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<\/a>My mother used to sing us to sleep. Her lullabies weren\u2019t choruses of \u201cTwinkle, Twinkle Little Star\u201d repeated just until she could tell we were out. No, she brought her guitar into the room my sister and I shared, sat close in the dark, and as far as we knew, had nowhere else to go and nothing more important to do. In those moments, she was all ours.<\/p>\nOur favorite songs were the sad ones. Like \u201cSummertime,\u201d that great ode to longing for what never was. We also loved \u201cAll the Pretty Horses,\u201d and others I\u2019ve struggled to remember. Even a nonsense song like \u201cB-A-Bay\u201d could sound melancholy in her lovely alto, sung at a volume meant to lull.<\/p>\n
Her lullabies were a gift, one way that she could comfort us during a time when our father\u2019s drinking and all that came with it caused so many things in our life to go wrong.<\/p>\n
Later, home life improved. My mom remarried, and my sister and I got our own rooms. In adolescence, visits from Mom at night (or any time) were considered an invasion, not a comfort.<\/p>\n
But I still needed lullabies, so I found new ones.<\/p>\n
By day I was a normal teen, listening to Huey Lewis and the News and REO Speedwagon, and trying to learn to love Van Halen to gain acceptance from my peers.<\/p>\n
By night, I may have been the only thirteen-year-old in town whose favorite radio station was KABL with its string arrangements and light classics. My continuing preference for sad songs made Gordon Lightfoot and Dan Fogelberg favorites.<\/p>\n
In high school, my best friend Christine and I made mixed tapes we\u2019d label simply as \u201csleep\u201d\u2014collections of quiet songs for bedtime listening. Lullabies. Those tapes included Everything But the Girl, Cyndi Lauper ballads, and Cat Stevens, who we\u2019d discovered along with the movie Harold and Maude<\/em>.<\/p>\nThe perfect sleep mix kept a consistent level of mellow going for a full forty-five minute cassette side. The hope was to be asleep well before the sound of the play button popping back up could wake you.<\/p>\n
Married life changed things, as it tends to. My husband\u2019s childhood lullabies were the audio recordings he\u2019d make of his favorite TV shows, and later, talk radio. This caused conflict until I got used to voices, too, and now we fall asleep to Coast to Coast AM or podcasts of various NPR shows.<\/p>\n
My mother, after a decades-long gap between getting her masters degree in music and returning to it seriously, now writes her own songs and performs them at backyard concerts. She\u2019s in the process of recording a studio album.<\/p>\n
When she first embarked on her senior project as a singer-songwriter performing for others, my primary reaction was detached, theoretical pride. Good for her<\/em>, I thought. She\u2019s in her seventies and starting something really new. That\u2019s cool.<\/em><\/p>\nBut deep down, a part of me didn\u2019t like it. And I didn\u2019t like that I didn\u2019t like it.<\/p>\n
A couple of years ago at the Glen Workshop I watched her sing at open mike and found myself thinking, No. She\u2019s mine. That part of her belongs to me, and my childhood, and my memory. <\/em>I felt wretched and selfish, but also entitled to my resistance.<\/p>\nIt wasn\u2019t unlike how I felt when she started dating my stepfather. I was around eleven, and my dad had left. I believed that the three of us\u2014my sister, my mom, and I\u2014would finally be able to make life about taking care of ourselves, not my dad. Then it seemed she was gone again, into this new relationship.<\/p>\n
And I guess seeing her move into a new relationship with her music triggered old abandonment fears.<\/p>\n
Would my mother ever be mine<\/em>? I\u2019ve listened to her and watched her later-life vocation with these mixed feelings and thought, what do I want, anyway? Do I want a mother who lives vicariously through her grown kids? Who calls five days a week and puts us on guilt trips? No.<\/p>\nWhat I want I can\u2019t have: My childhood back. Or a version of it that never existed.<\/p>\n
And I think that\u2019s what I wanted in the short time between fathers. To return to the bunk bed, my sister resting below me and the solace of our mother singing, only this time without the shadow of all that wasn\u2019t right lurking just outside the door.<\/p>\n
This past weekend I had my first chance to see Mom perform a full concert. I watched her friends gather in the shade of her hosts\u2019 yard. We sat in folding chairs and drank glasses of iced tea. Horses nickered on the other side of the fence, gathering in to hear the music.<\/p>\n
My mother sings from seventy years of lived life, lived faith. Some of the songs are fun, funny, and upbeat. Others are laments, and some tell stories from the Bible.<\/p>\n
The confused desire to keep her and her voice to myself evaporated into the late afternoon. Throughout the concert, my reserved attitude was transformed into wonder, admiration, love.<\/p>\n
That\u2019s my mother.
\n<\/em>She is<\/em> mine. But not only mine.<\/p>\nAs ever, I like the slow, melancholy songs best, especially \u201cWorld, Goodnight,\u201d the title track of her forthcoming album<\/a>.<\/p>\nIt\u2019s about death and meeting God, a song addressing her Lord. It isn\u2019t sad. Many people in the audience that day are probably in their final decade, and I listened as she sang to them\u2014beautifully and beautiful\u2014of her own longing, like mine, to return to something that hasn\u2019t yet truly been.<\/p>\n
A lullaby.
\nA gift.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
My mother used to sing us to sleep. Her lullabies weren\u2019t choruses of \u201cTwinkle, Twinkle Little Star\u201d repeated just until she could tell we were out. No, she brought her guitar into the room my sister and I shared, sat close in the dark, and as far as we knew, had nowhere else to go […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1062,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[50,18],"tags":[69,3577,62],"class_list":["post-1527","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-relationships","category-sara-zarr","tag-children","tag-music","tag-parents"],"yoast_head":"\n
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<\/a>My mother used to sing us to sleep. Her lullabies weren\u2019t choruses of \u201cTwinkle, Twinkle Little Star\u201d repeated just until she could tell we were out. No, she brought her guitar into the room my sister and I shared, sat close in the dark, and as far as we knew, had nowhere else to go and nothing more important to do. In those moments, she was all ours.<\/p>\n