Words, A Cello, A Frayed Bow, A Frayed Heart

Since February, I have been touring with my book, Motherhood Exaggerated, reading to friends and strangers about being a mother during my daughter’s treatment for cancer. I’ve read about the day her jaw cracked, her first MRI, her chemo, her hair loss (actually a funny scene), her surgery, her post-traumatic stress. I’ve recounted my history of anxiety, the death of my mother, the middle of the night isolation when my only company was Nadia’ pain. At each reading there is always someone who tells me I am so brave to tell this story out loud. But the book, which I hold at chest height, is my shield. It is telling the story. I am reading, not reliving. Last month, my barrier fell.

I have written often about my relationship with music. It is what I studied in college and the field in which I had my first job. Musical themes and allusions appear throughout Motherhood Exaggerated, and in this month’s Opera News I have an essay on music in a time of crisis. http://www.operanews.com/operanews/te.... In both, I share the story of a moment of transformation that occurred for me during a college performance of Bach’s St. Matthew Passion. I was playing first flute during a duet with the alto soloist. The setting was a gothic cathedral whose gloominess had settled over me like a shroud. The vocalist was my voice teacher who had no fondness for me nor I for her. Yet the music unveiled my heart. By the end of the duet, I had become the music and, in becoming the music, had no defense against anything that might harm me. Music leaves me vulnerable.

Last month at The Oracle Club in Long Island City (www.theoracleclub.com), I paired with Concert Artists Guild Winner, cellist Sebastian Baverstam http://concertartists.org/baverstam_b.... The concept was to design a program of selected sections of my book with music that punctuated and elaborated on the meaning of the words. When I received Sebastian’s repertoire list, it was obvious what we should do.

The Kodály Sonata for Solo Cello, Op. 8, is the musical representation of what happens when trauma strikes. It keeps you off balance, its phrasings and rhythms throb, it is percussive and it sighs. The musician must dig deeply into the cello as if pulling the music out of the instrument rather than imposing the notes upon it. Even the bottom two strings are tuned differently, a symbol for me of the altered states I would be reading about. Having been knocked around by the sonata’s first movement, I wasn’t sure if I could rise, never mind read, as the past pasted itself onto the present.

I began by reading about the anxiety disorders I suffered in college, which caused physical distortions of my reality: The shower was the worst. When I closed my eyes to rinse my hair, my little stall became a flight simulator mimicking a ride through a thunderstorm. It rocked and pitched. I couldn’t tell up from down. So I sat down, pressed my buttocks and the backs of my legs against the cool floor tiles. I wedged my shoulders into the corner. I kept my hand on the wall. In this way I remained oriented.

From here, I re-entered the warped world I was first sucked into the day Nadia was diagnosed with cancer: As I walk Nadia into the room for the MRI …, see the cylinder, feel the claustrophobia, anticipate the noise of the machine, realize the likely news this test will deliver, I feel those long-dormant anxieties limping alongside me like a phantom limb.

As Sebastian began the sonata’s second movement, with its walking cadences, my phantom limb felt more real than ghostly. It came with me all the way to the end of the chapter, which I began at the movement’s completion, to the moment I lay in bed pretending I was in an MRI and had to confront the fear that I would be unable to care for Nadia since I had never experienced what she would be going through.

And then Sebastian launched into the final movement. I closed my eyes to remove any distraction that might interfere with the work of my ears. But I couldn’t ignore Sebastian’s inhales, shifts, up bows and down bows, the arch and dance of his fingers. The music was causing a physical representation of what I wanted my words to project. In the final movement, which begins with brio and moves into a whirl of sound, I had to watch. What ultimately absorbed my attention was the bow. To draw the music out, it had to sacrifice a piece of itself as hair after hair snapped with the effort. It was literally pulling its hair out.

During the applause I took the frayed bow from Sebastian and held it up to the audience. I wanted everyone to see in the bow a representation of Sebastian’s brilliance. I hadn’t yet recognized the true reason behind my fascination with that stick and its threads. Twelve years earlier, I was that bow, drawing and scraping myself across the strings of my daughter’s illness.

What will happen the next time I read these same words without Sebastian, or when he plays those notes without the words? I can only believe that we have changed the experience of performing our art in a permanent way.

You can hear Sebastian by going to http://soundcloud.com/sebastian-baver.... And I invite you to check out my website, www.motherhoodexaggerated.com.