Perhaps one of the most succulent memories from my childhood is the sound of my mother's voice.  I have heard that sounds are harder to remember than images, but I disagree: my mother's voice is carved on my brain more indelibly than any scar from a roller-skating fall, more clearly than any photograph pasted to an album with care.

        Her voice was round, full, and soft, like her body; it would wind around me like arms, cradle me long after I turned six and was suddenly too old for her embraces.  It seems that it enveloped me since the moment I was born.  I left the warm safety of her body for the warm safety of her voice, which filled my ears for as long as I can remember.

        She used to rock me when I was a baby; I was often fussy and only that gentle undulating motion would soothe me.  I imagine she sang to me then: Carly Simon, perhaps, Linda Ronstadt, or Mary Travers.   The words of women, sung by my mother, surrounded me like amniotic fluid and became the lifeline I clung to.  My father used to kiss my scrapes and frighten away the monsters under my bed; but there were deeper, darker hurts, far down within my soul, that only my mother could understand or soothe.  Her version of "Hush, Little Baby" became my worldview.  She never sang that Papa would buy me a mockingbird; it was always Mama.  And if that mockingbird wouldn't sing, only she could take its place.

        My mother never held me too tightly.  When I strained against her arms, she let me go - but her voice remained, like the final invisible vestiges of an umbilical cord never cut, or the fingers she could guide me with when she knew her corporeal ones would cause me to pull away from her.  There were mornings when I'm sure she would have loved to catch me in a hug before I slammed the car door and scampered towards school; but I would have glowered, rebuked her for acting "baby."  So she would smile and say goodbye cheerfully; I never saw her eyes well or stand and watch my tiny form walking away from her.  Instead she devoted her energy to fashioning new ways to nurture me from afar.  It was she who brought music into my life in the form of car sing-alongs; it was likewise she who taught me to harmonize and treat the notes tenderly.  No love before or since was ever as rich in lessons as my mother's.

        But as often happens, a time came when the pupil began to think herself wiser than her teacher.  I grew to be a wizened, cynical teenager and could suddenly hear flaws in my mother's voice.  We argued more and more, and I came to know that once-pleasant sound in terms of its angry words, the hurtful things it could utter in response to my own hurtfulness.  Our voices, which had once mingled so perfectly in harmony, now clashed almost constantly in a discord of pain and indignance.  I struggled against the umbilical cord and the unwritten law that every young woman someday becomes her mother.

        But despite my efforts, the memory of my mother's voice raised in song echoes in my mind and ties me inextricably to her.  When I slam out of her house after an argument and drive away at top speed, I often turn up the radio and sing as loudly as I can to release my frustration.  I catch my breath every time; hear her voice in mine.  I cannot harmonize with Peter, Paul and Mary without flashing back to the days when she taught me the countermelody to "It's Raining, It's Pouring."  I am myself- but I am also my mother, my mother's daughter. When my own voice sails above Mary's strong alto, I can see my own daughter, who will love me and hate me and pull away from me, only to return to curl up in my lap and ask me to sing "All Through the Night."

        And I will- "I, my loved one, watch and keep thee all through the night."
 
 

*The title of this piece comes from a song by Peter, Paul and Mary; the lyric is
    'I won't be my mother's Jack
    I won't be my mother's Jill
    I'll be a fiddler's wife
    And fiddle when I will'