When Jenny Brundin gave birth to her son Gabriel, she didn’t experience the happiness that normally comes with becoming a new mother.
After her baby was born, she would lie wide awake for hours while Gabriel slept-a pattern that continued for three months. She was severely sleep-deprived and unhappy.
“Suddenly, I became (part of) that 10 percent of women who are no longer themselves after they give birth,” said Brundin, news director for KUER.
Her agony ended when she picked up a book about post-partum depression. With every word she read, she knew she was “everything it described,” she said.
And although the depression she suffered after giving birth was one of the lowest points of her life, Brundin said she has recovered.
Brundin’s story will be retold tonight during the “Mommy Monologues,” a performance that is part of the Women’s Week celebration. Twenty monologues were selected out of 65 entries and will be performed by the women and men who wrote them.
The performers range from U staff to community members and vary in theme from post-partum depression to single parenting to the way different races treat motherhood to issues revolving around homosexual parenting.
The event, which is the first of its kind, will hopefully give people a different point of view of what motherhood and parenting are really like, said Tina Hatch, coordinator of the Learning Enhancement Program.
“We’re trying to redefine the definition of motherhood,” Hatch said. “I hope this event resonates to people whether it’s (because of) the experience they had with their parents or when they became parents.”
Cynthia Lane, secretary at the S.J. Quinney College of Law, said she is not nervous to perform her monologue because it is about gay parenting, but because this is the first time she has ever performed in front of an audience.
Lane said one of the highlights of her monologue comes when she relates how her daughter asked Lane’s girlfriend to take her to Victoria’s Secret to buy her first “real bra.”
Lane said it was funny because she couldn’t explain why her daughter would ask Lane’s girlfriend, whom she described as “the trucker type,” to go shopping.
In the end, Lane said, she hopes to give people an alternative to the alternative viewpoint of parenting.
“There’s a lot of monologues that aim to give an alternative viewpoint,” Lane said. “But there’s always a commonality to them.”
As for Lane’s daughter, Lane said she laughed when she heard the monologue at home.
“But she’ll probably be wearing sunglasses during the performance,” she said.
The “Mommy Monologues” will take place tonight at 7 p.m. in the Utah Museum of Fine Arts Auditorium. The performance is free and open to the public.