‘The Hardest Part Of The Gig’: Breaking Down ‘Mum Guilt’ In Artists

A single mum with two daughters under the age of five, Gumbaynggirr and Yamatji soul queen Emma Donovan – who fronts Emma Donovan & The Putbacks – has been incredibly busy of late, playing her more recent gig bookings interspersed between a seemingly endless string of rescheduled dates all around the country, including but not limited to Blues On Broadbeach, Southside Live St Kilda, Dark Mofo, NAIDOC In The Square (Federation Square) and Darwin Festival. Throw into the mix the uncertainty of COVID potentially taking down a member of the band fam – or forcing a trusted babysitter into iso, therefore making them unavailable at the 11th hour (yikes!) – and the struggle is real.

“We played the [Southside Live St Kilda] winter series – you know, shoreside there – and we did Fed Square the other night [NAIDOC In The Square], and [the kids] can come and hang out at them gigs,” Donovan says. “I get sitters more for a late-night gig or when there’s concert hall-style gigs where I get worried about them running amok backstage and all that kind of jazz, you know? I’ve got some people that kinda help me and make sure that the girls are home and warm and ready for bed, I guess. But I love that I can take the girls to certain gigs and, you know, they learn; they can see me having a sing!”

When self-managed Melbourne art-pop singer-songwriter Georgia Fields – who also has two young children, aged three and seven – performed guest vocals for her friend’s 50-piece choir, Pitchface, at Brunswick Ballroom recently, she was able to take her eldest along since it was a matinee show. “I’m pretty sure she was reading her Dog Man comic book during my performance,” she reveals, laughing, “but that’s good! ‘Cause I’m glad she was comfortable and it was just like a normal occurrence for her... but my youngest hasn’t really seen me play, I just realised.

“I really wanted to be the kinda mum that was really chill and had her kids at all the gigs and was really open and relaxed and ‘Earth Mother’, and I just learnt that I don’t really perform or focus well when my kids are small and they’re with me at gigs. I tried to take them as babies to gigs and it was just – I couldn’t handle it.”

Donovan agrees it can be difficult to concentrate when you’ve got one eye on your children. “I’m always gonna have my ‘mum’ hat on when the girls are around. It’s hard for me,” she explains. “My little one, she’s just turning four – she wants mummy, and that’s my baby! So I’ve done a few soundchecks just holding her, you know? I just look at The Putbacks and go, ‘She’s not gonna let me go, just let her be here.’ We were at Fed Square the other day and the little one, she just would not take ‘no’ for soundcheck. But I brought her up, I said to her, ‘You sit there.’ She sat there quiet – she was fine, she just wanted to see me and that was it.

“And, I mean, all it takes is just for some people backstage – some of the organisers or mob – to just go, ‘Hey, she’s right,’ you know?

“It’s a conversation I think we just need to keep having, to make people feel a bit more comfortable. I’m always hesitant [to bring the children along]. And there’s times where I’ve just gone, ‘God, I’ve gotta take the girls to soundcheck. I’m just stuck,’ you know? And I need to take them. But I feel like, yeah, I might get the eye-roll or people are uncomfortable with two little ones, under five, running around – it is hard.

“The other day I got to a festival and I was hesitant. It was [Southside Live St Kilda] and I had another mum helping me in the audience, who’d just kinda sit with the girls – they were our friends. And then the stage crew just came out with all of these backstage passes – ‘cause she’d seen what I was doing with the other mum, and that I was trying to separate the kids from backstage – and then she just came out and was like, ‘Emma, here’s some passes for you all to get backstage; you don’t have to come back and forth’ – so accomodating! She just couldn’t do enough for us and immediately I’m just like [breathes a sigh of relief]. I didn’t feel like there’s this old muso crew backstage and, yeah! If there was more of that, of course you wouldn’t feel so hesitant.

“Sometimes [the organisers] do put it in the too-hard basket, but, yeah! We’ve just gotta keep having the conversation and being more supportive for the mums on stage. I know the dads’ve got it easy – they’ve got the mums looking after the bubs!” she points out, laughing. 

Although Fields’ hubby – also a musician – is incredibly supportive of her creative pursuits, she admits, “There’s always a juggle with the diary, and who’s doing what and how we’re managing it – especially because we’re both working part-time now and we’re both making albums! I have a spreadsheet; I’m that kind of person. So that’s kind of helping with the weekly family schedule. 

