Secret Life of a Mother

The raw and untold secrets of pregnancy, miscarriage, childbirth, and mothering are revealed in this true story of motherhood for the twenty-first century.

A playwright writes an exposé of modern motherhood full of her own darkly funny confessions and taboo-breaking truths. One of her real-life friends, an actress, performs the piece, and through it her own experiences of motherhood start to surface. These mothers are not the butts of jokes, the villains, or the perfect angels of a household.

This empowered and relatable play was written collaboratively between award-winning theatre artists Hannah Moscovitch, Maev Beaty, and Ann-Marie Kerr, with co-creator Marinda de Beer. Uplifting and full of love, Secret Life of a Mother is a generous and powerful act of truth-telling for anyone who has thought about, been, loved, known—or come from—a mother. 

• Hannah and Maev began working on the show in 2012 as an exploration into their curiosities about the truth of motherhood, and over the years of development became mothers themselves.
• The authors have kept a fifty-page document of hundreds of emotional audience responses from the show.
• Premiered in October 2018 at the Theatre Centre in Toronto in a co-production with the SLOM Collective and the Theatre Centre.