Hydra
There’s a leak in our little cabin roof. It’s been there since we first installed the wood stove, a steady drip, drip, drip that smells like creosote and roof gunk, coming from the part of the chimney where the boot meets metal. We’ve tried several times to patch it up, using everything the Internet has told us to. But no matter what we do, the drip keeps spreading, kind of like a Hydra, two drips for every one we try to fix. Nat fashioned a little canal out of aluminum foil, to channel all the drops directly into one bucket, and to keep them from damaging the ceiling wood. But every time it rains, or snows, we smell it, and we hear it, and we know that soon, we’re gonna have to deal with it for real.
A couple of weeks ago, my friend and I played a concert of unaccompanied music. It went about as well as it could have gone. Back in November, when the reality of my mother’s death threatened to choke me, when echoes of the trauma she caused clutched at my chest, I didn’t think I had it in me to do anything at all, let alone devote time each day to learning music on an instrument she’d insisted I play. I certainly didn’t think I had it in me to do this in front of other people, at a set time and place, forcing my body to do things my mind felt incapable of training it to do. It’s in my nature, though, to do the things I say I’m going to, so I pushed forward, and I practiced, and when the concert was over, people said wonderful things, affirmations that filled me with warmth, and pride, and relief.
But there’s a leak in my roof.
When I was a kid, I performed all the time. At first, it was theater. Then orchestra. For a while, I did both. And whether I was dressed as a little animal, barking my lines and crawling around on all fours, or playing the Theme from Rocky at the mall, my mother was in the audience, always ready to give a standing ovation, always shouting “Bravo!” over everyone else’s applause. No matter how stupid the play was. No matter how infantile the music was. She was always there, always proud, always ready to tell me how beautifully I performed over and over and over again.
And at night, after the inevitable celebratory dinner, we’d go to sleep and I’d take my place at the foot of my parents’ bed, the vinegar smell of my father’s feet perpetually reminding me of my place in the family hierarchy. Shine in public. Serve at home.
It’s a running joke between Nataly and me. Whenever I mess things up, mundane things that a 40 year old person should know how to do, I look at her with big, sorrowful eyes and say, “I never had a bed.” It’s mostly true. Out of the seventeen places we lived, I had a bed to myself maybe four times, and I had these Garfield sheets that I absolutely loved. But for most of my childhood, my things were stuffed into a storage unit somewhere, waiting for me in limbo, my brothers staking claim to their own rooms while my parents put their hands up like they’d tried.
And when my mother became scared of her own dark thoughts, when her depression threatened to choke her, it was my job to sleep at her feet, to make sure she didn’t do anything to harm herself.
I have a complicated relationship to independence and affirmation.
When I got my acceptance letter from Bennington College, my mother didn’t speak to me for two weeks. I was in the El Paso Symphony at the time. We were playing Prokofiev Violin Concerto No. 2, and I remember how gutted I felt while we rehearsed the second movement, how I took solace in this one particular section of the second violin part while I contemplated my future, and whether I even deserved one. I remember how cold my mother was after the concert. How there were no bravos. No celebratory dinners.
I’m pretty sure that’s when the leak started.
It’s fitting that my first performance since my mother’s death was called “Untethered.” For all these years I’ve been estranged from her, the tether that tied me to her, that lonely, aching hole where my umbilical cord used to be, has leaked self confidence from my body with a steady drip, drip, drip, all affirmation creating more leaks, turning it into a Hydra, making me wonder how I could possibly deserve even a little warmth without paying the price of subservience. How anyone could ever match the warmth of my mother’s enthusiasm after seeing me perform, however complicated it was.
It’s equally fitting that the premise of the concert was unaccompanied.
Because something happened to me afterwards. I suddenly noticed the hole. I suddenly realized that all my perceptions of warmth and affirmation had been built around it, and that no matter what I got from other people, it was all going to leak out of my body unless I did something about it. That I alone have the power to fashion myself a little canal out of aluminum foil, to channel those drips into one bucket, my bucket, at least until I gather the tools to repair the whole roof.
Even with a leak, this little place is home. And I get to decide what part of the bed I sleep on.