My mother was the strain of a cello from an upstairs room. Minor, mournful chords that moved through hallways where she never walked and hung suspended in rooms where she never sat. Even in life, she haunted us.
Occasionally, the universe folds upon itself and I recover a glimpse of the woman she was before the madness took hold. The roll of a stranger’s laughter, the blue-gray glint of a child’s eye all give her back to me in pieces. Slowly, I’m reconstructing her. Even now, that mosaic sits in some distant corner of my psyche largely unfinished. But before this all began – there was only the music.
Our story is old – mother’s and mine. Though no more ancient than anyone else’s. Our beginnings all tangle in that same white, bright void of pre-time. Just a great confused knot of energy and potential that has unraveled through the accidental circumstance of fate and chance into the present.
And here I sit – with a sliver of a story that begins and ends with God or some form of Him. I won’t claim any special wisdom or sacred knowledge. This is not a story that ends with a neatly wrapped set of answers. No certain Truths. The Unknown and Unknowable are the constants here. I won’t claim to resolve any of that for you.
I only know my part of it and even that is frayed and blurred for me.
My mother named me Rowan because she read Tolkien and liked the sound of it. Strong and strange and bitter in your mouth like black coffee. A Gaelic boy name for the dark, elfin Midwestern girl. In a town of Anne’s and Sarah’s and Christina’s – my name marked me foreign and alone. Five scarlet letters to stain me as an outsider. As lethal a mark as the manor in which I lived or my father’s wealth.
Rowan. It would be easy to start with that name and just move forward. Neat and chronological. And yet, such an approach feels unnatural.
No. I’ll start where the understanding began. Piece it all together just as messy and abrupt as it was for me.