One of my favorite moments in my life took place when Ara was four and we lived in the Tech Center. Our tiny cookie cutter apartment boasted one bedroom with a sloped ceiling, which meant he got a door to close at bedtime, but I had to make my bed from scratch on the pull out couch. The high counter that separated the pocket kitchen from the dining nook held my music rig. The bar was too high for me to sit on a bar stool and still reach the pedals, so they lived on a jungly decrepit cardboard box within foot reach.
In those days leading up to making my first CD, I was dialed in. Nearly every day brought a grain of a song. Truck brakes, overheard conversations, pop music heard from open car windows; everything sounded like music to me. This resulted in truncating many an ‘expotition' to the kiddie park or the swimming pool—when the song came in, nothing but the song could exist. I had to stop everything and write it down. An additional hurdle was that I was not yet adept at sketching out the bones of a song for later fattening, which meant that there were no ten minute delays, only two to three hour ones.
How often have I thanked ___________ (insert name of your favorite deity here, I’m going choose The Flying Spaghetti Monster) for giving me the son I got. He was so patient, so forgiving, so mellow. He always made the best of it, entertaining himself quietly while I worked, and was always happy to go to the park a little later. Now I regret that. I wish I’d been a more typical mom. Did I rob him of some of his childhood joys? I tell myself that if I had a chance to do it over I’d choose differently, but would I? I truly felt as though my only mission in life was to obediently document each song that hailed me from down the river.
And they came all the time, as I said. I loved my muse, but she had a shitty sense of time. The worst (best?) part was the way they came in. A pattern would start thrumming in my brain, first in the background and then more insistently, moving its chant to the front of my awareness, until I suddenly became aware that a song was happening. I’d drop the dish I was washing and start writing. Because truthfully, there was no other option. The song would become so loud, if ignored, that I wouldn’t be able to do anything else until it was properly born and safely corralled. It began to feel like serfdom.
There was one moment: it was the middle of the night. I woke to the familiar feeling of my muse rapping on my forehead, trying to feed me a line. I flipped over and tried to summon sleep, but no luck. There was no escape. It was like trying to ignore the urge to pee. I grumpily crawled out of bed and switched on my gear.
Some sound must have woken Ara, because he came padding down the hall in his PJ’s, black hair clouding around his half mast eyes. He reached his arms up and I hoisted him onto my lap (my low back wouldn’t have even said a word back then). He immediately melted over my left arm, seemingly gaining pounds as he swam back into sleep. With my one free hand and drifty brain I continued to midwife the song.
I can still feel every detail of that scene. It was the perfect snapshot of that time period. And as gorgeous as it was, and as much as I fell in love with every inch of my life in that moment, the next morning I woke up and decided to let it all go in order to be a better mom.
So after that, whenever a song came knocking, if I was free, I’d make space for it. If I was busy with Ara, I ignored the pounding at the door, and miraculously, after a time, it would go away. I didn’t know if it was the right thing, but I felt something had to be done, so I did it. I raised my son, and I tried to be present, and I attempted to stuff my creativity into the background. Eventually songs stopped clamoring at me at inopportune times. I could sleep better. Ara grew up, and a smaller crop of songs grew up around him. I tried to not let music crowd him away from his share of light. When he turned about ten or eleven and didn’t require so much of my bandwidth I thought my muse might come roaring back in full effect, but she didn’t. She never showed up like that again.
I still think about that time and wonder if I want it back. It’s hard to tell if that was my one true way of connecting with the muse, or if it’s just the way I slept with her during that time.
But here’s my slowly rising hope: that in fact I didn’t break that connection at all. That we might all be born with the greedy little fingers of our muses wound tightly into our DNA. Perhaps she comes in with us, sits down with us at our morning cornflakes every single day, and then flickers out when we turn the last page of our story. Maybe she’s part of our blueprint, and can’t ever really be lost.
