Attitude is everything- and I try to have a good one. Remain open, manage my expectations. Reframe in the positive.
So there is this-
I love choral music, and I used to love to sing, and I haven’t really had that in my life since Trinidad; I have missed that deeply. But the thing I really loved about music I think, was making it with my friends. They were my tribe. And my time with them was so significant that I can still sing the Vivaldi Gloria from end to end, all these years later. I hum the Fauré Requiem in the car. I belt the Messiah in the shower. I know the words to the Austrian National Anthem. The first two verses anyway. I loved doing the opera Carmen and I can sing all the parts.
So my baby went to university and I though I could fill my chasm of a void with singing.
First off, my voice is rusty. And my sight reading is worse. Furthermore, Monday night rehearsals after the typically chaotic Mondays of my day job, followed by my second job, and the time spent with my homebound student, leave me drained at 7PM and not in the mood for anything, least of all singing music that I don’t naturally like (but I’m trying to like.)
Still, I kept showing up. I know what I need is practice and commitment. I’m no quitter. And also it is the fond wish of my youngest child that I persevere.
So I am persevering.
Tonight was my first concert with the new choir and it was went alright.
Our performance uniform is a black turtleneck, black pants, and black shoes with black stockings. And silver earrings.
The black ensemble seemed the antithesis of festive, so my silver earrings were huge and sparkling with rhinestones. And it was a performance, so as per my Michael Steele training, I wore make up.
Lots of make up.
Foundation and concealer and bronzer and highlighter and eyes and cheekbone sculpting and lip color.
Basically all of Sephora.
When I strode into the church hall, it was like Jezebel walking into the temple.
The ladies were there in their black orthopedic shoes and their freshly scrubbed faces and their tiny silver earrings and their close cropped grey hair. A couple of them definitely cast a withering gaze upon my ensemble, and if they were women who used such words, I know they would have been thinking “what the hell?” But it was probably something more like “what in tar nation?”
It was the equivalent of a screeching toucan descending into the middle of a flock of turtle doves.
I was going to leave right after the concert but talked myself into staying for a bit. So I was served a massive plate of unfamiliar food, because God forbid one should refuse anything – and it was all mostly delicious in a Cracker Barrel kind of way. I can’t even begin to calculate the carbs. Like a million grams.
This was their church Christmas dinner and the ladies were being so gracious. So I sat and I ate and I tried to join in the polite conversation, but mostly I listened because I didn’t have much to contribute. It was generally the ladies’ health problems (most of the ladies are very elderly) and the goings-on of people I don’t know. I tried to arrange my features into what I hoped was a pleasant expression while I confronted a mound of chicken and noodles that was served on another mound of mashed potatoes (I think this is how it’s eaten- everyone was served them that way) while trying not to make my table manners look too foreign and weird, but I was unsuccessful as I noticed the sidelong glances at my gentle wielding of my knife and fork in tandem.
I tried not to look … pretentious. But it’s just how I was taught to use utensils. Everyone on my island uses a knife and fork the same exact way. A leftover artifact of British colonialism.
Anyway, trying not to look like the bizarre foreigner got too exhausting, and after what I thought was a respectable amount of time, having conquered most of the noodles, and all of the pie, but none of the green dessert concoction I could not identify, I rose to depart. I had made it through the evening keeping my family honor intact, but then I rammed my exposed toes (I was wearing high heeled sandals – I couldn’t find my black pumps) into the wheel of someone’s walker that was positioned behind me and an expletive escaped. I won’t say which one, but any cuss word said in a church meeting room is inappropriate.
And the gathering bristled with the shock.
I drove back home from the depths of rural Hamilton county on unfamiliar, unlit, country roads in the pitch blackness of a late fall night in the American Midwest. And I shed a good few tears.
This empty nesting is not going well.
I was sad because of the realization that not only am I very far from home, I am without a tribe. I had made myself a small one, a small tribe, a tribelette, and all was well once we had each other. But now we mostly hold each other close in the heart and are seldom together.
I was sad because I realized with absolute certainty that if there is something that is going to fill my void, this choir is not it.
Right at this very moment, I am the loneliest person on the planet.
And yes I know how that sounds.
Pathétique.
So I try to reframe.
I am a healthy, lonely person.
I am a blessed, and fortunate, lonely person.
I am a lonely person with employment, with a big messy house, with four lovely sons, with many faithful friends, with a handyman who will paint my dining room blue on Tuesday.
I am a lonely person who needs to focus on gratitude, and to find a way to emerge intact from this unhappy chapter- while I work on becoming who I am going to be, now that I have to try to be something other than mostly just their mother.
I had really hoped that would always be enough.
Raising Cain 