Covert Mom: Brown-Eyed Girl

By Mariah Mottley

Billie, my middle daughter, came home with a trumpet. She’s learning to play. She’s been walking around the house, trying to get a seal on the mouthpiece with her lips, interrupting everyone’s personal activities from teeth brushing to movie watching.

I can hear the blaring from outside in the horse paddock, and while I’m in the upstairs bathroom. It sounds like a constipated hippo. An acerbic elephant. A dyspeptic Wookiee. Sean resolutely donned noise canceling headphones and went back to work, but I haven’t been able to escape.

Billie has just started middle school and is adding the trumpet to her daily piano practice. Sometimes your kids grow all at once. I am suspicious this is happening to her now. Refusing to spend all my time gaping at headlines or watching storm footage, I am resolute in paying careful attention to my children. The world is more uncertain than it has been.

Billie generously accompanied me to the grocery store without her trumpet. On the drive home, I ask about school, about how it feels to be the middle child. She says it is the hardest job in the family because she has to be both a big sister and a little sister.
“That is really different from my experience growing up,” I tell her. “It was just my mom and me. I always loved the idea of having a real family, with a house, and brothers and sisters, a live-in dad. That’s kind of why you have the problem you do, now. You’re living my dream. You look like her, you know.”

I will never get used to the ghostly, flat curve of her upper lip, my mother’s mouth.
“I know I am like you,” she said.

We are heading north, past the hospital. She counts ways off on her fingers, her turquoise hairwrap twitching in my peripheral vision.
“We’re both slobs. We both write columns. We like to wear oversized pajamas. We both have brown eyes and long eyelashes. We like swimming in the water, but I can handle it way colder than you.”
“We’re good at lifting heavy things,” I added. “And mosquitoes like us, but I’ve learned not to scratch as hard as you.”

Her left arm, mirroring my right, bears the same summer tan, but is dotted with scabs.
“What are some of our differences?” I asked.

I always had a hard time figuring how I was and wasn’t like my mother. I want Billie to know for sure. She thought.
“I’m left-handed. I play piano and trumpet, I don’t need glasses. I can draw and paint.”
“You know what it is like to have a sister,” I said. “And a brother.”

She made a pfffing noise. This was not worth much, in her book.
“I play the piano,” I countered. “Or at least, I remember how, a little.”
“Yes,” she said, “but you just play the notes the way you learned them, you don’t hear the music in your head.”

I have never heard such an apt description of a musician delivered so casually.
“Got me there,” I said. “Do you?”
“Of course,” she shrugged. “My brain is like a playlist, there’s always a song going.”
“Really? I asked, downshifting into a turn. “What’s playing now?”
“Footloose,” she said looking out the window.
“What’s up next?” I asked, gobsmacked.
“Peace Train,” she answered.
“Want to put it on for real, so I can hear it?”
She did. We didn’t talk all the way home, just listened to Cat Stevens.

As I put away groceries, she went back to making the trumpet howl. Suddenly the tone changed to two beautiful, clear notes. Then the howling started again, followed by the two notes. Sad wookiee, then a trumpet player. Sad wookiee, then a trumpet player. I stood completely still, holding a bag of frozen berries, listening.

The year Billie was a baby, we had exposed wall studs and pipes in our kitchen. She spent most of her time there, in the warmth of the woodstove, accepting toys from her older sister, and exploring the open construction project we had going on. The first time she pulled herself up into a standing position, it was with the aid of a wooden stud and a metal pipe. Back then, I looked up from the counter to see her, erect; suddenly bipedal, a different animal than she had been before. She gave a hoot of victory, then dropped back down onto her cloth diaper.

She is doing it again, but I was listening to her transformation this time instead of seeing it. She is changing into a newer version of herself. She is becoming a musician.
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Originally from Manhattan, Mariah was educated in Massachusetts, Montana and Texas, often by failure. She lives with her husband and three children in the Finger Lakes region of upstate New York. Mariah can be reached at mariah@mariahmottley.com.