“In terms of the logistics of it, there’s a hell of a lot of scheduling that goes on – it’s a constant juggle. But I don’t know that that is unique to artists. I feel that any working family where you’ve got two ambitious parents – there’s gonna be that juggle.

“But in terms of creatively finishing things, I’ve learnt to just mostly finish them on the go. Things like practising, I have to sit down with the instruments and focus, but, with writing, ever since I became a mum I became better and better at writing in my head, like, whilst pushing the pram or doing the dishes or putting the laundry on the line and, you know, my head would be processing it.”

“Now that I’ve got the girls, I can’t just allocate time for my songwriting,” Donovan observes, “and I think that’s an understanding that I need to have there – we have to work around it, especially working with The Putbacks. And I write a lot in the middle of the night, when the girls are asleep.”

As a single working mum, Donovan relies on a network of babysitters she’s gathered to look after her girls. “I’m lucky that I’ve built a little community of people to help me with the girls, for sure,” she acknowledges, estimating she currently has about four or five trusted babysitters on speed dial. 

“Most of the people that have helped me are through the school actually, to be honest, or just friends in the community,” she tells. “Aretha [Brown], that done the artwork for the last [Emma Donovan & The Putbacks] album [2021’s Under These Streets] – when we met, I didn’t even know she was an artist. Me and her just met – she’s a Gumbaynggirr woman from up home, Nambucca Heads. And one friend put us in touch, she’s like, ‘Oh, I know this young girl, she’s Gumbaynggirr, or your mob...’ and she’s yarning to me and she’s like, ‘She’d be good for babysitting,’ you know? And she kept telling me about her. And then we met and she did babysit! She had the girls for me all the time and I just had an instant connection with her. I’d known her for a few months and then I realised she was this amazing artist, and then me and The Putbacks ended up asking her to design the last album cover – beautiful artist, Aretha Brown. But we met through the girls and she was part of the babysitters club that I was building so, yeah! That was a pretty beautiful connection.”

In this current climate, Donovan says she still occasionally finds herself getting “a bit stuck” when it comes to finding a babysitter. “There was a week where one of the sitters I locked in had COVID and then I was like, ‘Oh, no!’ and then I ran around and I was freakin’ out. I rang Kylie – Kylie Auldist – and Kylie had a friend; she helped me out – it’s about us reaching out and yarnin’, talkin’ to each other.

“I’ve been saying it is the hardest part of the gig, just organising the girls; especially in these times it has been extra hard. And I do get overwhelmed and I have my little meltdowns to Ali [Webb], my manager.

“It’s cool working with Ali, ‘cause she puts the babysitting hat on before I do sometimes – she’s got a boy, he’s a bit older; about 12, I think – and she’ll think ahead of me and be like, ‘Emms, you’ll need a sitter for that weekend,’ and we’ll go through dates but, yeah! Ali organises my diary with The Putbacks and then my other stuff that I do outside of Putbacks. I feel like we’re pretty good at it, you know. It’s a bit of a team effort.

“When my first daughter was born, it was only three months before I found out Mum had cancer. So I was just going up to have bubba close to Mum and then we realised Mum was sick. So then I just kind of hung out and I was like, ‘Okay, I can’t leave Mum here, she has cancer,’ and so we just kinda hung around Sydney and then, yeah! It was about a year until she passed and we stayed close to her – things you just do, you know? As a daughter; you don’t think about the music. I think Black Arm Band was folding then – or it was slowly coming to an end, that was when a lot of the budget cuts happened for a lot of different companies in the Melbourne arts scene. So then I was like, ‘Oh, okay, that’s alright. I’ll just go with the flow and be here for my mum.’

“I wrote a lot of lyrics for Crossover [Emma Donovan & The Putbacks’ 2021 album] during that time. The Putbacks knew what I was going through with Mum and they were just like, ‘Emms, we’re here. Just whenever you’re ready,’ you know? Mum had passed and they’re like, ‘No rush, Emms’. 

“I always pictured my mum being there for me when it was time for me to have my family. And she wasn’t. She passed.

