Playwright Caroline Bélisle addresses motherhood anxieties in Liste des enfants dévorés par les loups
Care of Théâtre la Seizième, the work examines how female friendships must adapt to the pressure of raising a new life
Caroline Bélisle. Photo by Annie France Noël
Théâtre la Seizième presents Liste des enfants dévorés par les loups at Studio 16 from March 4 to 14
ACCORDING TO A 2018 SURVEY on maternal health conducted by Statistics Canada, around 23 percent of Canadian mothers experience postpartum depression or anxiety between five and thirteen months after giving birth. That’s nearly a quarter of new moms. The figure is higher than the national average of people who needed mental health care during the same year, which was around 18 percent.
Caroline Bélisle’s new play Liste des enfants dévorés par les loups (“List of children devoured by wolves”) takes a close look at that reality. New mom Blanche has been struggling with her mental health. She obsesses over news articles that detail child tragedies—the baby forgotten in the back seat of a car on a hot day, or the toddler left unattended near a swimming pool for just a moment—and convinces herself she will become one of those mothers whose imperfections catch up to her.
As Bélisle puts it, Blanche is overwhelmed by anxiety and “trying to prepare for that moment where she will fuck up.” And it doesn’t help that her best friend, Charlène, is terrified by the fragility of babies and doesn’t want any kids of her own.
“Motherhood is a beautiful, beautiful thing, and we know that,” the playwright says. “We’ve been told that. But we don’t always feel that, especially in the first months. We think that having a baby is going to result in having that little miracle in your life. But it’s so much more complicated than that, you know? You have this little baby that comes into your life—but also this guilt, this shame, this fear, this anxiety. And I think we need to tackle this. Because we talk a lot about the tears of the babies, but we don’t talk enough about the tears of the mothers.”
Liste des enfants dévorés par les loups will be onstage at Studio 16 from March 4 to 14, courtesy of Théâtre la Seizième. The play’s dialogue is in French, and English surtitles will be projected above the stage.
Bélisle, who was born in Deux-Montagnes, Quebec, and is now based in Moncton, New Brunswick, writes primarily about femininity and women’s issues. Her play Les remugles ou La danse nuptiale est une langue morte (in English, “The musty odours or The wedding dance is a dead language”) won the prestigious Prix Gratien-Gélinas and was a finalist for the 2022 Governor General’s Literary Awards.
Though the National Theatre School of Canada graduate isn’t a mother herself, many of the people she’s closest to in life—namely, her sisters and friends—have now started families. She began writing Liste des enfants dévorés par les loups after noticing all the ways in which a close relationship between two people can change when one of them becomes a mom.
“We struggle, because it’s already hard as working adult women to be friends,” Bélisle acknowledges. “And then you add a little crying, non-sleeping baby to the mix, and it’s so hard. But you know, we always say it takes a village—and we don’t have many villages anymore. We don’t have a sense of community as strong as we used to have. But our female friendships, I think, are the way to bear the weight of family in a more joyous way.”
Part of maintaining those friendships is adapting. Bélisle says it’s become essential to ensure she can provide a comforting, non-judgmental space for the new moms in her life to share their fears—and that, in turn, they understand she may never fully relate to them, and that this is okay.
“Mothers struggle against something we have been taught to keep quiet,” she says. “There are a lot of things that we won’t admit about motherhood that are very hard on the body and on the mind. And I feel it’s becoming worse, because we are living in this era with so much opinion and hatred on the front line and so many ways to be told that you are not doing things right….You feel less of a mother if you did not give birth the traditional way, you feel less of a mother if you do not breastfeed, you feel less of a mother in so many ways all the time.
“And I see these women around me bearing crying children, and hiding their shame, and not feeling that they’re good enough,” she continues. “And I’m like, okay. In this era where we are working women who are also working out, being artistic, being chronically online, being everything that we try to be—bearing that shame of not being good enough, that scares me. That scares me for myself, and it scares me for my sisters, and it scares me for my neighbours and for my friends.”
In a rapidly changing world, says Bélisle, she holds deep love and reverence for motherhood, while simultaneously fearing the idea of raising a new life. She addresses this with her play’s title, Liste des enfants dévorés par les loups—positing that the “wolves” capable of devouring children are actually who we transform into when we let feelings of inadequacy consume us.
“This fear makes women feel like it undermines their love, but it doesn’t,” Bélisle says. “And I feel that that’s what the whole play is about. It’s hard for us to bear this fear, this guilt, this shame, because we think that feeling this means we are less loving. But these things live together in our bodies. And I’m trying to honour that, to pay tribute to this love and to our friendships—the ones that withstand the changes and that survive the violence that awakens in us when we are afraid.” 
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