‘Returning to Ourselves: Medea/Mothers’

In this chapter, Lena Šimić and Emily Underwood-Lee, return and respond to each other’s solo performances – Lena’s Medea/Mothers’ Clothes and Emily’s Patience, which were first shown in 2004 and 2009 respectively. Each of these performances was made as we negotiated our identity as ‘new mothers’, struggling with the immediacy of the needs of young children and our desires to assert our own sense of self within our new roles. We revisit these performances through this act of critical and reflexive writing 14/9 years later. Now, in a different stage of mothering, we are able to reassess them anew. Furthermore, we create fresh encounters with the old material, with our old selves, or rather our young selves when we became new mothers; and finally, with each other as friends and colleagues since 2005.