By Emily Poole
People often ask me what it was like to have twin babies, and my usual answer is that I don’t remember. The truth is there’s a lot from those years that I have probably forgotten as a subconscious means of self-preservation. It didn’t help matters when my husband Craig and I threw two more into the mix in rapid succession: for a brief but frantic time, we had a newborn, a three-year-old, and two four-year-olds. After it had taken seven years, tens-of-thousands of dollars, and several other people in the room at the moment of conception to bring the twins into the world, the next two children felt like bonuses, a sort of BOGO with a big hidden catch.
When my twins were maybe three years old—they were still napping, this I remember, because that’s when I would practice—I started auditioning for symphonies in the area. Craig would grab the babies from my arms—by this point, the third one had come along, a cool twenty months after his brothers—and practically push me out the door, recognizing even before I did that I’d started to lose myself a little. I’d been out of the professional loop for many years and had not yet reintroduced myself to the local musical network, but to my surprise, I was immediately hired and started getting on the roster for three different regional orchestras. This musical outlet filled my need to participate in something that felt bigger than the walls of my house, to talk to creatures who weren’t simultaneously wiping peanut butter across my shoulder or barfing down the back of my shirt, to make beautiful music and remember that I had been put here to do something besides conceive, incubate, feed, clothe, comfort, love, and spend money on my offspring. I loved playing, but more importantly, I needed it, and soon, I realized that I could do this—I could foster my art without feeling like I was neglecting my family. I could maybe even cobble together a music career that resembled what I had longed for in my youth—what I had been sure was my destiny, what I knew I had the potential to achieve.
Which is why I said yes when I should have said no.
It was an email message, innocent enough in its ask but teeming with subtext. “I’m working on the Christmas program for church,” it read. “I’d love to have you play a reduction of ‘For Unto Us a Child Is Born’ from The Messiah. It’s for violin and piano, and I’m going to have my daughter work on the piano accompaniment, but she won’t be in town until the 23rd. Can we rehearse then?”
This, readers, was the beginning of disaster. Can you see the pitfalls? Can you predict my undoing? In retropect, I see the red flags waving in the wind:
- “reduction of ‘For Unto Us a Child Is Born’”—How would two instruments, one of which can, admittedly, make different sounds with each hand, cover all the parts usually played by a full Baroque orchestra plus basso continuo and four-part choir?
- “for violin and piano”—While I would have played violin under duress, I didn’t then own one. To play this on my viola, I would either have to write out a transcription in my own clef and a more reasonable register, or I’d have to transpose from treble clef to alto and drop it an octave on the fly.
- “I’m going to have my daughter work on the piano accompaniment”—It must have been too much—too hard—to learn on top of the other things the music director was already doing to prepare the Christmas program.
- “she won’t be in town until the 23rd”—Exactly how I wanted to spend my birthday, for sure. At least she didn’t ask for Christmas Eve or Christmas morning before the church service.
- This was the year my kids were six, six, five, and two.
“Sure,” I said. “We can rehearse on the 23rd. Get me the music as soon as you can so I can figure out what to do about the clef.” December 18, friends, is when I got the music. I practiced as much as I could with four children crawling all over me. I also wrapped presents and made cookies for Santa and folded six million small articles of clothing and went to gatherings and playdates and sang tiny people to sleep after feeding and bathing them. The piece was hard, mostly because so much of it was up in the stratosphere and I had to transpose it down, but with practice, I became more comfortable with my part. And, really, it felt good to be working toward a performance—and to have had someone recognize that I was capable of contributing to the service in a way other than, I don’t know, quickly silencing toddler outbursts or refereeing whose matchbox car was whose. I had a talent, and, by God, I was going to use it.
When December 23 rolled around, my accompanist arrived at the house to rehearse, to my dismay, utterly unprepared. Sightreading unprepared. I don’t even know how I got here unprepared. We muddled through, and I made overtures about how maybe we could just leave the piece off the program, but the music director would not hear of it. It’ll be fine, she said. And the bulletins are already printed. I, in my naiveté, conceded. I loved Christmas. I loved Jesus. I loved Handel. How bad could it be? I spent Christmas Eve, after we’d put the kids to bed and moved presents under the tree and stuffed stockings, practicing in the basement while Craig repaired our broken washing machine. I could play the piece. It would be fine.
