nature vs. nurture
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"What are you afraid of?" Carolyn asked. It was only our second session, long before I had taken any real steps in my search. We were trying to get to the root of my resistance. Why was it so difficult for me to move forward? I knew the steps I could take, so why wasn't I taking them?
"I'm afraid that I'll find out my birth mother or someone else in my biological family is a musician," I replied.
This was confusing to me and I didn't understand why it was scary, but it was.
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I can't remember a time when I didn't know how to read music. I began taking piano lessons at the age of three and one of my earliest memories as a child was humming Carol of the Bells in the back of our van, followed by singing, "G F# G E," over and over while staring out the window. My earliest memories of piano lessons include my piano teacher's red pen and the smell of her piano studio. It was musty and stale, on the third floor of the local liberal arts college in my hometown. I'd grow tired of walking up the flights of stairs to get to her floor; they always seemed so steep. I'd smile as I passed college students and other teachers in the hallways. Her baby grand took up most of the room and I'd have to squeeze between the piano and her chair to reach the bench. I always loved to go to lessons. I'd plop down on her black piano bench, hand her my books, and then she would pull out a little foot stool so I could rest my feet on them for better stability. She always used a red pen to scribble notes in the music and to add the date for new pieces, or she would use it to write my practice assignments in my notebook. It was always red and always in cursive. Sometimes she would have me place my hand on top of hers to learn better technique. Her hand was small and soft like mine, but strong. I was always astonished by the power in her fingers, though she always spoke with a sweet tenderness. It seemed like a strange thing...to place my hand on top of hers. I didn't always understand what I was supposed to be feeling, but I trusted her. We practiced playing while balancing coins on top of our hands and I was required to perform everything by memory.
It wasn't until I was seven years old that I began taking violin lessons. I can't remember much from my first few lessons, but I do remember at one point my violin studio was on the floor below my piano studio at the college. When my violin teacher would tell me to put my third finger down and I would proudly place my middle finger on my instrument instead of my ring finger, she would look up at the ceiling, shake her fist, and jokingly say that my piano teacher was ruining my violin playing. Finger numbers are not the same for piano and violin, and it took me a while to learn the difference.
I can also remember the first time I listened to a violin concerto. My violin teacher gave me a CD collection of five discs featuring Itzhak Perlman performing all the major romantic violin concertos. I was probably eight or nine years old. I sat in our van listening while on the way to run errands with my mom. The Mendelssohn Violin Concerto came on and my mom pointed out the solo violin, the instrument that soared above the rest. My ears grew ten times in size and I could hear it all. I could distinguish the solo violin from the thick curtain of other strings that rippled through the current of sound, something I had never been able to do before. It was as if my color palette consisting of blues, yellows, and reds suddenly expanded to fuchsias, aquamarines, and lavenders. I saw the world in a different light and it was beautiful. Music became my life, my purpose, and my passion.
I grew extremely close to my violin teacher and studied with her for ten years. She had many mantras she would tell me over the years like, "I don't know the word hard. It's not in my dictionary," anytime I complained about something being, "too hard." She once gave me a printed quote that read, "For that which does not come from the heart, will surely not reach the heart," and has remained a philosophy I live by to this day. She challenged me for ten years then told me I needed to study with someone else if I really wanted to pursue a career in music. She passed away after a brutal fight with cancer when I was only 18. It was the first death I truly had to grieve and remains one of the hardest losses I've ever experienced.
After her death there was no alternative. She had shared with a fellow teacher that I would be her legacy, and I intended to live up to that by becoming a violin teacher.
