It’s September 2022 and I am on a plane. I find myself on planes too often for someone afraid of flying, but when you’re a comedian they don’t really let you work from home. I’m on my way home from the Edinburgh Fringe. I’ve been there performing a show about losing my brother and my father - and finding out I might have a genetic disposition to the same cancer that took them. It’s a comedy, I promise.
It’s funny how we all imagine we are going to live forever, that the things that happen to ‘other people’ won’t happen to us. And as the plane starts to shake, I remember that I am other people’s other people. We are flying through a storm. The turbulence increases and we come into land, but the plane is on an angle, and we’re being jolted around. We touch the ground and bounce, bounce again higher this time and then the plane flips upwards. I’m sitting along the wing and I can see it digging into the earth alongside the tarmac. The pilot is trying to correct course but the wind is too strong and so they just take back off, into the worst storm I have ever experienced. The pilot says nothing. The passengers explode into fits of tears, screams and prayers (a loooot of prayers - it was an American airline).
Two people have heart attacks and the doctors on board can’t safely get to them.
We don’t hear anything from the pilots or the staff in this chaotic ten minutes. I imagine them trying to figure out how to tell us they don’t know if it’s going to be okay. Finally, the pilot speaks and tells us we are redirecting to another airport. We head out of the storm to Baltimore and as the plane lands safely, fire trucks and ambulances zoom towards us on the tarmac. I look back at the messages I had sent in those ten minutes. We all got our phones out. Of course we did. It’s so hard to know what to say when you think it might be goodbye, but you also think it might not be goodbye - and how embarrassing if it’s not. I had texted ‘I love you’ to my mum and ‘love you girlies’ to the group chat. Love you girlies. “Love You Girlies”. Are you fucking kidding me? I’ve written a whole arse book and “love you girlies” is my lasting legacy?
I get off the plane and call Mum. I tell her what’s happened, and she says maybe it will be a gift of perspective. Something to remind me what’s ‘really important’. And I know what she means is: maybe this will slow me down, convince me to get married and have a baby. Finally. But it won’t.
I never played with dolls. I spent my childhood out in the yard with the dog rehearsing for one of our very long, very improvised plays that we would perform for my parents and their very patient friends. I had no interest in becoming a mother and I figured, like the women in my life had told me, that I would get to my late twenties and change my mind. But whatever magical change I was waiting for didn’t come and hasn’t come and every day, when somebody shows me a picture of their kid, I put on another of my little plays. Casting myself as ‘woman who can tell babies apart and appreciate their delicate little lives’. I say things like, ‘oh so cute!’ And ‘wow so sassy’. There’s nothing wrong with babies, it’s just kind of like… get a trade, you know?
Women aren’t supposed to prefer dogs to babies. I feel like all my maternal instincts went into a 9-year-old rescue Staffy with anal cancer and a failed Guide Dog who is afraid of moving furniture. I love my dogs. I love all dogs. I could look at a dog all day in the way I see women stare at a baby. I could forgive them anything. I’m not saying dogs are better! I’m just saying there is a reason people don’t get an emotional support baby.
As a performer I obviously care what people think of me. I care about what I leave behind. I have a terrible case of main character syndrome. It’s not easy to come from a working-class family in a country town with dreams of one day being on TV acting and singing and telling jokes and then actually having those dreams come true.
It feels absurd. And it feels momentous every time another little dream comes true, and I collect memories and achievements and flyers and reviews and compile them in my head in a little book for the grandkids. Something to share with a little girl. But I do not have a daughter. And every parent I know tells me they wish someone had told me how hard it is. It is hard and it is honourable, and it is absolutely not for me. I am not prepared to give my body to someone else as a vessel.
There is something sacred in such a selfless and ancient act but there is also something radically empowering about refusing it. About choosing yourself. My legacy is a book full of stories written down for a little girl who does not exist because she might ruin it. And so, the little girl I choose is the one from Wagga Wagga, teen pregnancy capital of Australia. I am going to give her limited time a really good go.
Michelle Brasier: Legacy will be performed at 7pm in Gilded Balloon Patter Hoose (Doonstairs) from 31st July – 26th August (Not 14th). Get tickets here.