It started with a story.
In 2004, Vancouver actor Marilyn Norry met a woman at a wedding who told her mother’s life story eloquently, honestly, richly… and in five minutes. Marilyn was so struck by the encounter she fired off an email to her circle of friends, other women actors in Vancouver, and asked them to write their mothers' story in 2000 words or less, just to see what might be out there. They were asked to give the facts, ma’am, just the facts, and keep themselves out of it as much as possible. More than 40 actors responded.
The results were astounding. Not only did this little segment of society come from -- one step back -- a whole century (the birthdates range from 1892 to 1954), but from around the world, all races, all economic levels, all forms of sanity, insanity, addictions, artistry, heartbreak, and joy. There were harrowing escapes during the war, arranged marriages, adoptions, lives of exemplary service, and of quiet desperation. Each daughter told the truth without judgment, writing what she knew, what she didn’t know, and what she thought might be important.
Each life was distinctive, a unique combination of cause and effect with some fate thrown in. As actors, many of the original contributors had been priviledged to play all kinds of characters in plays and movies but we discovered our own mothers had lives that went way beyond that mostly tepid fare. It also became so apparent that there is no such thing as a generic mother. And that we really don’t know much of "ordinary" women’s lives at all. It also became clear that stories like this are available to everyone, not just actors.
When we started having meetings to read our stories to one another, we suddenly saw how, for each of us, writing that simple story had been an exercise of both high anxiety and great liberation. We had written our stories for different reasons -- to remember our mother, to honour her, to exorcise her ghost, to figure out why she still held such power on our lives, to detach her experiences from our own, or to tell her we loved her. Writing and then reading them aloud became a cathartic event for all of us, both as readers and listeners. The readers sought to tell their stories as completely as possible (knowing no life can fit into 2000 words) but with the reading, all of us released long-held sorrows from our lives. Someone would say, "I don’t know if this is important…" and then tell a story that would break your heart.
We have so little perspective on the familiar.
The original plan was to put these stories in a book and donate the proceeds to charity, but since we are actors we were also looking for a way to share the feelings we got in our meetings with a wider audience. Thus, The Show was born. Jenn Griffin, one of the original 40 daughters, took a form used in spoken word festivals and, with Marilyn Norry, collaged 20 of the stories into one big conversation. In Vancouver, My Mother's Story- the Show has now become a sold out Mother’s Day tradition, with different combinations of the now more than 50 actors involved enlisting to be one of the 20 on stage telling her mother’s story.
My Mother's Story has become a new form of theatre, a book, a radio documentary, a film documentary, a non-profit society, a simple form of therapy, a workshop, a movement. Believing its true value is in giving it away, we’ve created this website to encourage other people and groups to write and share their mothers’ stories. You don’t need to go public with your story like we did; some people in our group got the benefits of writing their stories and yet declined to be published. But we think it’s important these stories are shared – even if it’s with just one other person.
