The Other Mother: A wickedly honest parenting tale for every kind of family

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Another in our series about young people at risk of getting into trouble and the people trying to help them. At a busy private stables in rural Worcestershire Steph works with girls who have been excluded from mainstream education – they have been offered a Changing Lives Though Horses course run by the British Horse Society as alternative way of educating/reaching/calming them. Jo Morris met Steph and the riding teachers Dan and Karen there with Britney, Emma and Libby. In The Other Mother, Brister explores the process of becoming a mum when you’re not the mum who gave birth. In 2020 she was due to take her UK tour [19] of Under Privilege to the Machynlleth Comedy Festival at The Tabernacle, Machynlleth. [20]

Donaldson, Brian (26 October 2018). "My Comedy Hero: Jen Brister on Victoria Wood". list.co.uk . Retrieved 28 May 2019. Gilson, Edwin (1 June 2018). "Brighton comedian Jen Brister on #MeToo: "I found out things I never knew" ". The Argus . Retrieved 28 May 2019. I had one of those asymmetric haircuts for a while. I thought I looked so cool. I remember going to my mum’s house and her answering the door saying: “I think your hairdresser hates you.” The funniest joke I’ve ever heard … In 2018, Brister took her sixth show Meaningless to the Edinburgh festival, where she had a sell-out run. This was the first show she had toured around the UK. We needed ten years to go from "We want children" to the birth of our first child. We went to fertility clinics, internet forums, and ultimately found our donour in a friend. I didn't give birth to my daughter, but stood beside her isolette in the NICU (she was a preemie) and was the first to touch her. The fear I had of losing her when my wife was bleeding during her second trimester is the moment I realised I was irrevocably a mum. I did give birth to my son.

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Didn't know a lot about Jen Bristow before listening to this book. Knew she was funny, and am fairly sure I knew she had at least one son, having caught part of a set she did on Live At The Apollo. For what this is worth, also knew she was part of a group of comedians I instinctively like - a pal of Sara Pascoe, Sarah Millican, Suzi Ruffel and Jessica Fostekew. I dreamed that I was Gary Barlow’s girlfriend and we were really happy, which was weird for two reasons: 1) because I’m a lesbian, and 2) because I always fancied Howard. The funniest meal I’ve ever eaten … Stand up comedian Jen Brister’s first novel focuses on her experience of entering motherhood with her partner, Chloe. Once Jen and Chloe have agreed that they would like to start a family, they begin making the hundreds of decisions every parent-to-be faces, with a few extras thrown in for being a gay couple. One of these decisions was that Chloe would undergo fertility treatment, and when their twins are conceived, Jen finds herself launched into the role of ‘the other mother’. Not the birth mother, not the biological mother, not the adoptive mother, but something other. From that premise, Jen Brister gives a lot in this book - a lot of honesty, a lot of laughter (some of it fairly dark), a lot of appraisal both of herself and her girlfriend Chloe, the process of IVF, the whole tedious conversation about the family dynamic initiated by cishet folk on a monotonous and regular basis, about the myths, the truths, the bullshit woo-pressures of being a parent to two kids simultaneously, and about doing it a) slightly later on the human energy curve than might be ideal (she was 40 when the kids were born, and is strikingly honest about the energy-sapping reality of that), and b) while struggling to turn herself from a barely self-supporting circuit comic and responsibility-repellant into a savings-possessor, known name in comedy and responsibily-facer-upper. The comedian Jen Brister talks about what it was like becoming a non-biological mum. She had twin boys with her partner Chloe four years ago after several rounds of IVF, and it was Chloe who gave birth. She talks about the reaction of friends and professionals, and what she felt like herself having babies in this way - experiences she has written about in her book The Other Mother.

I’ve never been good with small talk and I am completely allergic to other people’s opinions, so it’s no real surprise that I was not totally prepared for motherhood – and certainly not for being a mother to non-identical twin boys. As any parent of twins will tell you, when you walk down the street with a buggy so huge it looks like it could have been used in the last moon landing, people just want to talk to you. ‘Are these your twins?’; ‘I have twins!’; ‘My mum is a twin’; ‘I met a twin once’; ‘My favourite film is Twins!’ How are you supposed to respond? ‘That’s great to hear. OK, BYE NOW’? The Other Mother is not only a hilariously funny and authentic read but it is also a new kind of parenting book which portrays the changing landscape of parenting. We should no longer expect every family to look the same, as Brister explains to her own children; some kids have a mum and dad, some have two mums, some have two dads, and some have just a mum or just a dad, and all of these families share some of the same problems of parenting.Once, when they were very small, I took our boys to a café. They were both crying and I was coping as best I could: changing their nappies on a chair and wrestling to pour expressed milk into a flask. A woman approached me. ‘Hi, I’m sorry, but my friends and I have been watching you for ages and I just wanted to say...’ she started. Oh God – what? I thought. ‘We think you’re a hero! We can’t imagine how much work twins must be.' I was being a mum and – guess what – I wasn’t completely terrible at it. The truth is that motherhood doesn’t begin and end with conception, pregnancy or even birth. It begins the day you’re given a brand-new human and told that you’ll be responsible for them until the day you die. Five years in, our journey’s only just begun. As you would expect from a comedian, Brister writes with wit and peppers her narrative with funny episodes. Her tone is honest and open, inviting the reader to empathise and engage with her and her situations. I particularly enjoyed the times when she wrote about being a non-biological parent - the careless assumptions of others, her feelings as she bonded with her sons, the way she viewed her partner as a mother - as these made the book original and heartwarming. Despite her optimism about becoming a mother, Jen has to contend with being the “other one”, i.e. the non-biological mother of her children. She fears her twins not loving her as much as their biological mother and observes that she does not have the “glow” of a real mother like her partner. The descriptions of her eventual acceptance of this “otherness” makes the reader realise that temporary loss of identity is a confusion that everyone can sometimes have in life. Nevertheless, the book ends with temporary tranquillity in the characters’ motherhood. Motherhood is just an example of the mixed experiences life can bring, and you never know what comes next.

Burns, James (6 August 2012). "Review: Jen Brister, Now and Then". funnywomen.com . Retrieved 4 July 2023.

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I can't begin to imagine how hard it must be to raise twins, regardless of any other hurdles or added complications that may come with anyone's personal situation, whether that be through IVF conception or prematurity or parental disagreements. Quite frankly, this book has given me a deeper appreciation for not only the parents that I work with but also of literally any parent that I see pushing a pram down the high street. Brister is also a writer and has contributed to Diva, g3, Standard Issue magazine and The Huffington Post. She has also written for BBC Scotland. [22]