“And just that relocation of coming back to Melbourne – for a long time I was like, ‘What do I do?’ I’m hanging out in Sydney, Mum’s passed and I was kind of just hanging out with my brothers. But I wasn’t focusing on music. And it was just up to me to kinda go, ‘Nuh, if I’m just gonna hang out, I’m gonna fade,’ you know? The girls were still really little and I was just like, ‘What am I doing?’ And I’m like, ‘Am I gonna go back and just record again with The Putbacks at some stage?’ That was the dream, but I just didn’t know when that would happen. And we did it, yeah! We made it work. But with a lot of support. To get back to that creative space, it was a bit of a push. 

“But, yeah, once I was back in it again and back on this side of town – it’s just inspiring being back in Melbourne, you know? Around all the people that I love, not just the creative bubble of The Putbacks but other beautiful people like Kylie [Audlist] and other mob down here that I love.

“I’m a long way from family. I left the Sydney family – all the mob up there that look after my kids when I’m in Sydney – to move to Melbourne. And I remember when I first came down here I made a group chat, reaching out to people like Thndo and Kylie and I’m like, ‘Okay, you mob...’ And Andrea Keller, who’s the wife of Micky [Meagher, The Putbacks bassist] – you know, all the mums that I knew – and just went, ‘Hey, how are you all? I’m comin’ to town and I’m gonna be by myself with the girls. Any suggestions or has anybody got any cool babysitters that they wanna share with me?’”

In order to connect with like-minded artist mums, and after noticing the recurring convos she was having in various green rooms, Fields launched her website, the Mother Lode as an online resource to help mothers maintain sustainable careers in the arts. She also set up a corresponding Instagram account (@findthemotherlode). 

“One of the reasons I wanted to start Mother Lode is that of the musicians that I saw and admired and looked up to who were mothers, many of them had an established fanbase before they became mothers. So they had a level of resource that I didn’t, and a level of clout, so that they could say, ‘I will require a dark room to breastfeed my baby in, at this festival,’ and someone would say, ‘Yes, ma’am’. Whereas, you know, if you’re playing at the bottom of the rung, nobody cares and you have to fight for those sort of things. So it’s easy for independent self-employed musicians who are mums to look and say, ‘She’s a mum of two, she’s doing it. But I’m struggling, what’s wrong with me?’ Without acknowledging the fact that [the artist mum they hope to emulate] had a very established music career before she had children.”

Fields says one of the common challenges that many members of Mother Lode’s online community face – particularly independent musician mothers – is “the impossible equation of trying to fit three jobs into a life that only really allows enough time for two”.

“So if your music pays your wage and you make a living off your music career, then you can do the thing that ordinary people do,” she expounds, “which is juggle their work and their family – and that’s a big juggle for everyone: work-life balance. 

“But if your music doesn’t provide a living, then you have to somehow find a way to pay the bills and do this work that is so important to your soul, and make sure the children are fed and clothed and happy, and see their parents. So it becomes this kind of time and financial resource conundrum. And actually the main stressor is that you’ve got musicians who are excellent at their jobs but – for whatever reason, whether it’s to do with social structure or just one of the beautiful things about being an artist [laughs] – they may not make their living from it. So how do they fit in a day job, being a parent and their creative practice? It’s always like one plus one plus one equals two – you can’t fit it into the equation. 

“That general struggle of being an indie artist and not earning a living from it, yet it being such a vital part of your life – like, all the musician mothers I know might even contemplate giving up music, but just realise that their life is miserable and they’re not a very happy person without it. So they have to keep doing it. But how?

“I think the pandemic really showed artists how much they need to do their work, like, having that taken away from a lot of performing artists really highlighted how important and integral it is to their mental health. Me, particularly: I took it for granted, I was like, ‘Oh, I sing. It’s good, it’s fun.’ Then when I wasn’t singing, I was like, ‘Oh, no. I really need to be doing that.'”

It was the aching need to continue creatively expressing herself through song that eventually lured Donovan back to Melbourne. “I was kinda like, one foot was still in Sydney and one foot was in Melbourne and I just didn’t know,” she recalls. “Yeah, I needed to be closer to The Putbacks to keep creative and to keep in that zone, you know? It balances everything, then.

“And someone like Mick Meagher, The Putbacks bass player, he’s my rock. He’s like, ‘Emms, it doesn’t matter where you move or relocate or whatever, you’re a good mum and you’ve gotta believe that. And if you believe that, you’ll be fine. The kids will be fine anywhere’.” 

Of how she feels about posting ‘mum and bubs’ content on her artist social media accounts, Fields considers, “You do look to the successful musician mums that you know and think, ‘How are they doing it and can I do it like that?’ And I guess from one perspective, from the person who’s looking – like, for me, I love to see that and I wanna see that: I wanna see musician mums out there working. 

