I have always believed regrets are a waste of time. You make a decision, you act on it, you learn from it, and you move on — hopefully a little wiser than before. But I doubt I will ever be able to shake the regret I feel about the conversations I never had with my mother. She died unexpectedly many years ago and when the shock started wearing off, I became starkly aware of how little we knew about each other.
My mother was raised in a strict Southern Baptist family who believed talking about yourself was vain and ungodly, and that only crazy people went to therapists. So she didn’t have much experience with self-reflection and talking about her feelings, and I didn’t have the skill or patience to draw her out. She was also very sensitive about being the only person in our immediate family without a college degree and was afraid of looking “dumb,” as she put it. So she held a lot of things inside.
It may sound odd, but what haunts me more than anything else is that we never talked about our shared experience as singers. Music had played a big role in both our lives, with me singing professionally for many years and my mother being the featured soloist in a Baptist church choir. Suddenly, I wanted to know all sorts of things — how old she was when she realized the power of her voice; what drew her to gospel and Americana music; why she needed to express herself that way; what it felt like to get lost in a song; what part of herself she lost when she gave it up, and what it felt like when she started singing again in her late 60s.
I wish we had talked about the physicality of singing. The way it changes the mind/body conversation. Movement without filter; the fear and exhilaration of going wherever the music takes you. Our fellow Baptists weren’t entirely wrong when they cautioned about singing “the devil’s music.” Singing splays you out emotionally in ways no one can prepare you for. And the better I got at it, the harder everything else became. Because nothing compares to the experience of music magic coming out of your own body and soul.
If no one teaches you how to handle it, the intensity can take you to some dangerous places. It wasn’t until she died that I realized singing was one of the few acceptable ways my mother was allowed to express her individuality in a sexist and religiously oppressive small town. How great it would have been to talk about all of that with her.
But we never talked about any of it, even though singing together had been lifesaving neutral ground for both of us in an otherwise rocky relationship of constantly tip-toeing around family land mines. All that history and mutual resentment disappeared the moment we sat down together at a piano. I became the adoring daughter again, sitting in the front pew on Christmas Eve, transfixed as she sang “O Holy Night” to the congregation, her voice soaring. A plain looking little five-year-old in a pixie haircut, standing up and yelling to everyone, “That’s my Mama!” To this day, the moment I hear the opening chords of that song, I start crying.
I wish I had asked her what it felt like to rediscover and reclaim her gift after so many years of silence. What was different; what was the same; how she found her way back. What singing gave her that nothing and no one else ever could. I’d really like to know. Almost twenty years after her death, I still can’t believe I never asked.
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~ Jassa Skott, January 2025