Cranston woman reflects on motherhood as ‘Listen to Your Mother’ wraps up its final year

In 2013 Brianne DeRosa became part of something special: the inaugural cast of the nationwide show, “Listen To Your Mother.” The show, whose tagline is “Giving Motherhood a Microphone,” has been held in a variety of states all over the country since 2011, with Providence joining in their ranks four years ago. It allows men and women to submit their stories about having a mother, being a mother, loving a mother, losing a mother and anything in between, to producers, hoping for a chance to audition and earn a spot on the local cast. Depending on the submissions each year, the show comes together like a puzzle, with just the right amount of happy, sad, funny, touching and life-changing stories creating the show, and creating a lifetime of memories for its audience and its participants.

In 2016, DeRosa, who has a Masters in Fine Arts in theater and playwriting, stepped up and heeded to call to help produce the local LTYM show, in its fifth year at the time, and joined a group of local co-producers who were willing to work as a team to get that year’s curtain up. This year she will again co-produce the show, and read in it as well, as the curtain closes on LTYM as it stands in its current format.

“Every successful endeavor becomes big and at some point that needs to change,” DeRosa said. “The national team for LTYM was at the point where so many cities were having their own shows, they opted to go out on a high note at the conclusion of this year’s shows.”

Going forward, there will be a scripted show format available for purchase, consisting of scripts from past years’ shows from all around the country. Interested parties, theaters, and individuals will have the option to purchase the rights to run the show locally.

“Listen To Your Mother is based on the power of storytelling,” DeRosa said. “It’s real people, on a stage, who are not professionals, telling their stories and from year to year their stories might change.”

Many who audition for LTYM do so multiple times, and sometimes can be in more than one year’s cast. DeRosa is one such person and this year she will tell her story, as it is today, in the May 4 show which is being held at the Providence Public Library, the site of the original Providence show.

As a wife to John, and mother to two boys, Liam (10) and Patrick (8), DeRosa has seen her own story change as her journey through motherhood has progressed.

“I think what drew me to tell my story is that my son Liam is neurodivergent, so he in many ways presents as a very typical kid, but from his early toddler years onward, his life has been a story, a journey, as our family tried to pinpoint what was going on with him,” DeRosa said. “From the age of two, we were constantly questioning his development, getting different evaluations from doctors, from specialists, and no one could pinpoint what was going on. He wasn’t super-typical, but what he was we didn’t really know. We had him in various therapies for the immediate things we knew, Occupational Therapy, Physical Therapy, even Equine therapy, to resolve what we could resolve, and yet at the same time he was reading four or five years above his grade level.”

Eventually DeRosa and her family received a diagnosis for Liam.

“He had a nonverbal learning disorder, he had a slow processing speed, yet in some areas he was very gifted. Neurodivergence is fairly rare, not well known and probably not as diagnosed as it should be. It has overlapping characteristics with things on the autism spectrum, but it is not on the spectrum itself,” she said.

It was that journey to a diagnosis that brought DeRosa to LTYM.

“That first year he had started kindergarten, it was a fraught time. We had no diagnosis, we weren’t quite sure, we were in a weird, transitional place, a ‘now what’ place,’” she said. “The night before the deadline to submit a piece, I thought to myself, ‘This is where I am right now, where do we fit in, what do we do,’ and that year the producer had a son with similar challenges, and other cast members that year had similar stories, and our pieces just fit together to help create that year’s show.”

DeRosa has fallen in love with watching people find themselves in someone else’s story being shared on the LTYM stage.

“It’s just amazing,” she said. “Every year, people watch the show and they find a cast member they’ve never met and they say, ‘Oh my God, you told my story. I never knew anyone else felt that way,’” she said.

This year DeRosa believes that her story is like a bookend story to her first year’s story.

“I’ve now come full circle,” she said. “I share the impact of me having become this kind of seasoned veteran, a disability mom, advocating for others and meeting others. In my story, I share a part about a woman I connected with because of our shared journey and watching from afar what happened to her motherhood and how it changed me.”

DeRosa’s sense of humor is evident, and says that although she normally brings the comic relief to the show, for this year, the audience should bring their tissues.

As a whole, the final run for the Providence LTYM show will be like closing the parentheses on an era, according DeRosa.

“We are in our original location at the Providence Public Library, in the same auditorium as that first show. We have two of us at the helm and another cast member has come back as well, it’s really like two book ends on this project,” she said.

On a day-to-day basis, DeRosa doesn’t focus on characterizing her family as a special needs family, as much of their life has become their new normal.

“I don’t think of myself as a special needs mom,” she said. “It’s become normalized for me on a day-to-day basis, but this allows me to examine where we are as a family, what we do every day as a family.”

DeRosa hopes that in sharing her story, her journey and the point that they are at now, she will help to connect the dots for someone else on the same or a similar journey in their lives and that the cast of this year’s LTYM will help to spark connections for their audience one last time.

For more information on this year’s Providence show, past years shows or to get tickets for the event visit listentoyourmothershow.com/providence. The show will begin at 7 p.m.