Chapter 3

My mom used to describe herself as going “either fast-forward or horizontal.” She’d wake up at 5:00 a.m. every day to run for an hour on the treadmill, lift weights, shower, curl her highlighted hair, paint her nails to match her usually ostentatious outfit, eat an English muffin with peanut butter, and drive the 20 minutes it took for her to get to the senior center where she worked as a recreational therapist. If you’re not familiar with this occupation, it involves lots of running about and entertaining people through events like Bingo, movies, the county fair, music recitals, and the like.

I consider my mother to have been a true musical genius. She could pick up any instrument and learn it to an almost expert level in a week. Among the instruments she could play were the piano, mandolin, guitar, accordion, Irish tin whistle, hammer dulcimer, feather dulcimer, the flute, and who knows what else.

My mom's band: "The Road We Travelled" Your browser does not support the audio element.

I hadn’t even received my first haircut when my mom decided that I would be a musician too. She began following the dogma of the Suzuki Method, which entails playing tapes every day of the songs the child will eventually learn. Accordingly, the student masters all of their songs completely by ear, that is, without looking at sheet music, until the songs are too complicated to do so. The songs on the tapes began to roll when I was one, I reverently received my first violin when I was five, and won my first competition when I was eight wearing a frilly pink shirt and denim overalls at the county fair.

My mom wanted me to be a performer like herself. She’d dress me up in flowery little dresses and itchy tights that I hated and throw me in front of a crowd to play Twinkle Twinkle Little Star and other basic folk songs. If I practiced every day for a month, I’d get a banana split, so I quickly became good enough to play in a bluegrass and Irish band with my mom and a gang of other performers. I spent a lot of Saturday nights in middle and high school standing between a keyboard and guitar while drunken middle-aged revelers threw their dollar bills into a tip jar.

Because of me being her only daughter and the inevitable bond one creates by sharing music, my mom was my best friend. So it’s no surprise that when I was summoned out of English class one cold Monday morning 25 days after my sixteenth birthday to be told by my ashen-faced father that she had been killed in a car crash, I didn’t handle it well.

I began focusing on how long and fast I could run, my grief and anxious hollowness always just one stride behind. I calculated every calorie I consumed, even the five from my chewing gum, so I didn’t have to think about the suffocating absence of late-night piano music and early morning feet pounding on the treadmill. People would ask me if I was still playing violin, and I’d say not really, but don't worry I promise i'll keep it up! when I really wanted to say, “My mom just died for fuck’s sake.”

They put me in a hospital where they forced me to eat in increasing amounts and weighed me every morning at 6 a.m. and measured my urine and scolded me when they saw me doing sit-ups in my room. I had therapists with practiced sympathetic looks on their faces and PhDs who asked me leading questions to find the issues they wanted to find. PhDs and they couldn’t figure out that when it came down to it, I was just really fucking sad.