The reality of gigging with a baby…

At one of my last gigs before I had my daughter, the promoter said ‘don’t worry, when you have the baby you can just bring it to the gig, I’ll hold it in the green room while you’re onstage’. Oh wow I thought, this working motherhood thing is going to be so easy. All you need is someone to hold the baby for 20mins!

What a load of absolute bullshit.

Firstly, I couldn’t even get back to work in the first place. I expected to go back 3 months after giving birth, I had seen loads of women ‘bouncing back’ and maintaining a career whilst starting a family wasn’t just a choice anymore it felt like an expectation. Which completely underestimates the impact labour and early motherhood has on your body and mind. I
couldn’t go back to work after 3 months, I couldn’t even put trousers on. Secondly, when I did try and gig again, the fact of taking the baby with you is riddled with problems. You have to get the baby to and from the gig, which means travelling at night, through London, wheeling her in between crackheads. And that means you have to mother right up and until the point of going onstage, you have seconds after handing over the baby, to try and get your head away from breast pumping to punchlines. And then attempt to say those jokes aloud to hundreds of people whilst leaking out of every orifice. Not to mention the fact that, apart from a bit of chit chat before and after I perform, this promoter offering to hold the most precious thing in the world to me, was basically a stranger. And given the high volume of men in the comedy industry now on some kind of list, not ideal babysitting material.

But leaving them at home isn’t much better either. Arriving at the gig with minutes to spare, on the edge of tears as you’ve had to tear yourself away from an inconsolable child, exhausted from the 12mins of sleep you got last night, and as you step onstage you have a terrifying feeling that you have baby excrement somewhere on your person. All that said, gigging saved me. Keeping a foot into my old life stopped me from falling completely into the world of motherly service, it kept the light faintly on in the pre baby me I once took for granted. It also gave me pride in something, as I so often felt like I was failing
at motherhood, at least I could do this, at least I could go onstage and make people laugh, although I was so deranged with tiredness the laughter may have been a hallucination. One time at the end of my set I just could not find the mic stand to put the mic back into, I wandered around for a bit searching for it, but just couldn’t see it anywhere. Eventually I had to just gently place the mic on the floor and walk away.

Mic drop?

Lily’s show ‘Crying’ runs at Soho Theatre 13th-14th April 2026, get your tickets here.

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