhaustion to figure out what I want to do with my days and how I want to be but the feeling I get when I'm arranging slimy smarties onto sticky iced milk arrowroot biscuits, painting colourful messy masterpieces, making elaborate imperfect sandcastles or getting shafted by two entrepreneurial cafe owners selling make believe milkshakes and mud cake is the same feeling I had on my yesteryear adventures in the bush and it's the same feeling I want to have with my work… I can finally see the wood from the trees.
It sounds idealistic, oversimplified and delusional but when I started aspiring to how I want to feel instead of what I want to do things started to emerge without me needing to generate them. The minute I stopped charging after the notches and started to resist the FOMO the magic kicked in and incredible things started landing in my lap. Lots of things in fact, and with my 'capacity compass' finely tuned I've been able to make better decisions about what to pursue and what to let lie. Part of me is still addicted to the adrenalin, pace and gratification of the ladder climb and 'accolade optics' so my navigation is not as smooth as I hope it will become but aspiring to feel "free and full of joy" is definitely a good place to start.
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Over the past few days, my feelings have been supercharged because I lost my beloved grandma. She was 97 and I am extremely grateful that I was lucky enough to enjoy such a long relationship with her. She was an incredibly important influence in my life who championed me every step of the way; an inherent part of my little love story because she fostered my love for the Arts and creativity from a very early age. She encouraged me to write, paint, she took me to plays, events, exhibitions, shared music, movies and as a writer herself she was a visible example that a creative career was possible… even for someone living in a faraway regional place. The creative space can be brutal and having people in your court who celebrate, motivate and spur you on is vital, especially in times of overwhelm like those I've just trudged through and will continue to face. Just because my grandma was old doesn't mean the pain I feel from her loss is any less, and the gap she's left as a major supporter on the sidelines is significant. Gran's passing has been a reminder that in feeling great love we're also destined to feel great pain, however, I know in my heart that she's still right here with me skipping alongside among lofty gums.
Feature image: Supplied.