Playing By Ear

Mom did the best that she knew how.  Like playing a song without the music in front of her, she improvised as she went along, launching forth into motherhood without domestic knowledge or skills, hoping no one would notice the gaping holes hidden behind her pretended show of confidence and bright red lipstick.  Throughout her life, she survived a lot of tough situations thinking that if she didn’t acknowledge the flaws, disappointments, and glaring problems, well, no one else would either.

She wanted so much for me, her only daughter among three rough-and-tumble boys, to have beautiful curly hair and be a violin prodigy like her.  I had unruly locks, and while she started me on the violin at age three, she could not understand why I didn’t love it too.  In the 1960s when other people were playing Beatles and Beach Boys in their homes, she commandeered the stereo and we were held captive to the oldies of Mozart, Bach and Stravinsky.   And even though she thought I was not listening, somehow that continual soundtrack of classical music engraved deep furrows in my brain.  Handel’s Messiah still plunges me into a swift current of emotion, and sometimes when I overhear even a few phrases on the radio, my eyes close and I can hardly breathe.   

I wanted a different mother, one like the mythical television matriarch June Cleaver who performed housework in pearls and high heels, not the wild and imperfect mom depicted in “I Love Lucy.”  I know now that music was all Mom knew how to give.  That’s how she related to other people.   And that’s how she loved us.   We drank powdered milk, and our shoes were purchased from the clearance rack at K Mart, but somehow there was always a way to pay for more music lessons.

Teamed up with her passion for music was her compassion to love people outrageously.  We used to say that she would have cut off her right arm for anyone she met on the street.   Her total immersion in music made her like a small child, loving without restraint.  She engaged motel maids in conversation, she once stopped traffic to give her sunhat to a road construction worker, and she played her violin at an old acquaintance’s funeral because no one else was coming.  We would wake up in the morning, and more often than not, there were some of her high school violin students sleeping on couches in our living room and rummaging through the fridge. 

So in this therapeutic culture where so many problems are blamed on moms, I have grown to appreciate mine even more.  Each year since her passing, memories seem to emerge from deep inside like forgotten perennials bursting forth.   She did the best she could, and somehow she always thought music would smooth out the wrinkles.  And often it did.

As moms, we all stand imperfect, unable to rewind our mistakes, and as author Ann Voskamp says, “Grace stands in the gaps.”  Amen to that.

If you still have the opportunity, it’s never too late to whisper, “I love you, Mom.”  You can’t say it enough.