When I was nine, I sat in a darkened, moth-ball smelling auditorium with a hundred other kids and listened while music teachers played a sample phrase or two upon each orchestral stringed instrument. The point was to expose us to this type of music, encourage us to haul our parents to Speno Music in Auburn to rent a crackerjack-box, piss-smelling violin, and be able to put fifty or so kids in the cafeteria each day during music period to plow away at “Lightly Row.”
I chose not the violin, or cello, or bass, or anything anyone recognizes as a musical instrument. I chose the viola. Let me be clear: at nine years old, my selection from among all the orchestral instruments was the one that would make people squint at me for the rest of my life and say, “huh?”
[VIOLA JOKE BREAK: What’s the difference between a violin and a viola? A: a viola burns longer.]
My reasoning was fairly straightforward: the violin was screechy, the cello was too big to lug around, and the viola had a nice, warm, companionable sound.
What I didn’t know:
The viola is significantly larger and harder to coax sound from than a violin, once you graduate from rental-sized, which would make it a tough row to hoe for my small hands, inflexible tendons, and tense neck and jaw.
It was the perfect metaphor for the rest of my life and what I would come to learn is basically my temperament, despite a few-decade trial at being or becoming what one might call more of a “soloist”: this instrument was happiest and most useful when snugged between the other orchestra sections, carrying out harmonies, holding down the fort, responding to and supporting others, finding and being the richness in the middle.
[VIOLA JOKE BREAK: What’s the difference between a viola and a coffin? A: With the coffin, the dead person’s on the inside.]
*
Fast forward thirty years, through a few medical apocalypses and the opening seasons of my young twin children’s life, and we come to what one might call a Reminder Moment.
This is to say, that after three years of running myself actually ragged raising my kids, like I can see bits of me falling off on the road as I shuffle, it suddenly became physically impossible for me to care for them. I was in an ER, with my oxygen levels low enough to fast-track a hospital admission even during a pandemic. Was I smug that I had packed all the essentials, which rendered a late-night admission no biggie in terms of toiletries and entertainment? Yes. Could I get up the next morning and resume fire-hose levels of care for my kids? Nope.
Enter Captain Dad.
I should mention that this man, in addition to being the love of my life and an airline pilot, went to that same third-grade gathering in that same auditorium, and
he
chose
tuba.
When I asked him why, twenty years later, he looked at me like I’d just pooped my pants. “It was the biggest one,” he said, like I was profoundly and pitiably dim, and walked off.
So anyway, this Captain Dad is now, suddenly, at home with two three-year-old hobgoblins, their mother down at the hospital relaying updates via text message when she’s not dozing in the ER waiting room recliner chair, which is the first nap she’s taken since the 70s.
And you know what? The man steps up. He’s always been a great dad, helpful, empathetic about the strain of my primary caregiver role, hardworking and generous with his abundant energy. What he has never had occasion to be, up to this point, is Lead Parent. And he quietly, efficiently steps into the role, and gradually the following things mysteriously, astonishingly, miraculously happen:
The children begin to go to bed without a fuss, more or less on time, with good cheer. There is no coercion, no harried checklist, no screaming about the television, no bribing or bargaining. In fact, they play, read books, roughhouse, get sleepy, say they *want* to go to bed, head upstairs, put themselves in their bunkbed slots without fighting about whose is whose, lie quietly gazing at their starlight projector on the ceiling, and are asleep within minutes. It’s absurd.
The children help with a four-day project of building a sandbox. Captain Dad orders cedar, because he doesn’t deal in materials that aren’t the best, and he sets about building a 6’x6’ sandbox frame with the help of two toddlers, who are given screwdrivers, slabs of wood, and active, loaded paintbrushes, among other tools and materials. One of the children begins to narrate this project on repeat as a kind of background monologue for days, with the cadences of a Homeric performer.
The children begin to eat at the dining room table, instead of all over the playroom floor. They show up at dinnertime or thereabouts and clamber their small bodies into the gaping metal folding chairs we STILL HAVE instead of a real dining set, and look happy and excited about whatever’s coming. They predict ingredients, predict it will be “dee-yishuss,” and are right.
The children play in the yard until dusk, talking animatedly with each other, building things out of firewood or combing the lawn with whatever heavy, dangerous garden implements they can find. (This is instead of hitting each other in front of an evening TV show, yelling for more foods we don’t have.)
The children begin to speak in sentences and rhythms that suggest they are humans, not trolls, and perhaps even funny, artistic, capable, imaginative, loving humans to boot.
And the list goes on. Now: I have emphasized the clarity of these shifts from the chaos and strain I perceived in our family pre-ER visit, in order to make sharp their edges. I neither think I am a bad mom nor think my husband waved a magic wand. We both deserve more credit than that, as do the children, who very likely also just happened to be pulling out of an especially difficult phase right around the time Mommer’s body tanked.
But I wish to make something else clear: during the three years leading up to my most recent hospitalization, which were my first three years as a parent, I’d been serving as a soloist mom—the equivalent of the screeching, towering, busy violin concerto excerpt I’d heard in the auditorium when I was nine— the sound that had caused me to write off that instrument and move on down the line, goldilocks style, to find my “just right.” I’d been that sound, for years, straining to hit every note, find all the highs, make everything soar, and folks, remember, I am actually, at heart, a violist.
[VIOLA JOKE BREAK: What do you do with a violist when they die? A: Move ’em back a stand.]
When Captain Dad the Tuba Player stepped in, something wonderful happened. The children may or may not have brushed their teeth or gotten many vegetables for a few weeks, but the center of the orchestra, the heart and soul of the orchestra, got to swell to the fore again. Without the bandwidth for managing every thirty-second note, Mommer was forced to give up the frenzied cadenza entirely, and it turns out the piece everyone was playing all along was looser, more lovely, more surprising, and a better listen than I’d ever imagined.
Is this also just a mom who had her first vacation in three years talking? Yes. But as I return to the homefront with strict orders to keep Captain Dad in role of Lead Parent, while I blob around for about 6-8 hours a day hiding in the guest room so I don’t get wheezy or pained, I find that I’m relieved and delighted to inhabit my native role as harmony instrumentalist.
Watching my family operate, with full trust that the world will not explode if I don’t reorganize the lunch cooler, I feel… actual restfulness and joy. I’m back in the viola section, friends, and the Tuba solo is making my heart very, very, glad.
Just so remarkable. You have taken a bag of old yarn remnants and mixed them in with brand new, spun them into gold, and created the most beautiful sweater a truly lucky family could ever wear. Powerful knitting needles Caroline.💗
Beautiful, incredible resilience. In each one of you. The Captain won our hearts and respect long ago but this last month he has become a legend in his own time.