Wildflower

This Mother’s Day, I have a present for my mom. She died in 2012 of Alzheimer’s, so it’s been a while since I’ve been able to give her anything real. Our relationship was a complicated one, and her disease fogged up my lenses even further as I tried to weave a manageable path through my role as both a daughter to my mother and a mother to my daughter. It has only been in recent years that I’ve been able to stand back with a bit of perspective and look back down the mountain on a mother-daughter relationship of great closeness, some rocky times of deep separation, and an adulthood of worry and care as her health declined.

As is the case with many kids who grow up to be professional musicians, my childhood comprised many hours of practice, high expectations of success, and a very symbiotic relationship with the facilitating parent — that is, the one who monitors the practice and enables the lessons, the recitals, the camps, the competitions, and aids in all the planning and dreaming. That parent probably also does a good bit of their own dreaming in the process, and at some point, the dreams of parent and child become intermingled. At some other point after that, those dreams often start feeling a little less like dreams and more like high-stakes investments.

My mom did not have an easy life. She was raised on a Nebraska farm during the Great Depression, and from my earliest childhood memories, I felt no greater joy than when I was making her happy, making her laugh, or trying to deliver that intangible thing that would make everything right in the world. She was so proud of me, and I felt it with every notch I climbed. I felt her pride each time I walked onstage and made sure to snap myself into a trance to give an error-free and impressive performance, only to wake up at the end and have no idea what had just happened, or even where I was on some occasions. She was a piano-teaching guru in my hometown of Norman, Oklahoma, and she had as many as a hundred private students at any one time. She called me her “best advertisement” and meant it as a great compliment, but over time, I began to feel responsible not only for earning her pride, but for maintaining the equilibrium of her business. I had to win every piano competition, nail every performance, and live up to every ounce of my potential. In my mind, our lives literally depended on it.

It was a two-way street, as symbiotic relationships usually are. I was invested in her accomplishments and proud of her booming business. I felt a degree of guilt that she had given up a performing career to be a mother, so it seemed only right that my triumphs were also hers. We were a team, and there was little distinction between us.

I would describe my mom as an energetic dreamer, practical in many ways but wildly impractical in others. Fiercely competitive, she was a lover of all things unique and I always knew she appreciated the fact that I was a different sort of kid – an old soul with an organized mind and a strange ability to project way forward and then imagine looking back on my life. This odd little crystal ball kept me out of a lot of trouble along the way. Her idea to start me on the harp as a second instrument was quite unsurprising. I don’t think she would have let me play the violin or clarinet even if I had begged. Those instruments were way too basic for her. By contrast, I was drawn to ordinary things like most kids who just want to fit in, but I rolled with the unique plan and understood the wisdom of taking the road less traveled. I can still hear her voice saying Where there’s a will, there’s a way. This mantra was her life-long operating principle, and – I must admit – it became mine as well. My mother’s farm girl roots gave her a strong work ethic and solid values, but her escape from her tiny hometown in Nebraska to get a degree in music from The University of Michigan was a brave move in the 1940’s. When she succeeded, it fueled her determination to pursue other goals of an uncommon and slightly risky nature. At the age of 60, she set off on her life adventure, living and working in a half-dozen large American cities over the next 20 years. I must have subliminally embraced her “live dangerously” doctrine when I decided early on that a career as a solo harpist would be my future.

As one might expect, our ferocious closeness couldn’t last, and when I went away to boarding school at Interlochen Arts Academy at 14, I felt like I finally had the freedom to fail if need be – and it was liberating in ways I cannot describe. I screwed up the very first piano recital I played at Interlochen in a catastrophic fashion. I couldn’t even remember the first note of my Brahms Rhapsody. The problem was simple: I could no longer find the portal into my performing trance. It was devastating for a while, but I soon began to play my instruments in an entirely new way. It felt like I was practicing and memorizing music for the first time, almost as if I’d had a stroke and needed to master the basics all over again. I learned to be present, and to understand that making music is an art, not a ladder to climb. This began a time of separation from my mother, and I realize now that she must have felt abandoned. As teens will do, I plowed ahead and I had my own plans. I muscled through another couple decades and made my way in the world, but somewhere along the path, my mother and I stopped trying to know each other. When we were together, we acted out our former roles, laughed at the old jokes, and struggled in the same old ways. It was as if we just couldn’t risk getting to know versions of each other that might be too different, so we kept playing our parts.

The arrival of my daughter in 2002 was a juncture that ushered in a frenetic period that many working moms might describe as a blur of sublime joys, unbelievable sleep-deprivation, and the dawn of perspective on our own mothers’ lives in ways we never could have imagined.

My daughter was around six when my mom was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. As I began to realize what was happening, it was hard to separate my thoughts in the cloudy brew of feelings: the wish for more time, the exhaustion of caring for both a young daughter and a sick mom, the psychological struggle to understand the disease and watch a person you love become someone else, the baggage of an already complicated relationship, and the realization that the good moments will become fewer and fewer until the last one will be the last one.

I remember my last, best conversation with my mom. I was in Santa Fe playing at the Chamber Music Festival there. I called her between rehearsals while I was sitting on a bench in the scenic little town center. She sounded almost normal, but I knew better than to think that was permanent. I told her how much I loved her, and she said that she loved me too, but she said it in a way I won’t forget. I knew she was all there in that moment because after she said “I love you,” she added, “so, so much you can’t possibly know how much.” As both a mother and a daughter, I do know how much. With each passing year, I know even more what she meant that summer day, and I say those same words to my own daughter as often as I can.

I am releasing a new single this Mother’s Day weekend called Wildflower, written for me by the iconic jazz artist Arturo Sandoval, and I dedicate this recording to my mother. The minute I received the piece and played through it, I said to myself out loud, Mom would have loved this. While my mother was primarily a classical pianist, her guilty pleasures were always standards from the American Songbook and romantic hits by composers like Mancini, Bacharach, and Hamlisch. Often at the end of a long teaching day, she would sit down at the piano herself for a few moments and play something from her private collection just to clear her head. At some point in my process of bringing this beautiful new work to life, Wildflower became hers, and I believe it may have come to me with that purpose. Music has the ability to illuminate dark emotional corners like nothing else, and while living with this piece, I found new a perspective on my relationship with my mother that I hadn't previously been able to access. For me, Wildflower offers an uncanny blend of atmospheres that could be the soundtrack of my mother’s journey – poignant, bold, heart-wrenching, fearless, searching, romantic, melancholy, and hopeful, all at once. The closeness to her that I feel in this thread of common experience is not only a bridge to her legacy in me, but an inspiration to continue cultivating that same meaningful connection with my own daughter.

Motherhood is a spiritual undertaking, a leap of faith, and unlike anything else in this world. We finally grow up when we are able to see our own parents as people just like us, with struggles, hopes, failures, joys, and dreams. As important things often do, Wildflower arrived in my life with an unexpected, secret portal; in it there was an opening to perspective, to peace, and to gratitude – gifts that keep me afloat as I bob around in that fluid space between being a daughter and being a mother in these ever-changing times.

-YK