Who Am I? (with thanks to Leonard Bernstein & Peter Pan)

It crept upon me like some unholy stalker.  For months some undefined uneasiness has grabbed me in the solar plexus upon waking. Somewhere between a gnaw and a gasp I ease back into consciousness intuiting that something is askew. It makes its acquaintance in the physical yet, I know that this culprit has no form. Ghost of my past or premonition of my future, it has my attention.

I never expected to enter my 6th decade confronting an identity crisis, but here it is, full blown and menacing. We all adorn titles, social structure demands them of us. "What do you do?" quickly becomes "who you are?" For decades I proudly would display one of three when the question arose. It was a given. I was a mother, a teacher, a pianist. I could produce products and progeny  in proof of my function. Later, when my eldest gifted me with 2 little boys, I proudly added Grandmother to my list of identities.

Sometimes we can't mark, like a Birthday, the exact date when our lives alter. The uneasiness was taking on a life of its own and one day this summer I knew that I was not who I thought I was anymore. I woke up and realized that I, the I that  I always recognized as me, was lost, gone ,vanished like a vapor. Now, yes, there were mitigating circumstances lurking in the ethers. My youngest son is about to be very happily married and his older brother has found a partner who compliments his existence and loves him dearly. Although the biology of mothering never changes, the practical, everyday manifestations of motherhood do change, especially for those of us who birthed boys. It is inevitable that another woman will take our place and most of us take great joy in this. However, I am betting that the alteration of this familial relationship bites harder into the identity of a woman who lived most her life as a single parent. There is no marital relationship to reignite, no one to share with or bounce off.  The restructuring  is a solitary act.

There are isolated moments when imparting knowledge to someone else, in exchange for monetary reward, is still satisfying.  But one does not teach in a vacuum. No child left behind has left many teachers, especially those of us who work in the creative arts, in a delicate state of survival of the fittest. A good teacher has to carve her connections carefully without expecting respect, or recognition as rewards of the trade. Paddling upstream gets quickly old.

It is treacherously dangerous to go where I now tread, confronting my lifelong relationship with the piano.
I once met author Peter Matthieussen at a party in the Hamptons. I didn't know who he was and he struck up a conversation with me, decades his junior. The conversation ambled towards writing and he said " Oh yes, I write. I summarily go into my studio , shut the door and slit a vein."  And thus I, thereafter, had words to describe that tortuously perilous process of using an art form to release the torrent of emotional responses dammed up inside. The piano has been my muse and we have had a stormy marriage. Like a lover she has provided moments of rapture and moments of utter terror.I should have recognized a bad bout of tendinitis in my late twenties as a semaphore, a warning that the beast was bigger than I. I did conquer the physical aliment, thanks to my wonderful teacher Lucy, but the real disease was in my thought process.  The voices that warned of failure and humble beginnings were just too loud.. I was an accompanist, a place that I thought fit.  I did it comparably well, enjoying the challenge of being an invisible support structure.  I am not ready to file for a divorce, severing forever the connection with my muse. But I have stopped fighting with her. I had my own piano rebuilt last year. She is not the same as she was, but neither am I. WE still have our days of mutual satisfaction. I play, but I am not a pianist. God, those words hurt so much!

At 63 it remains to be seen what I shall become. Or maybe I am already there.  I'll chose to be mindful and watch.