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]

Over the past 15 years or so, Brooke Berman has built a reputation as one of the funniest and most emotionally honest playwrights of her generation. Her often autobiographical work includes “Hunting and Gathering,” which received a celebrated production at Primary Stages in 2008, as well as “Smashing,” “Until We Find Each Other,” and “The Triple Happiness.” It examines the struggles and compromises of women grappling with uncertainty, instability and the weight of their expectations for themselves and their world.

Berman is the wife of my friend and Forward contributor Gordon Haber, and when I first met her, she struck me at the time as a successful version of the spiritually-minded, artistic type of person — airy and abstract and very into yoga — that I’d become familiar with in the New York theater scene over the years. Since then I’ve realized that she’s much tougher. Her faith is grounded in hard experience (chronicled in her memoir, “No Place Like Home”) and it’s allowed her to handle things that would crush a lesser person with compassion, wisdom and enduring hope. I asked her to join me for a drink to discuss “1300 Lafayette East,” the new play she opened in Detroit, among other topics.

[Read the interview on Forward.com]

Dear Girls,

This week marks 18 years since my mother died. Exactly half my life ago. Every day after January 24th, 2014 will mean that I have been alive longer without her, than with her.

My mother, my beautiful, glowing mother. It seems impossible that she’s been gone for so long.

Almost two decades later, and I don’t know if I’ll ever get over it.

For a long time I didn’t understand how I could feel that way. I chastised myself for continuing to miss her so much, for knowing that I would never not long for her.

And then I had you, Vera, and you, Jules. And I became a mother myself. I wrapped my arms around you, your little breaths hot and quick on my neck. I learned how to rock you to sleep, how to pick you up when you fell, how to make you giggle, how to make your eyes light up with wonder. I held you closer than I’ve ever held anyone and I vowed that I would never, ever let you go.

I knew then, how it could be that I would never not long for my own mother.

This bond between us — the one between she and I, and the ones between you and me — is something utterly intangible, unbreakable, and unstoppable. Nothing, not distance or silence or chaos or death, could ever undo this connection we have.

Mothers are mysterious creatures. For us women, they at once anchor us and support us. They hold us back and teach us how to go forth. We rebel against the women they are, and we desperately try to become the women they are. I know that throughout your lifetimes you will push and pull against me as only daughters can do.

There will be times when you loathe me, when you question every decision I have ever made, when you frown upon all the things that I am. And there will be other times in which you try to fit your very shadow to match mine, times in which you wish with everything you are that you could be me. These swifts kicks and tugs will overlap so many times that you may never be quite sure what it is you want from me.

I’ve had a lot of time to review the woman my mother was. A lot of time in which to feel angry with her, or in awe of her. I’ve adored her and despised her, even in death. Such is the nature of a daughter’s love.

Even now, 18 years after her death, I can feel her all around me, her existence inextricably linked to mine. The thing is that I couldn’t shake her even if I tried. That she lived and loved me at all, is more than enough to make her a part of my world every day. I hope the same is true of me to you…

[Read the rest of the article on the Huffington Post]

AGE:  44

RELATIONSHIP STATUS:  Married

RESIDENCE:   New York City

CHILD’S NAME/AGE: Benjamin, almost 3

I’m primarily a playwright and screenwriter. I’ve recently made my directorial debut with the short film UGGS FOR GAZA, based on a story by my husband Gordon Haber.  Currently the film is in “post” — which means, we’re making it perfect.   My plays have been produced at Steppenwolf, Primary Stages, Second Stage, WET, The Play Company, Theater 7 Chicago and others.  I am about to see the world premiere of my play OUT OF THE WATER (developed as part of the Primary Stages writers lab and again with Naked Angels in residence at NY Stage and Film) at Red Stitch Theater in Melbourne, Australia.  Plays have been developed by SPF, Arielle Tepper Productions, The O’Neill, Williamstown Theater Festival, The Royal Court Theatre (London), The National Theatre Studio (also in London), CTC (Minneapolis), the Playwrights Center (Minneapolis), New Dramatists, MCC Theater (where I’m a founding member of the Playwrights Coalition and a former educator/staff member) and others. As a screenwriter, I have written films for Natalie Portman, Vox Films, Red Crown, The Mark Gordon Company and Fugitive Films.  My short film ALL SAINTS DAY, directed by Will Frears, won Best Narrative Short at The Savannah Film Festival in 2008.  I attended Barnard College and the Juilliard School.  More info: www.brookeberman.net.

