Happy summer! Welcome to the inaugural issue of The Country Professor, a quarterly substack newsletter in which I share thoughts I’ve been mulling over during the past season. I consider these drafts that I could someday morph into a chapter. I’m so glad you’re here. Invite your friends.
One night in March, my sons were particularly hard to put to bed. They were restlessly tired, and the normal reading before bed or tucking in tightly wasn’t working. My husband had been out of town for a week, and our parents pitched in to give me the previous long weekend off, which meant that I got 72 hours of beautiful silence but that the boys were on grandparents’ schedules and diets and that we had gotten in late on a school night. I came downstairs and listened to them continue to chatter and bicker as I tried to transition my mind from a quiet house back into a noisy home.
During the long weekend alone, I worked on an assignment from my therapist to process an experience that was occurred 20 years ago. It was hard to get into healing my inner teenager because of the vast differences between my life now and and my life then. Now, I’m a university English lecturer, wife and mom, living at a camp in the mountains, but back then, I spent the majority of my time immersed in music—singing and playing the piano. Most days I would be on stage playing and/or singing for Sunday worship services, funerals, weddings, recitals, sporting events, or school programs. When I was waiting for my parents to get ready for church or for a date to show up, I would play Beethoven or Bach as a way to burn time. When I was driving, I’d be singing along to the radio or crooning a cappella. What I realized while reminiscing that weekend is that one weird experience performing during my senior year of high school put a damper on my voice. The music wasn’t coming out the same.
As I entered college, I shifted my focus to my other love—writing—but I still enjoyed belting out tunes while I drove my friends around town. I would sit beneath trees on campus and play my guitar, and after classes, I would hide away in a piano practice room, but it wasn’t the same as being on stage.
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After college, I was working, moving, and getting married. I performed here or there for a church service, but I wasn’t in my element. It felt like a one-off, with grief folded in for the way music used to be.
GB’s grandmother passed right before we found out we were pregnant with our twin boys. She left her piano to my mother-in-law. One of the most memorable days of my life was the day my mother-in-law chose to give the baby grand Chickering to me. She said she didn’t have room for it and asked if we did. I said we’d make room if it had to double as our dining room table. (Don’t worry; it didn’t.) I had dreamed for years of owning my own baby grand, and I’m in awe that I do now. When the professional movers set it up in the house, I was miserably late-term pregnant with two babies, but I sat exhausted in my recliner and stared adoringly at it. In the chaotic days that followed, I rarely played, but as soon as the boys were able to sit up on their own, I put them on the bench beside me, and taught them—only fingertips, loud and soft, high and low, A-B-C-D-E-F-G. We constantly incorporated music into our homeschooling for the boys’ first seven years. After the second wave of Covid, I splurged for a couple years on an unlimited music subscription for our streaming devices so that I could request whatever song popped into my head, and that brought me so much joy. I told myself that I was a catalyst for my children loving music and that my own expression had served its purpose.
Last year, when we moved to the mountains, it wasn’t hard to make the best of it. GB and I are simultaneously happy in our work for the first time in our marriage, and we still get to raise our kids surrounded by nature. We gladly accepted the trade-off that we wouldn’t have internet for the first few months; however, I lamented that I couldn’t stream music and that we couldn’t lug the baby grand up the windy roads and steep steps. Instead, we set up a record player and signed the boys up for guitar lessons. Ben takes banjo, and I’m hoping to buy us all a keyboard for Christmas. We recently rejoined the 21st Century with internet access and began streaming music again, so we’ve obviously made accommodations to maintain my love for music.
Still, sometimes when I see people who knew me in high school, they ask if I’m still singing and playing, and I hate to let them down with a sheepish, “Sometimes, when I can.” The truth is, I’ve been pretty tired the past nine years because being a good parent takes more creativity on less sleep than I had in high school. It’s also difficult to enjoy a perfectly composed sonata when someone is banging keys on either side of you or having a Nerf war behind you. Admittedly, I get irritable when a winding-down lullaby is interrupted with tantrums, sibling rivalry, and out-of-the-blue philosophical questions from people who barely know how to tie their own shoes. I’ve learned to pick my parental battles.
Because music is a sacred space for me, I’ve tried to protect it in my soul despite the warnings. While I was involved in performing, people told me that if I ever stopped, I would lose my talent, and I’ve always been terrified that was true. My abilities have certainly changed without the constant training and the added pregnancy hormones and aging. But lately, I’ve been trying out my new voice. I’ve been singing in the shower again. This weekend, while the house was empty without the pressure of being perceived, I chose to sing some of the old songs that I performed almost 20 years ago.
During my junior year of high school, I visited a local prison to sing with my youth choir. We had come to serve them, but one of the inmates, Justin Davis, asked to speak to us. Afterwards, he sang, “His Eye Is On the Sparrow” with one of the most beautiful male voices I had ever heard. His performance still lingers in my memory and it made that song personal and meaningful to me.
When my boys fought sleep as toddlers, I would sing to them until they settled and drifted off, but I haven’t really been in the mood for nighttime serenades in a while. When I was sitting in the living room last night, waiting for the boys to fall asleep so that I could start my nighttime routine, I began to sing that song. I didn’t know if they could hear me over their sound machine and squabbling, and I didn’t know if I wanted them to. Still, the wooden vaulted ceilings were asking for it, and I sang more freely with each verse and chorus: “I sing because I’m happy. I sing because I’m free.” When I finished the last chorus, the upstairs bedroom filled with the hoots and applause of my children, the praise I cherish most.
Of course, I still need to chat through all of this with my therapist, but I think my inner teen and I are getting somewhere.
What did you do as a teen that you want to do more of now? How can you or did you get started?
Stay tuned for the fall issue, September 22.