I shared this personal narrative today during our College Comp Gallery Walk. Every student brought a piece to share, and together we provided positive feedback using Post-Its. It was a great experience for our learning community. Because I'm stressing the idea of authentic audience with my students, I decided I would share with my authentic blog audience as well. The rhythm pulsates. The band moves in sync. The steady beat of the bass drum echos my heartbeat. This is live music. My arms lift up like they aren’t my own. I close my eyes, allowing my mind to rest. Every note, every harmony, every strum. I am completely here, in this moment, with my husband by my side. I reach down to grab his hand. Our fingers intertwine perfectly without thought, and I squeeze. No, it’s not a dream. The music takes me over, reaches out through me. I don’t know all the words, but I don’t have to. My feet pound out the beat of the drum. This, to me, is worship, a psalm of David, a holy moment. As the crowd’s voices rise around me, I think, “Yes, I am standing on holy ground.” “When my time comes around, lay me gently in the cold dark earth. No grave can hold my body down. I’ll crawl back to her.” ----- Our relationship began with a lie. “Did you make that hat?” he asked, examining the golden knit hat I was wearing to protect my head from the frigid cold as we waited for the concert venue doors to open. “Um, yes, yes, I did,” I fibbed, wanting so desperately to impress this handsome stranger. “That’s cool.” I blushed, and so it began. “I hope we sit together when Jesus serves the wine so I can look into your eyes when I taste it the first time.” Later I had to admit that no, I didn’t know how to knit. But by that time he liked me for more than my cute hats. In the meantime I had learned to knit, and my first hat was a gift to the handsome stranger who would become my boyfriend and then my husband. After that first Waterdeep concert, we attended many. Live music was the catalyst for our love that first night at the New Earth in Kansas City, and it became clear in the early days of our relationship that music was also the fire that would keep us burning. “You are beautiful my sweet, sweet song. I will sing it again.” ----- We traveled to Chicago for the Swell Season, drove to Nashville for Over the Rhine, and stood at the front of the stage in Omaha for Bon Iver. Music was the backbone of our relationship. We cooked dinner together listening to Frank Sinatra or singing along to “Skinny Love.” On road trips we listened to favorite songs on repeat, memorizing the harmonies, drumming on the steering wheel, singing obnoxiously loud. We were just an audience of two, after all. “I told you to be patient. I told you to be fine. I told you to be balanced. I told you to be kind.” ----- And then we became parents. While the music to that stage of life wasn’t heard live, the soundtrack was still there. On the day we received permission to travel to Ethiopia to bring our sons home, we blared Waterdeep again, this time a song from their newest album. Their lyrics washed over us as we cried and hugged in the sunlit living room. We were becoming parents, and Waterdeep knew the perfect words that we needed to hear at that overwhelming moment and many moments to come in our early days of parenting. “It’s alright, alright, though it seems like a dark night in your dreams.” Suddenly, our time no longer belonged to us. Weekend soccer games, homework after school, and earlier bedtimes became our new rhythm. Instead of dancing in front of the stage, we danced in the kitchen. Instead of late nights in big city venues, the crickets sang a lullaby from the back porch. Instead of the Beirut or Indigo Girls station on Pandora, I was listening to Maroon 5 or Today’s Hit Radio. My life still had a soundtrack, but some of the tracks were unrecognizable, written in a genre I wouldn’t pick for myself. Looking back, though, I can now see that the music was always there. The preferred Pandora stations changed, and we went for years without going to a concert, but our house is rarely silent. A rhythm always pulses; the beat perseveres. Our children are being raised with music. But while I love my sons with every fibre of my being and like mothers everywhere I make sacrifices for my children, I slowly felt myself losing sight of myself. I rarely spent time getting lost in my own music while strumming a guitar or pounding out some chords on the out-of-tune piano. My time was spent helping with homework and doing the dishes and planning lessons and grading papers. I was a mother and a teacher, but gradually my roles as wife and woman grew foggier. I wasn’t done fighting for that, though. Nearly four years after becoming a mother, I again found myself at a concert with my husband. Getting there was a bit more complicated as we had to beg my sister to take the boys overnight. I also discovered that my more middle-aged body struggles to stay up until midnight. But still, we made it to see Hozier in St. Paul. In a strange way, as I sat in that auditorium letting his lyrics saturate my work-weary mind, I felt simultaneously like the middle-aged mother I was and the young girl I was when I first met my husband. I was 22 and 36; a carefree young woman and a mother of two. I was facing a wide-open future and looking back on years of struggles and joys. It was Waterdeep and Hozier, Bon Iver and Over the Rhine. “We lay here for years or for hours, your hand in my hand, so still and discrete.” The next day as we drove home from St. Paul, we listened to Hozier’s macabre love song, “In a Week” on repeat. We memorized the harmonies and talked about love and life and death. “You know, if the boys were here,” I began, “ we wouldn’t be able to do this. Jude would freak if we listened to a song on repeat.” “Yeah,” Chris laughed. “And we would have been interrupted about 47 times by now.” So we continued to sing and listen and talk and dream. But the silence from the backseat wasn’t exactly welcome as I realized I missed the chatter and bickering that usually echoes up when we’re all in the car together. “It was good to be away, to hear the music again,” I sighed. “Yep, and it will be good to be back home again.” I smiled at the blur of trees passing by my window.
2 Comments
Alaina
10/30/2015 03:12:32 pm
I love this. And I love you. It is amazing how vivid the picture in my head is of that golden hat. I remember it so clearly, which is so strange, but I remember how the hat became such a funny symbol and how you kept saying you had to learn to knit.
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Ironically, I listened to Both of Us Will Feel the Blast today and thought, immediately, of you and Chris and our hair-brained dream of getting Waterdeep to play at your wedding. Alas, you had to settle for me singing a haphazard version of "I Am In My Being Here With You." I sure love you, Kim Witt.
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