A Song for My Mother

by Beth Adams

Before I formed you in the womb I knew you,
and before you were born I consecrated you. Jeremiah 2:6-7

My father and his family are musical. Although my mother can play clarinet and a bit of piano, she's always differed to my father and me as the musicians in the family. My father taught me to sing harmony on long car rides to visit my grandparents, but it was my mother who sat next to the piano night after night knitting and encouraging me to keep going for the requisite half-hour. In the austere early years of their marriage, my parents still found money for my piano lessons and a secondhand flute. When it became clear that their daughter loved classical music, despite a house filled with show tunes, Sinatra, and country gospel, they ordered a set of introductory classical recordings, and sat with me through all of Leonard Bernstein's Young People's Concerts.

Those evenings, after supper, my mother washed thousands of dishes while Dad and I played and sang at the piano. Every Thursday night she stayed home while we went to choir practice. On Sunday she came to church not because she wanted to --- she didn't, although I didn't know that then --- but simply because she knew it was important to us that she be there. My music wasn't necessarily my parents' music, but they didn't care about that nor did they try to push me further than I wanted to go. They saw that, for me, music was a source of joy, solace, and community, as well as a way to express my emotions. So they came to every concert, every play, and followed our marching band through the ragged streets and dusty fairgrounds of Central New York nearly every summer weekend. Later, they even made it to some college concerts, driving home in the early hours of the morning. And when my husband and I were starting out, with little discretionary income, they brought a piano to me, all the way to Vermont in the back of a borrowed pick-up truck.

Somehow, though, the busier I became as an adult, the more music became relegated to my past. I wasn't singing in a choir, my old flute stayed locked in its worn brown case, and I dusted the piano more often than I played it. It was during a particularly difficult period in my mid-thirties when my mother said, "Have you thought of doing something with your music again?

A few months later, my parents came for a visit, and attended church. During the recessional, I caught sight of my father, singing away, intent on the hymnal. Then I saw my mother. She had one hand at the hymnal my Father was holding, but she wasn't singing. She was looking straight at me. After the compliments about the service, and the quality of the choir and the organist, my mother quietly observed, "What struck me most was how happy you looked."

Caught off guard, I fished around for something to say, and finally stammered, lamely, "Well, music just... makes me happy."

"Well, sweetheart" she said, smiling at me with that mixture of forgiveness, understanding, and love which is uniquely hers, "it always has."

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