Some pics from last weeks beautiful event at The Mount Without.
Thank you to Beth, Alice and Meg for singing with me! What a treat!
There’s been quite the photo dump on a WhatsApp thread so I’m not sure who took what! In any case, it was an amazing day. A massive well done to Emma, Alice, Rachael and Beth for organising such a mammoth event. To all the fantastic performers, crew, volunteers and audience members… it was such a staggering team effort. These performers were courageous, free, intensely joyful…. It lifted me up so much that I felt kind of sad after it was all over.
I hardly ever go to gigs anymore, and going to this one left the kind of impression on me that a great gig should. I’d forgotten that feeling of being fired up by live performance - waking me up and giving me a sense of what’s possible. Gigging was the main thing to take a hit with parenthood, and seeing all these incredible parent performers do their thing, to a crowd of parents, was powerful beyond measure. I feel such a strong sense that parenthood has made me old overnight, completely irrelevant and like I have nothing deemed valuable to say anymore. I’m reminded of what Lucy Jones said at her recent book event, that it felt like all the feminist principles she’d been raised on were just eradicated when she became a mother. It is a bit like someone puts an invisibility cloak on you, or at least that’s how I felt.
I feel like last week has challenged all of those misconceptions. More events like this will simply prove them wrong.
We can’t do it alone, but together we can make it happen! Many more exciting live events are in the pipeline, so stay tuned!