Welcome to Menopausal Mommy

I started writing “Menopausal Mommy” in 2017 when I was pregnant and 49 and felt very isolated. Out of that blog, came a conversation that expanded from my own experience with being a first-time mother at 50, to my own life as an artist and my own faith journey as an ex-Catholic recovering alcoholic singer/songwriter/poet and now divorced woman in my late 50s. I write in the space where it all intersects – art, performance, motherhood, feminism, ex-New Yorker now Nashvillian, 13 years sober ex party girl who used to care too much about the fame game and now just loves to chase down a great song or poem all while navigating being single at 58, alone but not lonely, in love with the brokenness of the world.

I have no idea what prompted me, but I filmed it. You see him counting the beat and then he starts and I start in with him, making shapes (not even chords) with my left hand, following him and at first it’s a muddy mess, but he keeps going and I’m watching his face from the phone video and realize he’s really listening, and then I see him making choices. At one point, I think he’s ended the ‘piece,’ but he’s just sustaining a single note, and very legato, he continues a melody. I take my hands off the piano and listen and watch. It was beautiful. Really magical. Had shades of Faure and Debussey, he was painting a picture with these random notes he chose. It could have all been just the luck of spontaneity, but I watched his face and there was something working there, and I held my breath. I was watching the gears of creativity open up in my son. The melody landed, not on a solid tonic chord, but on the ‘4,’ the ‘subdominant,’ which is a tone that bends and leans to wanting something more, needing to land on the 1 or the 5, and he left it there, gasping for air, longing for landing, and I was stunned. He looked up and was done.

We talked about it, was that fun? I asked. He said, ‘can we do it again?’ He said, “I like my song.” I said, “then you should name it.” He named it “Nightmares and Dreams” and asked to see the video a few more times, pointing out where the ‘weird’ notes were – “that’s where it’s a nightmare” – and then when the melody gest high and lyrical, he said, “that’s the dream.”

I was probably around 14 or 15, a lonely middle school girl, a kind of misfit in my school. The only place I felt comfortable in my skin was playing the piano. I started playing by ear at 3, but started lessons when I was 5. I was a terrible practicer, but a good sight reader and kept it up through high school, always a mediocre player with the promise of a better one in my fingers. But I loved the piano. I would sometimes lay my hands over the keys in the dark at night and do just what Huck did – sound things out – explore. Create. I never showed anyone these little tunes, not even full songs, just melodies, or harmonic phrases. I only wrote in the dark. I never put melodies or words to these things. I never wrote them down. I would be 25 before I got a guitar and started writing songs in my NYC studio apartment after a devastating break up with a guy in a band. I would be in my 40’s in Nashville, single, before I went back to the piano and gave myself permission to play by ear again and write on piano.

In Church this morning, the sermon was about coming home to oneself. I love my church. It’s a progressive Episcopalian church in Nashville where the musicians are the real deal and play John Prine and Nanci Griffith along with “Rock of Ages” and Emmylou Harris showed up last week to sing. It’s a church where two of the priests use the ‘she’ pronoun for God. It’s a church devoted to social justice and sustainable farming and it’s a place where I found a spiritual ‘home.’ Not surprisingly, many of my friends from AA go there, too. I found my spiritual home in AA first, then this church. I’d always found God in music. Home in music. God and home, being, to me, the same thing. That feeling of belonging in love. Deep love. My church doesn’t even hide it’s rage at the injustices going on in our country. Preaches Love Heals. And walks the walk. People know me there. They know my son. I sing there once in a while. I stay to get coffee and cinnamon after, to meet more people, to be in community. I take Huck to my AA meetings and put headphones on him and we stay to help clean up and everyone knows Huck and high fives him. A few weeks ago, Huck and I were watching TV and someone must have said something on the show, because Huck said, “Mommy. He said that guy was a drunk. That’s what you are right?” At first, I was really shocked. But I’m committed to telling the truth, so I said, “You know what, you’re right. That’s what I was. I am not that anymore.” And I explained to him the meaning of the word and of course, he overheard it in someone’s share at an AA meeting when I didn’t think he could hear anything under the headphones. But to him, it was just a word. And he is right. I was. And I am not now. I am home in my sobriety.

For so long, I ran in circles trying to belong to someone else, or to someplace else, or something else. I tried to figure out who I was, all the time, I was just being. That’s what that moment of sitting at the piano, just putting a finger on a note, maybe two, then another, then following the sound to something pleasing, or even landing on something awkward and ugly. And repeating it. To make it a choice, not an accident. And then resolving it into something beautiful and whole. The discovery of creating a sound that has never existed before just for the sheer pleasure of the moment. I did that when I was a kid, sad and alone, feeling completely misunderstood and not knowing who to turn to. It was, in those shadowy teenage years, my way of communicating with God, making music. I watched Huck do that the other day. I saw something wake up within him. I know what he was doing. When I did that, there was nobody around, and there would have been nobody to go to. But Huck is born of two writers. I know simply to hold the space, for he is on his own homecoming journey, and he knows where the piano is now, and if he wants to find himself there, picking out melodies on his own, he can. And if he wants me to sit next to him, I will. And if he doesn’t, that’s ok, too. But I feel like I just watched something being born and caught it on video by accident. And that is the kind of hallelujah I believe in.

Amy Speace is an award-winning Americana folk singer and songwriter discovered by Judy Collins. Her songs have been recorded by Ms. Collins and many others and she has won International Song of the Year from the Americana Music Association (UK). Her writing has been published in The New York Times, The Guardian, Working Mother, and Salon.com. She received her MFA from Spalding University and teaches English at Cumberland University. She resides in Nashville, Tennessee, with her son, Huckleberry, and her dog, Dusty Springfield. The Cardinals, coming Sept 1st with Red Hen Press , is her debut poetry collection.