Had I known she would be pacing from her couch to the piano for the duration of my trip to the toy store, I would have said something to reassure her before I left. Our girls were playing upstairs, trading clothes and eye shadow, so I left them and ran to grab a birthday gift for a party later that afternoon. As I returned to the house, the girls were on the lawn choreographing a cartwheel routine, when my friend’s daughter shouted, “My mom wants to see you.”
Something was up, I thought, but I had no idea what. When she turned the corner into the kitchen I was kicking off my shoes in the foyer. Without saying anything, she gestured me to follow her into the next room as if she had a secret to share. I thought she might report some news about her father that she didn’t want her kids to hear. I knew he was ill, recovering from a stroke that abruptly changed his life, but not his playful determination to keep improving. When we arrived in the living room she stopped at the grand piano. “I’m going to sing for you,” she said. Her hands were shaking and she was uncharacteristically matter of fact.
I took that as my cue to shut up and sit down. I offered to lay down and close my eyes so that she might have the privacy she needed to summon the courage to do whatever it was that she was going to do. I was excited, she was anxious.
I’d never heard my friend sing before. Although we’d talked at length about her life before kids, it wasn’t until after she sang for me that I learned what a dedicated professional she had been. She sang Fontine's “I Dreamed a Dream” from Les Miserables -- one of the most heartbreaking and familiar songs of a generation. The maturity she brought to the song was something I'd never heard before, and it felt as though I was hearing it for the first time.
I would say it surprised me, her nervousness. Singing was a talent she was so obviously gifted at and a skill she had perfected over three decades of practice. But I wasn’t surprised at all. My experience of working with artists and being related to a lot of them is that the more that time passes when you are not practicing your craft, the more strength must be summoned to tame the doubt and fear that has had time to root.
Now, instead of rolling into an audition prepared and practiced, she has to sing when an invitation haphazardly arrives and, in her words, “If it’s not perfect, I don’t like to do it.” Well, it seemed that waiting for perfection had met its threshold and she was pushed over to the other side. The side of “do it anyway.”
Sometimes the push comes from the inside, and sometimes from the out. For her, it was a little of both. Her father called since his stroke asking her to record a few songs for him. He has had to remind her to do it, as recently as that very week.
This month her life is undergoing a sea change: she is cutting her work load back to part time from a 15-year career as a more-than-full-time executive. She has made space in her life for her creativity to root in place of the fear, and the creativity is calling.
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