Rachel Siegel on Motherhood ‘Making our way through the vast ocean’

Rachel Siegel is one of the actors performing in Motherhood Out Loud on March 28 + 29 at the Unicorn Theatre in Stockbridge, presented as a benefit for WAM Theatre and the Berkshire Festival of Women Writers. Below is a beautiful and honest blog post Rachel wrote about her own experience with Motherhood.

The moment my first son was born, I remember the world I knew rushing out, rather like the one one trillionth of a second after the Big Bang in which the universe began to grow outward in all directions and went from nothing to infinite. The life I knew had gone forever and a new life came at the same moment in its place. With a bright red scrotum.

There is this, that you know, if you are a mother. You are a member of a club—yay! A club they can never kick you out of. You are a Mom. Important. Beloved. Cherished. Needed. Purposeful.

I felt all this in the years after my first son was born. And then I got pregnant again and I also felt a host of other things that put me in quite a different club.

I was told, after my 15-week quad screen came back with a very high risk of chromosomal abnormality, that there was a 1 in 2 chance that my baby had “Trisomy 21, Trisomy 18, or Trisomy 13.” All the little trisomies; the first of which was familiar to me from my college biology class, the diagnosis otherwise known as Down syndrome. I remembered my college friends Chris and Peter, who also took that lecture class, inventing a game show like blackjack where the pregnant mom is told (game show announcer voice) “You have 21!!!!” Their increasingly exaggerated voices played back to me in stereo during the following months, as I anticipated the birth of a child with Down syndrome: driving my son to daycare, sitting in the dim light of yet another distant ultrasound room, waiting for another specialist with an ever-more-complicated-to-pronounce kind of job, another procedure.

[Read the rest of the article on WamTheatre.com]