Music Healed My Life and Showed Me How To Dream
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It saved me as a little girl…and years later, it would save me again
When I was a little girl, dreams were few and far between. While I slept, there were plenty of nightmares reflecting the environment in which I lived, but actual dreams about who I could become or what I could be? These were in short supply.
My days were about surviving violent attacks by my older brother and verbal assaults by my mother. The nights…well, I had to survive those, too.
But dreams about my future? They were elusive at best. From my earliest memories, I was just trying to get through each day. There was nothing that encouraged or even suggested the notion that I was allowed to dream. My thoughts, needs and feelings were wrong. I learned to dismiss them. Instead, I adopted my mother’s beliefs about me as the truth.
“You’ll never amount to anything.”
“You’re stupid.”
“You don’t deserve…”
And one in particular that now makes me laugh when I look back on it — every time I dared say I wanted to try something I hadn’t done before:
“You can’t do that!”
I heard that one numerous times throughout my life until she died. For decades, I lived with the fallout of her terrible words. They had sunk so deeply into my soul that even as an adult, when I thought about trying something to improve my life as a high-school dropout and single mum and create a better life for my children, those words bubbled up instantly and put an end to such nonsense.
And if my mother wasn’t actually saying it, I was saying it to myself.
Take some high school upgrading courses and go to university? She said, “You can’t do that!” Become a midwife? I told myself, “You can’t do that!” Bring home a “nice guy” and hope it might get serious? She said, “What would a nice guy like that see in someone like you?” Good marriage, happy life, better myself? Nope. “You can’t do that!”
No dreams. Not for you, young lady.
As soon as I learned to speak, I was silenced. And so were any dreams that dared wander through my mind.
But dreams show up in different ways. Sometimes, we might not even recognise them as such. Turns out my biggest one was going to be about having the freedom to discover who I am. It would mean finding my voice, speaking up, and being who I was always meant to be.
As that silenced little girl who didn’t dare dream, I had a long way to go before I’d get there.
I loved drawing pictures when I was little. I loved colouring, painting, anything about making little-girl art. All I wanted to do was play with colours and make pretty pictures. I didn’t have much by way of art supplies so they were extra special.
Desperate to please my mother, on occasion I would get out my crayons or paints and make something for her. Invariably, she’d stare at it, frowning in disgust, and bark, “What am I supposed to do with this?” Promptly, she’d crumple it up and chuck it in the garbage. After a while, art seemed pointless. I put it out of my head. But my heart remembered.
I adored books, too, as a young child and taught myself to read when I was just 4 years old. Oh, how I loved good stories! My favourite gifts were always books. I was especially fond of my giant chapter books, three of them from the “Oz” series by L. Frank Baum.
My brother damaged or trashed the few toys and dolls I had. If he knew I liked something, he would gleefully destroy it. I was careful not to let on how much I loved my books. I would only read early in the morning before anyone woke up, and with my door firmly closed.
I endured a lot of pain and torment from my brother. But I couldn’t have coped with him destroying my beloved books. They carried me away to other places, other worlds, where I spent endless hours with characters I imagined to be my friends. I delighted in getting lost in those stories; the rest of my life melted away and there was only joy, excitement, adventure, and people with kind families and happy homes.
Around that time, my dad, a professional musician, brought an organ into the house. I’d seen pianos, but never one of these amazing creations with two keyboards and a whole host of buttons and tabs that made different sounds when I pressed the keys. There was also a giant keyboard of pedals on the bottom left side, and one wide flat pedal for the right foot. Weirdest piano ever, I thought. But it made music. And I lo-o-o-oved music.
The organ came with a book that explained how to read music. It showed how the notes on the page corresponded to the keyboard, how to play whole chords with the left hand on the lower keyboard while playing the melody with the right hand on the upper one. It showed how to use the volume pedal with the right foot, and how to play the pedals with the left foot. I had to stand up to use the pedals; at 4 years old, my feet dangled as I sat on the bench.
Hour after hour, day after day, I delighted in sitting at the organ, reading and figuring and learning from that wonderful book for beginners. One note at a time, one chord at a time, page by page, I burned through the book and learned every song.
I got lost in music like I got lost in my books and in art and colours.
And the best part was that my brother could never take it away from me.
It wasn’t long before I got bored with that music book. There weren’t any others forthcoming so by the time I was about 5, I was figuring out how to play by ear. This kept me minimally occupied. I’d have loved music lessons, especially as we’d also got a piano, too. But that didn’t happen until I was 9. I was over the moon! A teacher! More books! More songs!
I didn’t like practicing when anyone was around but I didn’t have much choice. I kept the volume pedal as low as possible. And I detested being forced to play for company. I was especially distressed when someone would comment on how I played with so much feeling. I was aghast!
Note to self: I’m not sure what I’m doing that lets them see this but I must try harder not to do it again!
When no one was home on a rare evening, I played for hours. And I did it with plenty of feeling that no one else had any right to hear.
In 18 months, my teacher had taught me everything she knew and sent me on to her teacher. Two years after that, she’d run out of material for me, too, so she sent me to her teacher, an extremely talented musician who was well-known in Southern Alberta.
She was all business. She appreciated my talent and immediately pushed this shy, sensitive girl into the public arena. I was horrified! I wanted no part of it but I couldn’t speak up. I had no voice.
So at 13, I was playing at places like the Planetarium, on radio, TV, the Calgary Stampede — and the nerve-wracking Kiwanis Festival (now called the Calgary Performing Arts Festival) with huge audiences and many hundreds of entries over several days. A complete and utter nightmare.
