Mum’s the word for Michelle
Agony inspired series of plays
A DEBUT playwright has opened up on the pain of delivering her dead baby and being judged on falling pregnant as a teen in a new series of dramas entitled Motherhood.
Former Newstalk radio news anchor Michelle Mac Mullan hopes her heartfelt plays debuting at Smock Alley Theatre in June will help start a judgement-free conversation on women’s fertility.
Falling pregnant at 18, inspired Oh Baby Baby, a play on teenage pregnancy.
Michelle, 44, told us: “My dad took his own life when I was doing my Junior Cert, things imploded at home.
“As a result I was pregnant before my Leaving Cert.
“To put it in context, being a teenage mum in good old Catholic Ireland in the 1990s, w had stopped using the word illegitimate and weren’t using the term bastard in its original form.
“But you were let know you had transgressed and breached a moral code.
“My own generation was the hardest on me.” On the other end of the spectrum, the mum-of-one didn’t meet her husband Michael Watters until she was 40.
She said: “We tried for a baby straight away.
“Instantly we got pregnant and instantly lost the baby.
“We started into this cycle of IVF and even used donor eggs. I had three miscarriages.
“On my final pregnancy in
August 2023, I collapsed in a carpark of a hospital and woke up looking at the ceiling tiles in A&E.
“My baby was dead. You get sympathy, but you get some people saying, ‘sure were you not too old to have a baby’.
“The harsh part of a miscarriage is you have to keep going back into the hospital for check ups. You go and sit in the waiting room with all the pregnant ladies.
“You’re not jealous of their baby, but you’re grieving you own baby who died.
“At one end of the spectrum, I was told I was far too young to have a baby and on the other end I was told I was too old.
“I call the plays tragicomedy as Irish people are great at gallows humour. The second play is State of Grace, on choosing to be childfree and single.
“The last play is a story of miscarriage called Lost and Found.
“You get to the point that it’s not personal to me, from the intimate there is the infinite.
“If I’m having this experience I bet other women are.”