An old love

The relationship started showing signs of trouble during my junior year of college. Little things really, I would call plans off here or there, sometimes blowing something off altogether. Nothing major, but the signs were there and I chose to ignore them.

By the middle of senior year it became clear that I simply wasn’t in this relationship anymore. I was emotionally and even physically just absent. But I kept on, more out of habit than anything else…kind of a “doing it for the kids” sort of attitude. There was no animosity, no anger; but there was also no joy, no passion…no love.

I did my student teaching after graduation. It was a weird way to do things, because you are no longer enveloped in the safe confines of the academic world. You are paying rent and car insurance and have choices and freedom. At the same time you are still a student and not yet in that adult world. That’s when things moved away from the peaceful coexistence that had been so carefully balanced for the last couple of years. It was done. This relationship that had defined such a huge part of me was over. I removed all traces of it from my life…surgically excising that whole part of me.

Recently though, I have found a peace that I didn’t know I could and I find myself nurturing a new relationship with an old love. It’s slow going, kind of a day to day sort of thing. I owe it all to Will…he loves music as much as I remember loving it.

I don’t remember starting to love music. I don’t remember learning to read music, I just remember knowing how. I don’t remember when I first felt like my entire body would explode because the music I was singing/playing/listening to had come perfectly into tune with something inside of me, but I have been lucky to experience it many times over.

When I realized that teaching music wasn’t the right path for me, I didn’t really know where to go with it. It had been an all consuming part of life for so long that I thought if I couldn’t do it all the time, I wouldn’t do it at all. I went from identifying myself as an alto, a music major, a member of a choir a musician to not even listening to music in the car. I stopped going to concerts, stopped singing in the shower, just stopped.

But then there is Will. As a baby when he and I were alone in the house nothing could calm him quite like music. Now he loves it when we play music in the house and he can “dance” along. He loves being sung to every night...and more recently many, many times during the day. And he has started singing along with me in that fantastic two year old way. So for the past two years I have been mending that relationship I had and have been learning how to let music be a part of my life and not my whole life.

Do you know those songs that you have that you could listen to over and over again…barely letting it finish before you hit the back button to start it again? Those songs that somehow come into tune with something inside of you? I have been finding those songs again. Right now some of them for me are:
Fidelity – Regina Spektor
Mr. Brightside – The Killers (this has been on the list for some time now!)
Vindication – Bobby Llama
Overture to Candide – Bernstein
What are some of your songs? Please, please leave me a comment and share them with me – I am loving finding new music again.