Ten Steps to Nanette

by Hannah Gadsby

When I was a kid, I used to feel sorry for Dad. We all did; and sadly, Mum knew this and that must have been painful. Dad’s preference for fence-sitting has been a near-constant source of frustration for Mum. As a child I couldn’t at all comprehend why, but now, as an adult, I can see the immense pressure she must have been under. Essentially, when it came to emotional labor and decision-making, Mum was operating as a single mother of six (five children and one adult man). But whenever things went wrong, which they frequently did, Mum would suddenly be married again and having the anatomy of her mistakes explained back to her by the very man who’d refused to help in the first place. In terms of fodder for my comedy, I am ashamed to admit that I have positioned my mum at the butt of my jokes to a far greater extent than I have my dad. This is unfair to both of them. Dad was the calm to Mum’s storm, and so it was just too easy for me to believe that it was my mum, alone, who was responsible for packing my emotional baggage. It is only now, after a significant chunk of life has passed since, that I can recognise that Mum was not always the right target, she was just the easy one. So, I would like to ask that if you find yourself judging my mother harshly, just keep it in mind that I can be a lazy hunter and Dad is a parental gazelle.

“Are there any parenting decisions you aren’t proud of?” I teased. Mum didn’t answer and instead just looked out the window. I felt bad; I’d only asked in jest, and I assumed she’d reply in kind. Sometimes I like to tell her that she used to terrify the life out of me, and she usually responds by telling me that she didn’t like me very much. It’s fun. It’s our love language. But this was not how this interaction was going. “I think the thing I regret most,” she said eventually, “was that I raised you as if you were straight.” I was stunned. I had not been expecting that at all. I was thinking about all the homemade clothes she’d forced me to wear. “I guess I wanted you to change, because I knew the world wouldn’t. I should have been your friend, you know, but I wasn’t. I’ll never forgive myself for that.” They say that time heals all wounds, and while I’m certain that time is better at wound care than Vicks VapoRub, time alone is not enough. Effort is required. And until Mum said that, I don’t think I appreciated just how much effort she had to put in over the years. As we drove on, I began to think back to the moment I’d come out to Mum all those years ago, and much to my surprise, it was still painful to recall. “What if I told you I was a murderer!?” I had repeated Mum’s response to my coming out so many times on stage that it had separated itself from my actual memory. It worried me that I had become unable to think about my coming out story as it had actually happened...