M*therhood, whether longed for, lost, chosen, or rejected, deserves to be talked about with honesty, care, and courage. FLOAT is my way of doing that
BY INDRA WILSON, IMAGE BY LOOKY HERE
I’ve always found the topic of motherhood fascinating as an artist and as a person.
Even as a child, I was captivated by it! Especially thanks to my pregnant Barbie, complete with their very own magnetic womb. My mum, ever mindful of gender stereotypes, tried to steer me away from the classic image of an AFAB child cradling baby dolls or pushing these naked dolls in prams. But despite her best efforts, I became quietly obsessed with the idea of being a mum.
Even when studying at RCS, one of the first shows I made was expressing this obsession and had me running around the stage screaming, “I want to be a mum!” on repeat. Not exactly my finest artistic hour, but it’s proof that the idea of motherhood has lived in me for a long time. There was a point when I felt ashamed of that desire. It didn’t feel very genderqueer of me or even “feminist enough”. But no matter how I tried to reason it away, the longing remained. It was honest.
Pregnancy loss, however, had never crossed my mind. It wasn’t something I thought I’d experience or even knew how to imagine until I lost a pregnancy at 13 weeks. I became pregnant unexpectedly with an ex-partner. Which was terrifying, but I also felt a curiosity about what m*therhood might look like as a young, single, freelance artist still finding my footing in the world of adulthood. When I lost that pregnancy, I was left in a grief that felt both enormous and invisible.
The silence was overwhelming. Most of my friends were actively trying not to get pregnant, so they didn’t know what to say, and I didn’t know how to ask for support. It became a difficult, often isolating road of figuring out what care could look like in a situation none of us were prepared for. Medical professionals, too, framed the loss as a relief: “Now you can focus on your studies.” But I didn’t feel relieved, I felt heartbroken. And deeply unsure of where I now belonged in relation to m*therhood.
In the quiet, I started writing. Anything I could.
There’s a graveyard of poetry (even some very bad song lyrics) in my Notes app that will never see the light of day, but looking back, that was probably the very first version of FLOAT. I knew I wanted to create something where I could speak the grief out loud, where I could share the disorientation of losing a pregnancy and still holding a deep desire for motherhood but now being scared of pregnancy.
So I took myself every day to coffee shops. Told myself: just write for two hours. No pressure. Just a reason to get out of bed and write what had happened, and how I was feeling. I didn’t think it would become a full show; FLOAT was simply a way to explain what it felt like to lose something I never expected to have. But somewhere in the writing, something shifted. I even read versions of the scripts to my new partner at the time as a way to explain how I saw myself within m*therhood.
A few years later, when I had the idea of creating a theatre show, I wanted to find a metaphor that everyone had a relationship with, because in a way, we all do have a relationship with fertility, even if the relationship is that you don’t want children or can’t have children. That’s how I landed on space.
And grief, like space, is vast. It’s silent. It distorts time. It makes you feel untethered.
The loneliness of unspoken grief is exactly why I made FLOAT.
The show doesn’t claim to have answers. But it creates space, hopeful, tender, glittery space for the messy, human, deeply personal stories that often go unsaid. Because grief deserves to be witnessed. Fertility isn’t a straight line.
And m*therhood, whether longed for, lost, chosen, or rejected, deserves to be talked about with honesty, care, and courage.
FLOAT is my way of doing that.
And I hope it makes someone out there feel a little less alone.
FLOAT by Indra Wilson and F-Bomb Theatre is part of Made in Scotland 2025, playing at Gilded Balloon Patter House (Other Yin) from 30 July – 25 August at 18:00 – 19:00. Tickets can be purchased at: https://www.edfringe.com/tickets/whats-on/float
DIVA magazine celebrates 31 years in print in 2025. If you like what we do, then get behind LGBTQIA+ media and keep us going for another generation. Your support is invaluable.