You have had success as an award-winning playwright and screenwriter.  Where does the inspiration come for your work?  Do you have one piece you are most proud of? I am most proud of my play SAM AND LUCY.  It’s the closest to my heart and the most personal.  This play has never been produced but it was workshopped quite beautifully at SPF in New York Citystarring Merritt Wever (Nurse Jackie, Tiny Furniture, Michael Clayton, New Girl), Mireille Enos (The Killing, World War Z, Big Love) and Didi O’Connell (a goddess of the American theater.) [Read the rest of the article here]

Santa Fe, NM (PRWEB) October 23, 2013

Art Matters|Santa Fe matters in more ways than one might imagine. With the highly successful staged reading of “Motherhood Out Loud” by Janet Davidson’s For Giving Productions on Saturday Oct. 19th, Casweck Galleries partnered with the Food Depot, collecting non perishable food items for needy families.

The full to capacity evening brought down the house and filled the 50 gallon drum with much needed food items. “Motherhood..” was performed by Marika Sayers, Alisia Downing, Debrianna Mansini, Alaina Warren Zachary, Christopher Dempsey, and Kelly Kiernan. David Lamb, Entrepreneur and audience member said “Janet, Motherhood Out Loud was fantastic. YOU are a Magician. What a dazzling evening. Thank you so much for assembling such inspired professionals to share inspiring (funny) work…”. The evening was followed with a lively panel discussion on Art and the Family , led by Lisa Samuel of Samuel Design Group. Actors Debrianna Mansini, Kelly Kiernan and Director Janet Davidson joined Samuel in speaking to the challenges of family, inspiration, finances and creativity. [Read the rest of the article here]

by Mike Barnes, The Hollywood Reporter

She partnered with Steve Martin on “Picasso at the Lapin Agile” and in a television production company.

NOTHING can sink a friendship like differences over parenting. Sometimes the areas of disagreement are stark and dramatic, leading to blowups and out-and-out breaks. Most of the time they’re subtle and unstated, a matter of dark looks and long-simmering resentments, that erode, rather than rupture, formerly close relationships. Often they arise from a vague sense of betrayal, a friend’s having changed once he or she has had children, breaking unspoken assumptions about shared values and goals, how to live and who to be.

It’s the sort of relationship-fraying challenge portrayed with much humor in the film “Friends With Kids.” And it’s one that a Washington mother of three found herself forced to confront when a close friend became pregnant, revealing an entirely new side of her personality. “She immediately stopped her temp work because the Xerox machine might be bad for the baby,” said the mother, who, like several others interviewed for this article, requested anonymity so as to not compromise her relationship with the friend. “She changed all her shampoos. We pretty much had to detox the environment whenever we saw her from then on.”

The tensions deepened, she recalled, once the baby was born: “She practiced total attachment parenting. She never let anyone watch her baby. To go to a movie, she and her husband would go one after the other. If it was cold out, she’d bring the car seat into the house and warm it with a blow dryer” before bringing it back to the car. When the child was older, she said, “you weren’t allowed to say no to him. You weren’t allowed to set boundaries. We were at our wits’ end.”

No matter the cause, no matter how well-managed the reaction, the disagreements arising over parenting practices can hit hard and cut deep. Because what’s at stake is much more than different ideas about Ferber versus Sears, or organic versus conventional, or the use of timeouts, or the limits to be put on TV time. What is often triggered, in the divide between what mothers and fathers do or don’t do — whether or not those differences escalate into out-and-out confrontations — are convictions that push all the most basic parent-buttons.

“It’s the judgment: ‘You want to be popular with your kids, you don’t want to say no to your kids,’ ” said Rosalind Wiseman, author of the parenting advice book “Queen Bees and Wannabes,” who described herself as a less stringent parent than many of her peers. “The tone of voice conveys: ‘I am a better mother than you. I have control, you don’t.’ We all to a certain extent respond to it.”

In 1975, the psychoanalyst Selma Fraiberg proposed a theory as to why certain areas of parenting — “feeding, sleep, toilet training or discipline,” she wrote in a greatly influential article for The Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry — were such emotional flashpoints for parents. There were “ghosts in the nursery,” she argued, residues of the “vulnerabilities of the parental past.”

For the current generation of parents, who tend to ascribe quasi-magical properties to the choices they make in their children’s early years, Dr. Fraiberg’s formulation couldn’t be more resonant.

Breast versus bottle, whole-grain versus white, cloth versus paper diapers — for many mothers now in particular, these decisions take on the weight of “political, moral and ethical stances,” as Claire Dederer put it, describing her cohort of right-thinking, left-leaning, semi-working, highly educated and deeply angst-filled mothers in her 2011 book, “Poser.”

Ms. Dederer believed that many of her generation’s parenting practices stemmed from the fact that they were nursing psychic wounds from the family disruption and disengagement that had swept through their own homes in the 1970s. [Read the rest of this article…]