Orange Paint and Concrete Barriers

I grew up the daughter of musicians. Sounds sexy, doesn’t it? It’s not. Unless you’re the daughter of George Harrison, it means something very different: you grow up poor, I mean really poor. 

How do you unpack a past that taught you what you did not want to be? 

There were moments of beauty. My mother singing while she made noodles for dinner, her hands working dough and flour while a voice that was made to exist on a stage filled our small, overcrowded house. Let me clarify something: my mother rarely sang in our house. After all, this was her job, and she saved that energy for times when only strangers listened. Yet, once in a while, she would settle back into the place where she was meant to be and give in to the natural lower tones and vibrato that kept casino showroom seats filled. For those moments, our house would fall silent, all of us listening as if we’d forgotten she belonged to us. 

I sometimes wonder if my mother suffered in her silence. I remember her exhaustion as she transitioned from the stage to the cycle of breakfasts, scraped knees, and tangled curly hair - all on about four hours of sleep.  Did we, unintentionally, absorb the space where her independent identity used to breathe?  

Those moments when my mother would sing and our house would listen still whisper across my heart. It was reverence. For a moment, a house filled with berry - stained lips and dirty fingernails would fall silent, and we would be swept away. 

I was twelve the year I decided I would not grow up to be my parents. They lived in constant fear. After all, an edge is still an edge, whether you walk it with a guitar strapped to your shoulder or your hands deep in flour in hopes of putting something on the table. All it would take was one slip for the very minimal life you gripped tightly in your hand to be lost: a flat tire, a cold winter, or a disease that took your mind, away from the exhaustion of survival and into a place where the edges were not so sharp. 

My mother was an alcoholic. When I was twelve, the platform Candies shoes that she wore -  whether walking around the house with a cigarette in one hand and a cocktail in the other, or climbing the darkened stairs to a sparkling stage - slipped.  Her disease simply took her from us. Took her from me. 

My mother drove a Camaro - a bright orange Camaro with black leather seats. There she was: windows down, her Candies heel pressing down on the accelerator, wind whistling through the car as we rocketed down the highway. She would laugh as she tossed her cigarette out the window, and for one beautiful moment, one beautiful, aching moment, my mother was free.  This was not a car for children, packed together, hanging on with goofy smiles and wild hair. But, damn it, it was ours. 

Until my mother hit the concrete barrier on the freeway, leaving a swatch of orange paint shockingly bright against the grey. If the barrier had not been there, then it would have been a guardrail and then a drop to the freeway below. 

I often wish I had been younger and not the twelve-year-old middle child of an alcoholic parent. I would have been scared but, to the young, these moments get washed away and replaced. The water was always shallow when you’re five. When you’re twelve, you understand how far down it goes - and you realize that the person you’re counting on to save you might be drowning too. 

So, I chose. 

Not reverence, not sparkling stages or the beautiful freedom of becoming someone else for a while. I chose the far less glamorous work of becoming myself. 

Perhaps this is why I wrote Rayale, my queen, the way I did. My mother found freedom in those fleeting moments when she could step outside the life that needed her. Ray chooses differently. She does not choose freedom from her family. She fights for the freedom to remain herself within it.