Janine Harouni: This is what I’ve been waiting for to review – A new mother’s return to her childhood | comedy

TThe last time I saw Janine Harouni perform she was eight months pregnant and doing a show about impending parenthood. It may not surprise you to learn that her first show since then is about the actual fatherhood of a now 18-month-old boy, with the help of her visiting Lebanese and Irish-American parents. Raising children may not take a village in This Is What You’ve Been Waiting For, but it does require an extended family — which gets our host thinking about how she gave birth, and what kind of mother she could be.

This isn’t the first time with Harouni, that I find the smoothness and control of her watch on this topic very elegant. She’s a proponent of “gentle parenting,” and does gentle, thoughtful comedy as well. The jokes are delivered with great subtlety as she leads us through her experience raising an unusually large child, with detours through her relationships with her husband, father and mother. One piece of great sage advice offends her sports fan father’s opposition to their consciences. There is another story about how unqualified new mothers are to care for children, and a choice lapse about the similarities between the newcomer to her family and colonial Britain.

If Harouni’s observations about new fatherhood are somewhat common, privacy is provided by the visit from her native Brooklyn, to help with the children. (Grandma) Mother and daughter spoil each other – partly because Janine worries that she can’t live up to her mother’s standard of parenting. Harouni’s description of these fears gets to the point where situations in the show would love to give us a poignant moment, along with the claim that stretches credulity that Harouni never saw her mother as a person, rather than a parent, until now.

It all ties an honest bow around the show’s closing moments — but it’s not as enjoyable as the less wholesome story that preceded it, about the time Janine pretended to have cancer while on a date. There’s something awkward and belated in that tale that makes up for the fine engineering elsewhere. Control is all well and good, but sometimes — as with parenting — something a little messier happens, and that’s just as worth celebrating.