But there I was every year, plowing through complex, lengthy pieces by memory, my fingers racing up and down the keyboards for the judges while I fought the desire to be sick.
I left home at 16, unable to cope with the abuse and suffocating atmosphere one minute longer. I was engaged to a 21-year-old young man, and daring to dream about creating the happy home and family I’d never known. We spent hours talking about getting married, believing our dream of “happily ever after” would last forever.
We did marry when I was 17. But with youth, inexperience, and a lot of baggage behind us, just after my 19th birthday I was the divorced mum of a 10-month-old daughter. It was the beginning of a long and turbulent journey as I scrambled to create a better life. But first, it got a lot worse.
My saving grace — or at least, something that provided some stability and a sense of “family” — was being a church organist and choir director throughout most of my 20s. I could never call myself a Christian, though; it just wasn’t me. Eventually, my spiritual quest continued elsewhere.
Meanwhile, with a foundation of toxic beliefs at my core, my attempts at creating that dream of “happily ever after” were futile. Time after time, I got into relationships — and marriages — that weren’t good for me. I wanted to back out of five of my six weddings but because of my upbringing I didn’t believe I had a right to my feelings. Nor did I have the right to speak up.
So I kept going through with weddings I didn’t want, believing that somehow I would make the marriages work. But they were all suffocating in various ways, even the only one I truly wanted — the one I was certain I’d finally got right. In every marriage, there was some version of the same issues. I couldn’t be myself. My feelings were wrong. I was stifled, subordinate, and discounted.
The sixth was a short and terrible marriage that should never have happened but emotional blackmail, threats and gaslighting are powerful tools to force a wedding even when you keep telling that person, “No, something doesn’t feel right.” By the time that horrific marriage mercifully ended, I’d seen my share of shattered dreams, dreams that were misguided at best and self-sabotaging at their worst. After that divorce, I was done. Done with marriage and done with dreams.
I’d spent my life chasing that elusive “happily ever after”, thinking that if I could just make that dream come true, I would be blissful. But at the end of the day, I was still that suffocated little girl, the one who felt powerless and couldn’t speak up, the one who had been silenced again and again and again.
How could I create a dream life or find happiness when I couldn’t even find my voice?
Fast forward several years after the last divorce. Having lost everything (two homes, all assets and more) to a husband’s secret debt, I’d been thrown into the deep end of life as an entrepreneur. I was busting my backside creating an online business. I wasn’t loving it. In fact, I hated it. But without traditionally marketable skills to get a great job with a decent income, it was the only way I could support myself.
One night, I was hanging out with my friend, Frank Moffatt. He was the father of four sons who were an international “boy band” in the ’90s — The Moffatts. He had successfully managed their career for several years until as young adults they disbanded, wanting to spread their wings. You might remember this one of their hit songs — “Miss You Like Crazy” — still one of my all-time favourite songs by anyone, ever.
Frank knew about my musical abilities and suggested we write a song together. He and his boys had written numerous hits during the Moffatts’ career while I had no clue about such things. But heck, I figured it would be a fun evening, so why not?
Frank came round and after chatting for a while, we parked at my desk, my piano to my right, and ready to roll. In figuring out where we should start, he asked, “What’s been happening for you? What’s going on in your life?”
I thought for a moment and said, “Well, it’s been a long struggle.”
“Write that down,” he instructed, pointing at the notebook in front of me.
I did as he asked and he said, “Okay, what else?”
Again, I thought about it. “Been feeling trapped, feeling stuck.”
“Write that down,” he repeated. “What else?”
“I’ve been spinning my wheels.”
“Write that down.” Are you sensing a theme? Frank was.
After I added that line to the others, he put aside the songwriting. Given the three statements I’d just made, we had a conversation about what was going on in my world, and the fact that I was seriously not enjoying my life. In fact, I’d given up believing I would ever be happy again.
He asked, “If you could get up every day and do whatever you want and you didn’t have to worry about money, what would you do?”
“That’s easy. Writing, art, and music.” I’d been neglecting my three loves for several years, apart from a bit of writing here and there. No wonder I wasn’t happy; these were significant parts of my soul.
Frank challenged me to spend 8 hours every day, Monday to Friday, on my three loves. And just after I accepted that challenge, he checked his watch and had to scoot to pick up his wife from work.
“Finish that song, record it and send it to me.”
Just then, my mother (dead for years) was in my head. “You can’t do that!”
Staring at Frank, I spluttered, “But — but I’m not a singer!” I don’t know what I’d thought we were going to do with our song but it wasn’t that.
He wasn’t having it. He insisted I must finish writing the lyrics and music, record the song and send it to him. Period. No excuses. And off he went.
I stared at those three lines for the longest time. I thought about the conversation I’d just had with my friend. I remembered that powerless little girl, the one whose art was thrown in the bin, the one whose feelings were a crime, the one who had been silenced, and whose ability to dream had been silenced, too.
And by the next day, that little girl had finally found her voice.
The conversation I had with Frank pushed me in a whole new direction, impacting my life in ways I couldn’t have imagined. I put creative self-expression at the forefront of my life. I was drawing, writing, and making music again. I was happier than I’d been in years.
I love that it was music that brought me back to myself, that reconnected me to that creative little girl who could spend hours reading her favourite books, painting pictures, or playing songs that stirred her heart.
It was music that reminded me that I could have dreams, and that I had the power to do something about them and make them come true.
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