I stopped making music. I didn’t think of it as a pause. I wasn’t taking a break or promising myself I’d come back someday. As far as I knew, that part of my life was over. I think I needed to believe that.
In my early twenties, I was living in Philadelphia and making music in the city’s neo-soul scene. I wrote songs, recorded, performed. Music wasn’t something I fit into my life. It was the thing I was building my life around. Then I had my oldest son.
When I realized I would be raising him as a single mother, I moved back to Missouri to be near my family. Suddenly, he was the most important thing in my world. Putting music aside didn’t even feel like a decision.
I had terrible separation anxiety. I couldn’t bring myself to leave him with a sitter. I needed to figure out how to work and still be with him, so that’s what I did.
I can still picture us in front of a tiny laptop. I’d split the screen in half, put cartoons on his side, and work on mine. On half a screen, I painstakingly built an Etsy shop and a photography business. I edited photographs while he watched cartoons inches away from me. I didn’t stop being creative. I redirected it.
And then life did what life does. It filled in around us. My fiancé, Glenn, and I had a daughter, and later, twin boys. There were school days, sick days, orders to fill and dinners to make. Fifteen years sounds enormous when you say it all at once. Living it happens one Tuesday at a time.
I missed music, of course. But there are things you can miss so much that sometimes it’s easier not to look directly at them. That’s what music became for me. I muted it, except for one night a year.
Every year, the Grammy Awards were probably the most ridiculously exciting night of the year for me. My kids and Glenn knew. That was Mom’s night. Other people had their sports. The Grammys were mine.
For a few hours, I let myself completely back in. Then the show ended, and I would politely pack that part of myself away again for another year. Looking back, that probably should have told me something.
Eventually, my youngest children, my twins, started kindergarten. I cried for the first three days. And then the house got quiet.
Not long after that, I was moving things around when I came across my old Roland VS-1880 recorder. There were old recordings still sitting inside it. A day or two earlier, I had learned that my first manager, Chris Lyons, had passed away.
Chris had believed in me. Really believed in me. When you’re young and trying to make music for a living, sometimes somebody else’s belief becomes part of your own. He had made me believe in myself.
So there I was, with my youngest children suddenly in school, my first manager suddenly gone, and this old machine full of songs sitting in front of me. I pressed play. I wasn’t planning a comeback. I just wanted to hear what those songs sounded like to me now.
And the strangest thing happened. I liked them. Not nostalgically. Not because I was being kind to my younger self. I thought, Man, I could really write and create songs.
Then came the second thought: What the hell was I doing?
Something snapped into place. For 15 years, I’d convinced myself music belonged to another life. I’d almost forgotten I had actually been good at it.
I announced to my family that I was making music again. I was getting Ableton and learning how to record myself. They didn’t entirely believe me. To my children, my old music life was almost mythology. Philadelphia. Studios. Shows. It belonged to a version of their mother they’d never met. Now Mom was buying recording software.
The first song I made when I came back was a Christmas song. I had my kids sing on it. I didn’t think much about the significance of that at the time. I was mostly trying to remember how to make a record while learning a completely new way to do it.
But looking back, there’s something fitting about it. I’d once thought motherhood and music belonged to two different versions of my life. The first thing I made when I came back had my children right there in the middle of it.
I’ve worked on music nearly every day since, mostly while the kids are at school. In my 40s, I’m somehow returning to something I’ve done most of my life and beginning all over again. Music can still consume me. Hours disappear. Sometimes I have to remind myself that reclaiming one part of me doesn’t mean neglecting all the others.
I don’t even have a studio door to close. My studio is a tucked-away space in the middle of our busy house. I hung a moving blanket like a curtain for a little sound privacy. Maybe that’s fitting too. Music isn’t separate from my life anymore. It’s right there in the middle of it. I’m still learning how to let both versions of me exist at the same time.
Back then, the choice seemed binary. There was the life where I pursued music and the life where I raised my son the way I needed to raise him. When it came time to choose, there really wasn’t a choice. He won. He would win again.
I don’t regret those years. I don’t think of them as time I lost. The life I built wasn’t what happened instead of my life. It was my life. A good one. But I can finally admit that I missed this part of myself terribly.
I’m not the young woman who left Philadelphia, and I don’t want to be. She hadn’t raised my children yet. She hadn’t built anything on half of a laptop screen. She hadn’t lived the years I’m writing about now. I couldn’t make her music again if I tried. I can only make mine.
Every February, I used to give myself one night to remember that music was still in there somewhere. I’d watch the Grammys, feel completely alive for a few hours, and then politely put it all back where it belonged.
I don’t do that anymore. This time, I’m not packing it away.