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I was used to hearing music every day growing up. My mom was a sought-after piano teacher who taught lessons from our home and still does to this day. At her peak, she taught roughly 80 students every week. I heard the same songs day-after-day, year-after-year, and had begun to memorize the natural progression of repertoire. I knew which songs were from which books, and developed friendships with the siblings of her piano students. It was normal to be sitting in my living room after school only to see our front door swing wide open and to see a stranger's face walking in. I thought nothing of it. Piano filled the main floor of our house and in the basement was my brother, practicing constantly. He was a drummer and so our basement soon began to fill up with drum sets, full-sized marimbas, congas, cymbals, and much more. By the time I was twelve, he was already preparing for college auditions and would practice hours every day. I never saw him except for an occasional snack or meal. What seemed like noise and ruckus to others was normal to me. I learned to absorb it and noticed more often when the basement was quiet rather than when it was loud.
In middle school I would plan out my practice time knocking out 45 minutes when I got home from school and then another 45 minutes later in the evening. On the days when I wanted to play outside in the neighborhood instead, I'd hear my mom calling me from afar, reminding me that I needed to practice. Though I sometimes reluctantly headed home, I knew it was a good reminder.
My love for music developed because she first loved music. We would watch musicals over and over again, so much that I could probably recite every word of White Christmas or Seven Brides for Seven Brothers. We would walk through the grocery store and hear a light humming faintly above, then try to guess what pitch it was. We would have conversations in an operatic voice just to be silly and a fun day for us looked like going to giant music stores and sight-reading music. I eagerly waited up for her to return home from worship team practices during the week and watched as she played keyboard on stage for church on Sundays. She was my first accompanist and we must have logged hundreds of hours playing and singing together. I watched her write songs and rode along with her to recording studio sessions. I began playing weddings and doing studio work by the age of 12, always with her by my side. She helped me set up my violin studio policies after college, told me to charge more, and has remained my biggest fan.
I can't help but think that music became such a large part of my life not only because of my music teachers growing up, but because my mother helped put me on a path and inspired me to love music in the way she lived and the way she loved.
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After sharing this with Carolyn, she responded with a gentle, "Ahh, I see."
I looked at her with a blank face, missing her moment of clarity.
"So, do you feel like...if you find out your birth mother is also a musician, that it will somehow make you feel less connected to your mom?" Carolyn asked.
And there it was. It felt like a stake to the heart. More grief. I quickly had a vision of my mom standing in front of me with her hand reached out to me, slowly being pulled away. It was like one of those dreams where you scream, but nothing comes out. You run, but move nowhere. You chase, but never catch. You want, but never have. And just like that, it felt like she was gone. It hurt like hell and I began to cry.
I gritted my teeth, a poor attempt to stop crying, and looked at the wall above Carolyn. I pursed my lips and took a deep breath.
"Yes," was all I could muster.
"I know," I replied quietly while looking down at the floor. "It just feels like it. It feels like...if I find out my birth mother is a musician, that everything I've done and experienced was just, I don't know. Maybe inevitable or destiny, which then makes me feel like I don't even know who I am. Like I didn't make these choices or I didn't even have a say."
"Feelings don't have to make sense. But the truth is that your mom and you share a love for music, and that is a special thing that exists over here," she said as she motioned with her hands. "And if you find out that your birth mother, or someone else in your family, is also a musician, that exists over here," she continued while motioning to the opposite side. "One doesn't take away from the other. Even if you did have a biological reason to gravitate towards music, that doesn't guarantee you would have grown up to become a musician without the constant nurturing over the years."
I nodded and sighed deeply. I knew Carolyn was right and it made sense in my head, but I still felt an internal tug-of-war. If one side gained, the other side lost. There was no here existence and there existence, two separate entities of possible attributions. My existence felt linear and if I found out that I shared characteristics with my birth mother, it meant I had to grieve that loss with my mom.
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As an adoptee, I have been fascinated by nature vs. nurture theories because for me, there is an alternative I don't know. My whole life has been a study of nurture without nature. What runs deep in my blood? Which bits and pieces of myself are fragments of somebody else? My laugh or my tendency to over-analyze? I've grown up believing that every choice I've made is my own, and that I am who I am because of my mom and dad, my brothers, and the experiences I've had. But somewhere out there is another set of humans which I share DNA with, humans whose chemical makeup has been welded and mixed together to create me. And what do I share with them? What is nature and what was nurture?
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