I posted me singing the other day. I have sung all my life, just to hear me sing. Because it calmed me when anxious, released me when mad or sad and was such an incredible part of me that when sick and unable to sing I felt less than whom I am.

I remember singing in church, I loved that part. I remember, when small, Suzie and I standing up in front of the whole church to sing and she remembers herself being all dramatic and me just calmly singing. I only remember walking to the front of the church all nervous.

Mom always had music around from her 78’s to her 331/3’s we children listened to blues, jazz, opera, and the singers from our mom’s youth. We would escape our poorness by laying under the sheet in our makeshift fort the water cooler blowing around us on a hot summers day and listen to mom’s Reader Digest piano concertos. To this day the smell of a water cooler just being started up the first hot day of summer takes me back to the fort and my youth and I find that comforting.

Then those tumultuous teenage years filled with angst and love that you thought you could never live without. How I would sing about love and dying for love and found my way through by music and song. Every love song was about me, I would sing them loud with hair brush in hand in front of the mirror knowing someday someone would discover me and I would be a star.

The early years married were filled with laughter, love and music. I always sang but had my family and I was content to stay there. But that was not to be and as my first family grew up I rediscovered my love to sing and for the first time ever I got up on stage with a band and sang Patsy Cline’s “Walkin’ After Midnight.” My first husband walked away from me that night. He no longer would allow music to be played in the car or at home. He tried to forbid me to sing. He had friends who told me that if he wanted me to not sing then I should do as he asked. Poppycock! I knew it was over and waited to find my escape.

The new family with the dad who had been in band after band and played the guitar upside down backwards as a lefty, that was how he taught himself, was my chance to sing again in public. I could make it work I knew I could. There were many nights of singing and playing and I had hope through music we could make our marriage work. The children and I would dance around and sing song after song and on long journeys they would listen to me sing along with Bonnie Raitt and so many others and they would be quiet and just listen to me sing. That was the highest compliment in the world to me.

As this marriage finds it’s conclusion I again turn to song to comfort myself. Only this time I have decided to take that jump to sharing my voice, in hopes others will like it.

I am done waiting to be thin to accomplish my dreams. I am done listening to the voices in my head that say nobody wants to hear me. I am done talking myself out of doing what I love; sharing a gift I was given and if some folks don’t like it well then I will have to live with that. I am done, I hope, asking repeatedly “you liked it you really liked it”!

I love to sing, it completes me, it fills my heart with happiness or sorrow, joy or anger, and it fills my heart all the same.

I will never be that star I aspired to be in my teens but I will sing and I will not give up recording myself even though my voice quakes in fear that maybe I am not that good. I will not be defeated this time around. My time is running short and it is time to set myself free from my imagined fears and fly free singing to the skies.

I keep listening to my voice singing on tape. I find strange comfort in the fact that I have finally done it. I have finally shown myself to the world as a singer. I, at first, picked me apart, this note was off key, this should have been better, and the damn cell phone went off in mid song.

BUT I will let that all go. I will learn to accept me just as I am, flaws or not, I am just me and singing is what sets me free.

I am almost done raising two families, both my choice, starting at 18 years of age until now at age 57. It is now my turn to step out in the light, do what I want for me. What I want more than anything is to sing, to be finally heard. To be free….

So one more time just because I can, and I want to, here is me singing again.