Vog

What I write in this post is about my family. Today, I dearly love my parents and siblings. I owe the world to my parents for giving us more than either of them ever received as children. It is important to me that anyone who reads this realizes that we are all--every one of us--broken, sinful people. It is quite true that we pay for the sins of the fathers of the third and fourth generation. This is how I account for what happened to me. I write without malice but not without pain.

As I fell asleep that night after my first solo, I had a mix of feelings: excitement that perhaps I could be a musician like my father, whom I adored. I also felt scared--I didn't know how to be a singer and thought that they knew how to act and be gracious in all situations. I was a naive country girl who didn't like to be around people I didn't know, and I knew that I was decidedly not gracious. But most of all, I was confused by what my father had said to me. It seemed a double bind somehow, to do all that I was supposed to do with my singing. It didn't seem fun anymore, especially when my voice wasn't for me--it was for God. Of course, I was glad that I could do something for God, but there was something wrong with the awful weight of thinking that I couldn't sing just for me. So I lay in bed and wondered about this thing that had come out of nowhere and that had everyone on campus talking.

A few days later, I was walking down the hall of the girl's dormitory and hear the familiar strains of someone playing a recording of the Vivaldi Gloria. I wanted to hear how the singer on the record sang the numbers I had performed on Friday evening. The recording artist had a loud, mature voice that had a full, operatic sound to it. I popped my head around the corner of the door to find three of the choir members listening to a cassette recording. "Who's that?" I asked.

Gales of laughter. "Come on, Barbara. Don't give us that."

I was confused. "No, really. Who is that?"

It was me and they thought I should know that.

I have never been so shocked in my life. Since I'd never heard my voice on a recording, I didn't recognize myself. It was a horrifying and jolting experience all at once. If that was truly me, then I couldn't be a shy, naive teenager. What was worse was that if anyone else knew that I sang like "an old lady" that I'd not have any friends and boys wouldn't like me. After all, the big music rage was David Cassidy singing, "I think I love you." I'd never be able to sing along with that, no matter how hard I'd try, with that operatic voice of a much older woman. My social life seemed doomed: I sounded like Two-Ton-Tillie.

For several weeks I could hardly see the light of day. My entire world had been upset by what had happened. My view of myself had changed so drastically that I couldn't seem to get my balance. This was to me like a curse. I kept thinking about how my life had been before I'd sung. Yes, I'd been very quiet and almost anonymous in school. Writing class had been fun and it was great to hide out in the library, or to simply sing in a choir. But now everyone knew me and I just felt so awkward. There was such hoo-haw about me everywhere I went that I was mortified.

Two weeks after that first performance, a traveling youth orchestra came to the school to give a concert. After sitting through what had been to me, a stunning concert, the conductor asked to hear me sing. She had heard about me through the grapevine, two states away. So I sang the Vivaldi solos for her whilst my parents stood by, eagerly awaiting her pronouncement. I sang the best I could, and got more than a pronouncement. I got an invitation to tour with her orchestra as a soloist that summer for a month in Poland. She was very encouraging and indicated to my parents that she would be looking out for me herself. I left that concert in shock.

My parents were so excited that they could hardly contain themselves. They were full of platitudes and advice about how to conduct myself and what I needed to do in order to prepare for the trip to Poland.

At that point, everything changed in my family. My parents pledged to send me to Poland, which meant that they had to empty their savings of the small amount of money they had in order to send me off for a month. My sister, who was in college at the time, and in need of money, was livid. Why should I, who had never sung a note in her hearing, get that kind of support, when she had performed at school in numerous venues. Why not my brother, who had sung in choir and played several instruments--why had he not gotten that kind of encouragement or support? Why indeed.

It was quite apparent to me, even at that young age, that my parents began to live through me then. If I thought it belonged to God, I was wrong. It belonged to them--theirs to schedule, groom, and to reap the rewards of my accolades. I was merely the medium for them to get strokes and to feel that somehow, their lives were fruitful in the musical world.

Does this sound harsh? Probably. And yet, when gifted children are in the picture, there is often some sort of exploitation that occurs. Particularly when the parents do not have a strong sense of personal agency or identity on their own.

Almost overnight, my parents began to carry around recordings of me singing. They often took them to people's homes to which we were invited, and asked if they would like to hear them. That's like boring people with home movies. Most people don't like operatic sounding vocal music, so I could tell that between my parents' poor manners and the type of music that this was not a good thing. I would skulk back away from everyone, mortified that I was being dragged into something that I would never seek out for myself. It was embarassing to be an object of curiosity like that.

Of course, this had quite an effect on my siblings. Goodness knows what prompted mother to do this, but she told my sister that I suffered from low self-esteem and needed to hear her praise me about my singing a lot. This did not sit well with Dana, who needed to be nurtured herself, not think about what I--the overprivileged younger sister--was getting. She became very cruel in her comments and mockery of my singing. I was the "fat Italian opera singer" whom she parodied with painful frequency.

My brother was pretty good about my singing. He didn't say much about it. But he did tease me about being a fat opera singer. A Wagnerian (that's pronounced, Vahgnerian). Rather than call me a Wagnerian, he called me, "Vog" (Wag). All I was missing was the Valkerie iron bra and horns on my head. What a sickening thought to be compared to an overweight, bellowing, swooning tank of a woman, which my brother caricatured so well.

My father was a classical musician by his training. He was a music teacher from the old school. He had studied at the Westminster Choir College and had very strong ideas about "proper" singing and "proper" church music. When I was asked to sing at church, my mother would not allow me to decline, citing my responsibility to God. My father would then dictate what I was to sing. After all, God did not deserve some haphazard rendition of popular music in church. He should have "the best." So I found myself singing songs like O Divine Redeemer, The Holy City, and Open the Gates of the Temple. I didn't like a one of those songs. I sounded so old singing them that I felt sick having to sing them. But there in the front row would sit my parents, looking expectantly at me. Sitting several rows behind them would be kids my age--who visibly had no interest in what I was singing because it was what old people sang.

"Can't I sing something with a guitar sometime?" What a silly question.

I was absolutely trapped.

The interesting thing is that I loved singing, once I knew the freedom that came with soaring off into the music. I often crept off to the chapel in the girls' dormitory and would sing at the piano through lunch hour--all the classical songs that I was realizing that I could sing flawlessly: Brahms, Mendelsohn, Bach. For that hour every day, I could sing for me and lose myself in the music. It was intoxicating and I couldn't get enough. But then one day when I finished singing something by Purcell, I heard muffled applause on the other side of the wall. I had been found out and my vulnerable freedom was gone. I never sang there again.

Vog. My parents had stopped seeing me and only saw my voice. My siblings resented me. I didn't feel that I fit in with my friends. I was ashamed of how my parents made over me in front of other people. In a word, Barbara, as I had known her, had mostly disappeared.