The Musician's Mother

In the stage lights she comes alive, blinking and smiling as if emerging from a chrysalis. It is there I see her as she will be, confident and consummate, no longer the fifteen-year-old being lectured about her cell phone, or the sister arguing whose turn it is to wash dishes.

On the stage, she is in her element. Everything else is just an interlude between performances. She swims through the delicious tension, her eyes running over the assembled crowd. She speaks and her voice comes back to her through the amplifiers. She inhales, growing larger. She sings and the world smiles. She plays her fiddle and the bright lilting notes lift us in our seats.

At home in her room, in the basement, on the porch or on the roof, she fills hours and days with the same strokes, scratched out in maddening succession. I cup my hands around my mouth, leaning toward the stairs or out the window. “Slow it down! I can’t listen as fast you can play!”

There is silence for a moment and I picture her bow poised over the strings, tiny snowflakes of rosin sifting to the dark wood. Finally she shouts back, “I don’t know it slow!”

Later she tells me she does not know the notes at all. She says the music is in her fingers, not in her head.

I watch her now, gathering the heat of the stage lights and the chaotic energy of the small crowd. It courses through her body and flows out through two hands – the fingers of one moving subtly over the neck of the fiddle while the other hand lightly grasps the bow, wrist undulating as she saws the strings. The remnants of that energy escape through swaying hips and tapping foot.

I follow the notes – I know them better than my own heartbeat, although I could not squeeze two in a row from those alien strings. Perhaps they are my heartbeat. And when she is gone – don't think of it! -- the melody will play on in my head. It will be the music of my days, energizing my steps lest I falter. It will course through my veins, so that I grow with each breath and do not melt in the emptiness she has left behind.

Yes, she will move on to other adventures, other cultures, other loves. I will be someone she has to remember. We won't finish each other's sentences, or reach across the table for the same dish. She will be a voice on the phone, or a tiny string of text, enigmatic at times, as her life unfolds.

I try to picture her in the settings she has imagined aloud. I see her in an antiseptic room, blue eyes burning bright between cap and mask. I see her gloved hands aloft, bright with blood. Is this the child I have raised, fearlessly facing down death each day?

Or is this my child, in a dusty foreign land, surrounded by children with eyes as big as moons? I look at the hands that play the fiddle. I watch what tiny and precise movements create sound out of silence. The notes break across the crowd, and we are moved. Are these not hands that heal?

I imagine her in a chapel, slanted evening light illuminating a soft veil laid over her maple-colored curls. It occurs to me again that I cannot in good conscience say “Her father and I” if some preacher asks “Who gives this woman?” How can I give away what was never mine? If she were mine, I would hold her like a jewel burning cool in the palm of my hand. It might show you my jewel, but I would never turn over my fist, open my fingers and empty something so precious into your palm.

But she was never mine. I knew it the first time I held her, wriggling and bloody, against my body. This was not the child I had imagined growing in the womb, a part of me, an extension of myself. No. The little being who gazed up at me with curious sparkling eyes was a stranger here.

I know I am not alone. Every mother must feel that she has become the portal of angels. She kisses her baby's mottled head, and finds that the child does not smell of earth. A tinny cry makes music so soft, she cannot imagine how anyone could mind the sound of a baby crying in the night. She cannot fathom that this sweet infant will become the screaming, pounding little savage who dumps the fish bowl on the bed – again.

Yet the sweet-smelling infant and the brutal fish-killer are one being, moving through the world touching and tasting, gulping at the strange sweet air that is foreign but familiar, too. And somewhere nearby, a mother's watchful eyes drink in all those memories, the same way the child is drinking in the world.

When I was a child, I always wondered about the Virgin Mary. How could she wipe that perpetually dripping nose and clean that little bottom and still have faith that the boy on her lap was not an ordinary child or even a prophet, but actually God in human flesh? Then I became a mother, and I understood. It is no great feat for a woman to look at her child and feel something kin to worship.

Her dancing feet and peals of laughter proved what I knew. She was no mere mortal, no smartly packaged glob of cells and chromosomes. I called her Twinkle Toes. She danced in my arms. The music was always in her – or it was out there, perhaps, waiting like flowers to be gathered.

The long fingers that grasp the bow were once soft and dimpled. I close my eyes and see that little hand reaching back for me. A thousand times she ran ahead, always spotting some new adventure. But then the copper-colored locks bounced over her shoulder as she looked back.

“Hold me hand!” she sang, dark lashes fluttering over eyes as big as the sky. “Hold me hand!” I rushed forward to place my finger in her grasp, wondering where she would lead me.


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