“I follow a keyboardist and songwriter and producer, Sarah Belkner – she’s an amazing powerhouse – and she was on tour playing keyboards for Tim Minchin in the UK with her little baby, Juno. And I was seeing little backstage photos of Juno or, like, ‘soundcheck baby’ and it’s so cute! But also it’s like, yes! She’s doing it, you know? She’s taken her baby with her so that she can breastfeed the baby, the baby’s happy there with Mum, Mum’s happy she’s progressing her career – it’s so exciting! So I love to see that.

“From the mum perspective, of me being a mum: I get nervous about feeling like people will think I’m using my kids to promote my music. Or I’m wanting to protect their privacy, so not wanting to show their faces. And then, also, I get nervous of – are people gonna pigeonhole me as a, you know, quote-unquote, ‘boring-old-lady-mum’ artist?

“Which is ridiculous. Because I get so inspired by seeing artists like Sharon Van Etten and Sarah Blasko and Feist, who’s now a mum – just all these women in that stage of their life; that’s what inspires me.”

When asked whether she thinks artist mums still sometimes feel they must sacrifice their own dreams to instead focus entirely on raising their kids, Fields contemplates, “I think certainly that old school, family-first kind of generation before us did. What I noticed with a lot of the material and support that I got when I became a mum, even just through the council maternal nurse services, was: parents need to be happy for their kids to be happy and it’s important to make sure you keep doing things that you enjoy, and to make time for yourself. I think culturally we’re getting better at acknowledging that when you become a mum or a parent your life doesn’t stop, you know; your sense of self should continue.

“Mum guilt is a thing. And across all working mothers, but I think particularly when you’re engaged in creative activity that is very much involved in the inner-world, and you’re aware that it’s something that feeds your soul. So it’s easy to think, ‘Oh, well, I’m just being selfish,’ or, ‘Who do I think I am?’”

“I invited the oldest one up on stage the other night to have a little sing with me, because of NAIDOC Week,” Donovan shares. “And a couple of weeks back Jessie Lloyd was in town with Ailan [Island] Songs and she got the girls up, ‘cause that’s the girls’ Aunty. Her little girl was playing the warup, the drum, and so she invited my girls up. And I think to myself, ‘Jeez, I haven’t done that with my girls yet – like, got them up on stage properly – and the only reason is: I know they’ll just love it and wanna do it all the time – they’ll take over the gigs!” she predicts, laughing.

After getting somewhat used to her kids resenting any home songwriting sessions or rehearsals she tried to factor in, Fields has noticed a change in her eldest’s behaviour of late. 

“My three-year-old, and certainly when my eldest was younger – you could be doing anything but if you sit down and start singing or playing the guitar or piano, it’s like, ‘Stop singing, Mummy!’ or suddenly there’s a drama or, ‘I need you to come and do this thing with me,’ even though they were sitting quietly doing something else or colouring in… But I think it makes sense on a psychological, emotional level because to the very young child it’s important that they feel like their parents really care only about them. It’s a challenge to work through and I think that a lot of other mothers prefer to get a babysitter and go away to practice rather than trying to do it at the same time. 

“But, having said that, now, if I have a show that I’m practising for and if I’m using my loop pedal, which requires me to practice with my PA and a microphone, my eldest gets very sweet and will be quiet, and I can tell that it’s something she does feel kind of – I wouldn’t say proud, but she feels like it’s a nice thing.

“I think I have a similar experience, because I grew up in a musical family and I was probably older than my seven-year-old when I realised it, but there’s a point where you go, ‘Oh, not every family gets together and sings in four-part harmony’ [laughs]. You realise that, ‘Oh, what we kinda do is actually really cool and special, and that’s something that’s part of my identity – and my family’s identity – and it’s a really positive thing.’ So I hope that there’s some positives about it, but you do feel guilty when you feel that pull to finish the song or focus on practising something and, you know, you feel that tension.

“I feel like if I’m spending time away from my kids, I wanna make it count and I want to – I guess, in a way, I wanna make them proud, but most of all you just want to make it count. That’s how I feel, anyway; it’s made me really wanna do the best work that I can.”

PART TWO: Quashing The Stereotype - ‘Being A Working Mother In Music Is Perfectly Viable’