The Motherlode
In our culture, it’s hard to be a mother and a person at the same time. We’ve envisioned motherhood as a state of idealized nonpersonhood: the perfect mother is fully knowable through her relationships with her children, her husband, and her home–but never as herself. Mothers who “want it all”–in other words, who want to pursue their own interests while raising children–are suspect, inviting personal burnout and family ruin. While men must maintain careers, hobbies, and an interest in sports to be real fathers, women have to give up nearly everything to become true mothers.
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Three years ago the Sweat Girls teamed up with filmmaker Joe Winston to begin work on The Motherlode, an evening of monologues about mothers and daughters. First they interviewed their mothers on video–or, more accurately, interviewed each other’s mothers, a much safer endeavor. Winston chronicles the project’s inaugural moments in the show’s opening video segment; he and the Sweat Girls pack a car with video equipment and head down the highway, arms flapping out the windows while surfer music blares. Once the interviews were completed, however, the tapes sat gathering dust for a couple years; Dorothy Milne, cofounder of the group and director of The Motherlode, explains that the women were freaked out about doing pieces about their mothers.
It seems the Sweat Girls are out to answer a different question–what kind of person is my mother?–based on a doubly subversive premise: that mothers are people, and that their personhood matters. So all they do is present 15-minute profiles of their moms. We learn where their mothers grew up, how they feel about their parents, which family memories are most powerful to them. And we catch glimpses of them in Winston’s videos.
Actually, the show’s success depends upon how well we like their mothers, for the Sweat Girls always remain in the background, even as they stand front and center gabbing into the microphone. And given the exquisite portraits they paint, it’s nearly impossible not to fall in love with their subjects. The pictures may be distorted, sanitized, and even a bit romanticized at times, but they’re no less winning.
