Singing is an Escape - Eden Moon

    Singing is an Escape

Since before I was born, music has always been a crucial part of my life and my childhood. When my mother was pregnant with me, she would always play one CD while sitting in a little chair in the corner of her bedroom in Rhode Island. 

    She found it relaxing and would put it on while she was going to sleep, while knitting (because she got a compulsive need to knit and bought all the materials), or just sitting and thinking. As she was in labor, she had them playing Returning by Jennifer Berezan; she would then play it as my lullaby. 

    She's since lost the CD, but she upgraded to the fifty-two-minute YouTube video. She tends to listen to it anytime she goes to the dentist, and she's even moved to using it as her own lullaby. (It's one of my favorites to meditate to)

    My mother was also a singer throughout her life, and so she would constantly sing to me. 

    With my head on her chest, she would sing Baby Mine from Dumbo. To this day, these two songs immediately make me miss my mother. I miss the security I had when I would lie down with my head on her chest to hear her heartbeat while she would sing to me. It was like the world fell away whenever she did this. 

A story my mother loved to tell me took place when I was two. My uncle was a musician, and he learned fully by listening to people play guitar on the radio and found the notes. 

Back to the story, I was about two, and he was completely distraught that I “couldn’t hold a pitch.” My mother told him he was crazy, but he was panicked. Luckily, by the time I was in kindergarten, I had learned, and he finally felt at peace. As my mother would drive me to and from elementary school, we would either listen to Taylor Swift by Taylor Swift or a really old CD that I’ve never been able to find again; it was all of the main older Disney Princesses’ “theme songs,” and I adored that CD. 

    Looking back at it, music has been such a crucial part of my life; I'm twenty now, and I still love singing with my mother on long car rides. We sometimes go to see Broadway in Boston; from my house, it's a two-hour drive, and basically the entire way there we sing our hearts out to Disney, Broadway, and artists I've played enough that she's learned the songs too. Singing and music calm me down so easily, and whenever I listen to Returning, I feel so at peace and tired that It’s almost impossible for me to keep my eyes open. I’m immediately ready to go to sleep. 

    When I sing, it’s like I can feel something that’s been trapped inside of me being released. I can feel the vibrations from the notes in my chest and in my throat; I can feel and see my chest rising and falling with each inhale. Its almost like being able to express my emotions and how they affect me without having to sit with them. I can just let them all spill out into the notes. Its as if i'm weightless and simply observing, my anxieties and fears falls away when I sing i'm just physically feeling the words.

Eden