Call Your Mother by her Name

 “Happy Birthday Andrea!” is what my cake read inside the pandemical year of 2020. Though it was baked with love in my home by my daughters, that year Mom was replaced with my name. My actual name.

I know this is a stretch for some and maybe even a form of sacrilege as far as the sanctity of motherhood goes, but at the very least the sentiment I’m about to express is honest. This may even need a disclaimer, but if you know me, you know I deserved that cake and my name for that matter.

During those quarantine years I felt like I was standing in the eye of a storm. In the midst of loss, social unrest, interruptions in education, and household routines, I started looking for more of myself. But just a year before, somehow as if I knew a reckoning was coming, I made a personal declaration in 2019 to step outside of my safety zone. My oldest daughters at the time were 9 years old and my youngest 4. They were happy and life was good, but something was missing. Someone even.

I started thinking about my childhood and how I left my hometown to come to New York to study acting. I was already a storyteller, credentialed by experts of the oral tradition whom I called, mom, dad, aunty, sister, cousin, uncle, grandma, teacher, neighbor, store owner, stranger, friend. Each of them with their niche delivery and style taught me everything about telling stories. And they all called me by my name. As I journeyed through time I found myself being called Mom. A title, not a name.

Though an internal conversation, I started seeking ways to find Andrea again. Mom was who I was to my children but who I was to myself started to become foggy and I wanted more of me than I felt was acceptable.

In June of that year, I got a call to join a regional production of a play happening back in Detroit and to everyone’s surprise, I said yes. Up until that time, I had never been away from my children for even one day. Hours, but never twenty four. Of my own decision, I kept my children close to me. I was a hawk, a protector. I made myself the air they breathed and I filtered myself often to become the cleanest air possible. Caring for them and loving them healed me in ways I never mentioned. I breastfed them all beyond the two year mark. I made all their food from scratch, and we played outside daily—sometimes all day until hunger dragged us back inside. I wanted to find a new world with them and I did. I wanted to love them freely. In hindsight I can honestly say, I wanted to witness childhood. I became enamored with this new life. I studied them and tended to them so closely that I became completely theirs but years later, I was ready to become my own.

That simple yes took me back to the place where I had always been Andrea. Maybe not my own, but definitely Andrea. When I first arrived, the city looked different somehow. I had been away for almost twenty years since I graduated high school and left for college. Visits back were rare and brief. Since then I had graduated from the conservatory, worked professionally, learned a new practice, got married, and had children. My craft, my practice, my new titles, myself—all converged. Yet there I was back in Detroit, working, without my children, being called Andrea more than I had in a long time.

At first I was excited, then numb, then regretful. I missed my new life. But once I began to craft out the character I was portraying, my focus went further into the work. Having received an extensive and thorough education and training in theatre meant I was a professional like many of my peers who were accountants, engineers, writers, and business owners. But somehow my work became my guide. Moving me from one world to the next. From role to role, all while revealing my inner most parts. At times I kicked myself for not choosing an easier path, but ultimately I came away from that play and Detroit re-membered. It was a difficult process personally but what we created on that stage was nothing short of a miracle. It was time spent with an Andrea I almost forgot. I had previously done plays in New York all while managing the day to day of taking care of my children. But in Detroit, where I worked on my first production without performing the duties of Mom, Andrea started to peek through. It was a reintroduction. Upon my return to New York I found myself at the overlap of a new reality that would turn into some of the hardest years of my life.

2020 came down on us all like a tsunami. While I was struggling to introduce more of Andrea to my daughters, Covid came and halted everything. The new found me started to revert back to what felt like the stay at home years. I was back in the trenches. We all were. Confused and trying so hard to defer the reality of a global pandemic to a summer blockbuster. I was trying to audition for new productions happening here in NYC and taking on new routines of self acknowledgment and care. I was still working as an applied theatre artist in March when I got the call that all work would be remote until further notice. I was devastated. People were dying and scrambling for care and connection. I felt lost. How would I engage my craft without the stage? The classroom? How would I work and continue to define my purpose? Not only were all the theatres shut down but so were my plans to find more of this person I knew, but had almost been erased.

Once again motherhood had top billing and there I was with fragments of Andrea desperately looking for the rest. Que the montage where you see me MacGyvering any and all that I could to keep my plans in motion. With the loss of work at the non profit I worked for, I started my own applied theatre company and began serving schools virtually. I applied for grants and was awarded funds to open my own studio, where I would hold a series of workshops supporting young people, artists, teachers, and parents in the surrounding area. In the evenings I used the studio space to work on audition material, virtual therapy sessions, zooms with other artists, uncomfortable conversations with loved ones, white boarding my goals and trying to figure out where I was stuck. And then came the dancing to my favorite songs, the staring at myself in the mirror, the wondering.

Shortly after, my manager sent out an email letting me know all auditions would move to self tapes versus the usual in person auditions I was accustomed to. I thought to myself, this just got worse. There were countless classes on mastering the self tape and I became fixated on how I looked and moved in each video. I studied them like game tape and sent them to friends and family before casting directors. One of them, I sent to my sister who responded in a text with a simple “?” The next text asked “why do you sound like someone else? What am I even looking at?” My heart sank. I said, “It’s an audition. A self tape.” Her last response was, “If it’s a self tape, shouldn’t you be yourself?” If a picture is worth a thousand words, then a video is worth millions. But that question from my sister was priceless. The signs were all pointing forward. To keep going in the re-membering of myself. Andrea was there but apparently out of practice.

Motherhood is one of the most divine experiences I’ve ever had. It is also one of the most consuming. My organs, tissues, joints, hormones, blood, and brain devoutly served in growing those beautiful babies. It was tedious and precise, and the highest form of creation that I've ever taken part of. The purest forms of love I’ve ever known. But in that moment after reading my sister’s casual text, I stared at myself in the full length mirror propped against my studio wall and I searched for more. I left feeling defeated. Maybe I had gone too far away from home, I thought. Maybe I went past caring for my children into avoidance of myself. Maybe I went so far into this new world where they could be safe and free that I forgot to bring myself along. Was that erasure or departure? Either way I wanted to regain custody of myself and the urgency almost consumed me. Like a wildfire sparked seemingly out of nowhere, I watched so much burn until finally, after reintroducing myself to my daughters, I sat at our dinning room table and watched them bring in a small birthday cake with only the candles lighting the room. As I looked down at the cake, it read Happy Birthday Andrea! I cried because I was embarrassed that they could see me wanting to be Andrea. I was even more embarrassed that they acknowledged it. I was worried that Mommy was all I could be to them. But they welcomed Andrea and wrote her name on our favorite cake.

I had torn up every room looking for her. I swam out to sea where she was quietly slipping past the reef. I grabbed her hand before she reincarnated herself and saved the life she was in.

Now on Mother’s Day I sit with my children and let them see me. They call me Mommy but I know they know my name.

Andrea Patterson

Andrea is a professional actor and applied theatre artist who has discovered a lot about the craft of acting through the craft of motherhood. Her writing style is primarily narrative as she is interested in sharing real life experiences that she believes others can relate to. Whether at home with her 3 daughters, on NYC's stages, or in the classroom, Andrea blends all her roles into one.