The Moldau

It's easy to describe events, real or imaginary, but emotion... emotion is a bigger challenge to put into words. Thank God for music, which describes what words can not. Lately I've been thinking of how to describe the interplay between some of the deepest emotions in my life and the most profound piece of music in my history. It's time to try.



History: I was raised by musicians in a house filled with music in the physical, auditory, and spiritual senses. History: I played violin from the age of five, with a love-hate relationship for the first six years and a passionate love affair for the next six. History: The Moldau was one of the last pieces of music I played.

Through the unraveling of my self as musician, The Moldau became inextricably linked to everything I know about myself as a vulnerable and triumphant human being.

It was our chairing audition piece in the youth symphony that year. I flailed through it so badly that I left the audition in tears, sure that I was going to not only lose my chair of 9th out of the 16 1st violins but that I was going to end up in the back of the 2nd violins. I got out of my car at home and took out my frustration on a 4 mile round trip walk to my best friend's house. (She wasn't home. Life before cell phones.) Calling to receive the news of my placement was nerve wracking, and when the woman on the line told me I was 8th chair I had to ask her "1sts or 2nds?" Firsts. Firsts! I'd actually gained a chair. And I thought I had learned a lesson in believing in myself and feeling my own strength.

No signs of trouble throughout the year. I was in pain, but I had been in pain for years. Taking 800 mg of ibuprofen every 4 waking hours was a routine part of my day, with breakthrough pain from my neck to my midback and all the way down both arms. I never questioned it. My childhood best friend was a ballerina who also lived with chronic pain. My arms, her ankles. We paid the price for our art.

Then in spring, I was preparing for a solo competition, two recitals, and the youth symphony's spring concert. The Moldau. I knew it was written about a river that runs through Prague, but I always felt it as my heart beating, my life's energy coursing through me. It's the closest understanding I have of the concept of chi. The Moldau.

By mid-May, I'd completed three of the four performances. Just before the fourth, my hands rebelled. Seized up completely. I don't remember the pain, only the inaction. My hands and wrists were frozen in claws. I would use the back of one hand to open the other and place it on an object I wanted to grasp, but that was as far as I could get. I did not have the strength to turn a doorknob or lift a glass of water to my lips.

I saw a physical medicine specialist, who told me I could expect permanent damage if I did not quit violin immediately. He preferred that I stop permanently, but said I could try playing again after six months of complete cessation and physical therapy, provided I made enough progress. I also had to immediately and permanently stop taking the ibuprofen, so that I would be completely aware of my pain and prevent myself from harming my body any further in my daily activities.

The physical and emotional pain over the next several months eclipsed the rest of my life. I have few memories from this time frame. I do remember that at one point it occurred to me that I was mourning the greatest loss of my life. Fifteen years later I would still agree with that viewpoint. While I would have given up violin to save the lives of any of the people I have lost (and I do note that I have not lost any children or either of my parents), the mourning that came with the end of what I had regarded as my very being was immense. After close to a year had passed, I attempted to practice the music to audition for UCLA's symphony. I forcefully relapsed. And I acknowledged that it was over.

Nothing could replace violin in my life. Slowly, though, I found other, smaller ways of fulfillment. I became physically active in a way I had never anticipated, loving hiking outdoors and indoor rock climbing. I graduated from college and married my high school sweetheart. I finally fully rested my hands, in ending school and finding a job with no computer work involved. After three specialists and three physical therapists, I found the cure for my repetitive strain injuries: massage therapy. Money, time, and an extraordinary body worker finally ended my chronic pain four years after I had quit violin. And somewhere in that four years I had become whole again, so subtly that I can't point to a moment of transformation into a complete self that wasn't a violinist.

I couldn't listen to any music at all that first summer. Even rock music - guitar is a stringed instrument, after all. After several months I could listen to rock. After a few years I reintroduced classical music. In fact, I played so much of The Four Seasons (one of those last recital pieces!) when I was pregnant with my first child that it was the only thing that could calm her on car rides in her infancy.

As I gave birth to my children and then found birth work, I recognized that birth was the first thing since violin that had fulfilled me as wholly, though differently, as violin had. And one day, as I drove to my first midwifery skills class, The Moldau came on the radio. For the first time in twelve years, I listened. I let it wash all over me, feeling acutely the loss of the violinist and the triumph of my soul.

Since that day, I turn to the Moldau when I need to find peace with my vulnerability or feel my ability to prevail. In becoming a midwife, these needs have been great! When I listen to The Moldau, my emotions are raw. Every muscle in my body sings with proprioceptive memory of playing violin. My heart joins in the song. I can smell the rosin and the wood, feel the vibrations of the symphony around me in my chest and in my feet on the wood planks of the stage. I can believe I'm there again. I remember what I've lost, and I remember what I achieved in gaining myself back, finding my impenetrable core. Then I recognize again what I am working for and who I am. I recognize that I can exist outside of a named identity but as deeply as I was a violinist, I will be a midwife; as deeply as music will always continue to stir my body and soul, I have always been a midwife.