A Few Sounds Later

Her notes struck the incessant thoughts from my brain. Each punch on the keys left me thinking only of the beauty the world had to offer, the drops of rain hitting the pool, the light touch of a butterfly.

I know when I’ve lost our fights because my daughter looks away from me, sits, and plays her piano.

I look at her in a state of reverence when she ignores me, her mother, her teacher, her prodder, her leader, her tormentor.

The sounds bleed from a part of her that no piano teacher could ever touch. She knows the notes from ages ago and I know I have no right to interfere in their delivery to this small space she’s found in a limitless dimension, so I stand distant, yet affected.

Her sounds leave me inferior and that’s when I know I can mother her from a place of love, bowing to the majesty of understanding music with only her ears.

A book, a lesson, exists somewhere but never meets this moment when she sits and creates from her soul. She plays by ear.

My daughter blocks my noise, my pressure to do, to checklist, to become and achieve. She seals my lips shut with a sound, the universal sound of song without words: music.

Times when I need her to listen, I have been cut short by the piano.

With her long, tangled hair draping her shoulders, she defies me. And, I’ve learn my lesson.

I stop my rant and listen.

That music plunges into every empty pocket of the house. No one speaks when she plays. She knows this and so do I.

The humility of knowing that my child may know more than me smacks me in the face.

A few sounds later, she leaves the song behind and we’re smiling again.