Reader, it was decidedly not fine. I wish I could blame all of what came next on the accompanist, but that wouldn’t be fair, though she did mess up first. I could not follow, which got me flustered, and then once I’d found my footing, she dropped out altogether just as I lost my place in the high part I was transposing down. By some divine intervention, a true Christmas miracle, we arrived at the end of the piece together and I sat down, defeated. I couldn’t even look Craig in the eye where he sat in the congregation, kids mounded around him in solidarity. As soon as the service ended, I packed up my viola, ducked out the side entrance, and skirted around the back of the building so I wouldn’t have to acknowledge any sympathy compliments. I retreated to the minivan and cried.
Craig told me it was far better than I perceived it to be—not perfect, by any stretch, but not terrible. But the flaws of the performance were amplified in my mind, taking on epic proportions. I cried about it for days. I’d started playing viola in fifth grade, choosing it because the teacher demonstrating instruments at the interest meeting used it to play the theme to Star Wars. I heard those low golden-brown tones, and I was in. When I learned that the viola wasn’t commonly a solo instrument, that it sat in the center of the orchestra and held up the internal scaffolding in many symphonic works, I was even more on board. Anonymity in the orchestra was my jam—in the music, of the music, contributing to the whole, essential, but under the radar. I loved hiding in the center of the orchestra outside of the spotlight, but I also craved the recognition that came from solo performance. And I was great at both ensemble and solo music. I played in professional symphonies my senior year in high school. I sat first chair at all-state orchestra—twice. My string quartet played at the inauguration of the governor. I earned a full scholarship to college on the strength of my playing. And here I was, thirty-five years old, and I couldn’t put together a Christmas carol for a Sunday service.
Even I was surprised by the existential impact of what should have been an inconsequential incident. But as I wrote to a friend, that bad performance made it real, and the sense of loss was acutely painful. “I haven’t thought about my music dreams for a long time,” I wrote, “but after this, I’ve officially put them to bed. I feel like I’m at the funeral of a really good friend and I wish I’d been better about keeping in touch.”
My sadness at the loss was sharp and all-encompassing—and I felt betrayed. I’d been led to believe that motherhood would be the best possible choice I could make, that its challenges would satisfy my curiosity, my creativity, my need for intellectual stimulation, but instead, my world was smaller than it had ever been, my options were narrowing, and the parts of my brain I loved the most seemed to be withering on the vine. I had limited myself right into a little, tiny corner where I would never play in the New York Philharmonic or get a PhD in musicology or go to Eastern Europe collecting Slovak folk songs, searching for their analogs in Dvorak’s Slavonic Dances and symphonies. None of the potential I’d had in my former life mattered anymore because I’d given it all up, it seemed, when I’d chosen motherhood over education. “I don’t know how to do this,” I lamented to my friend, “to not be good at things anymore.”
And what could I have done differently? I had those babies, and I loved them—fiercely. I did not wish I hadn’t had them. But I did wish that I had loved myself enough—soon enough—to prioritize my own creativity and intellectual development instead of setting myself up for atrophy. Would I change things if I could? Maybe. Those seven years of infertility—when I was sure that motherhood was just around the corner—haunt me still. Instead of going to grad school, I spent my early twenties working a day job and teaching piano lessons as a side hustle, maxing out Craig’s student loan money so we could pay for both living expenses and fertility treatments.
I cannot dwell on the what-ifs. I’m too happy in my life now to undermine it by questioning the choices that landed me here, especially since I can’t change them. That doesn’t keep me hoping the pain of considering my squandered potential will diminish with time, but it’s an open wound, tender around the edges. I could’ve been someone. I could’ve done bigger things. The music is not gone, but those dreams and possibilities have been put to bed. I’ve found new ways to express my creativity, new talents I didn’t even know I had back then. While not a substitute for a career, the experience of motherhood has added richness and depth to my life that I’m not sure I could have gained in any other way, expanding my capacity for love, tolerance, and compassion. I still play in those three symphonies, joyfully maintaining my skills so I can keep up with the rest of the viola section from my preferred seat near the back of the section, right in front of the timpani. But late at night, in the quiet of a sleeping house, I imagine myself, another version, another universe, living out the other iterations of my life. I could’ve been me. I am me. Still myself in this small silent world.
