Dancing to the Wrong Notes

The "High, Low, Buffalo" story of April, or, when you disappoint yourself

“Mom! Mom!” Annalee came running through the back gate last week and hopped over the cement planters, her hedgehog backpack bouncing behind her. “We need to protect the house! Next week is Hexennacht!!”

One of the things I love about living overseas is that, at least in the younger grades, my kids have to take a specials class (along with art, music, PE) that educates them on the culture and customs of the country they’re living in. Annalee’s Host Nation teacher had informed them that day about the custom of Hexennacht, or Walpurgisnacht, or in English, Witches’ Night. Chilling as it sounds, it’s a mostly benign night of pranking. People cause mischief like toilet papering or putting shaving cream on cars or dumping your trash out, and if you call the police nothing will be done¹. The way Annalee described it, it was basically The Purge.²

“I asked many questions,” she informed me, and knowing Annalee, I’m sure she did. She came up with elaborate plans to protect our house, as you can see here. There was definitely some Home Alone inspiration.

Here’s the plan I presented.

It mainly involved me and Matt alternately being awake because that’s nighttime in your forties, Mabel being a valiant guard dog (instead of a spoiled 15-pound dachshund with a penchant for electric blankets who doesn’t care much about what happens between 9:30 pm and 6:30 am), and Lilly keeping watch late into the night because she is studying for her AP exams next week.

In the end, we brought in her bicycle and skateboard and let her fill all the water guns in the house. As I tucked her in, she whispered, “I don’t know how I will sleep tonight!” But sleep she did, and we woke to find everything just fine the next morning. Honestly, I think she was a bit disappointed.

When I think about the shortest way to describe April, I have no words, just a single image: the face-melting emoji. The main reason for this is that we recently decided to sell our house in the States and knew one of us needed to go back as soon as possible to move some belongings out and prep it for sale. And the one to do it was me. As improbable as it seemed, we managed to find a week that was fairly quiet as far as things go around here and a ticket that was reasonable, so off I went. It was, as crazy as this might sound, my first time traveling alone without kids. I’ve traveled alone before motherhood and so many times without Matt but with kids, but this was a landmark moment.

On the 12-hour flight to the States, I only watched one movie in its entirety, and I can’t stop thinking about it. It’s called Where Do We Go Now? and is about a group of women in a remote village in Lebanon. They’re almost equally Christian and Muslim, and they’re all very close friends. But as outside tensions infiltrate their community, threatening to tear them apart, they join forces with the imam and priest, and scheme to hold the village together. It was fairly equal parts funny, heartbreaking, and inspiring, and begs the question, “If women were in charge, would there be less war?” I’m not completely sure of the answer, because I’ve seen plenty of cutthroat behavior among women. But it’s something to think about.

There were bittersweet moments on my trip. One of the things that went into our 10x5 storage unit was the Little Tikes Cozy Coupe that all five of my babies loved. I’ve whittled down the sentimental items from my kids’ childhoods to just a couple boxes of clothes and blankets I won’t part with. This little car takes up a lot of awkward room. Its plastic is so faded, and the metal attaching the wheels is rusted and bent, but there is NO WAY I’m getting rid of it. I could see each of the little faces tucked behind the steering wheel wearing proud smiles, sometimes two of them squeezed in together, their little legs Flintstoning around the yard as they “drove” away from me and I blew kisses.

*Not all kids pictured--sorry, Lilly and Annalee!

The little box of our old dachshund Milo’s ashes was tucked into the compartment at the back, where the kids had stored favorite rocks or toted their dolls.

I had to take a minute.

I also saw my two older daughters while I was stateside. Skyler, my second, goes to college in the town where our house is. She’s a junior now, and this was my first time seeing her apartment and getting a tiny taste of her life. On the way home, I had a long layover in Charlotte, and my oldest daughter Jayna drove there to spend the time with me. For the first time since she purchased it almost three years ago, I rode in her car. I looked over at her remembering how she scooted around in that Cozy Coupe, and now she was really driving herself around—in a real car with an engine. Oooof.

One of the happy surprises of the past couple months is the time I’ve spent with friends. In March, I reunited with a German friend who was in my 5th grade(!!!) class in Dhaka and lives only an hour from here. We spent such a nice afternoon and evening with her family.

This past weekend, my friend Jenna came over. Jenna is an extremely talented writer, who wrote this beautiful essay on homesickness for the Coffee+Crumbs Spring ‘24 collection and is part of my creativity group. She also lives about an hour away and visited in February. But this time, she also brought her husband and two kids who are close in age to Wyatt and Annalee. It was such a lovely day. If you’re married with kids, you probably know how hard it is to find people that mesh with all your people. But Jenna and her family were that³.

We had a couple brief, intermittent mud rains early in the month. I’m sure there’s a more scientific word, but you’ve probably experienced this—when dust mixes into the clouds so that when it rains, it basically looks like mud splattering everything. Thanks to this phenomenon, everyone in our corner of Germany needed to wash their cars, and I had to wait several days until the car wash line was reasonable. I mean, it was still long, but not too long. The car wash is one of those places that always feels at least a little stressful, but as the cars lined up far behind me, I made an apparently huge mistake: I tried to type in the code before the car in front of me was done.

I know, I know. You’re probably thinking, “And? That’s what you do at a car wash.” Well, not at this one. Here, it shut down the entire car wash. (Why??? Why would I be given that power?!?!?!) I had to wait several minutes in my car, cheeks burning as I slid low, trying to conceal myself behind the dashboard while the woman in the car in front of me wondered why all the swishing and scrubbing had so abruptly stopped. At long last, the attendant ambled out of his office.

“Don’t press the red button!” he admonished. There’s a big red button sticking out of the machine, but come on! Even I am not so stupid as to press that.

“I didn’t press the red button!” I explained. “I just tried to type in the code.”

He rolled his eyes and shook his head, clearly thinking, “Another impatient American imbecile.” “You cannot type in code before other car finish. Now I must restart machine.”

Fortunately, I had trained for this moment, having grown up in the 80’s and 90’s with years of my life spent waiting for computers to “boot” and AOL to connect to the sound of a thousand shrieking demons. This machine was exactly like those (minus the shrieks). Let me just say, it’s a top-tier level of shame when you’re sitting in line waiting for the car wash you stopped to restart watching a growing line of drivers behind you lean out the window and shake their heads at you in disgust. I almost abandoned the scene of the crime, but darn it, I really needed that car wash.

It felt like April was a month where I got the message from many different voices that I was not doing enough, or that I was doing things wrong. The reasons for this are varied, but the worst part is, I felt like I was going all out, doing the absolute best I could. I’m a people-pleaser, so knowing someone out there was unhappy with me was tough to swallow. On top of this, I think I have obsessive-compulsive tendencies, something that played into my having anorexia as a teen. It’s not manifested in intense cleaning (lol, definitely not!), but in hyper focusing on accomplishing certain things and getting really frustrated when I don’t.

I lay in bed Tuesday night, knowing I couldn’t possibly have finished this post given how that day (/week/ month) went, and on top of everything else that I felt like I’d done wrong in April, that I’d had to accept wasn’t going to look the way I wanted, it almost made me crazy. But then I thought back to one of the highest points of the month.

Last week, we attended Wyatt’s middle school band concert. You may recall how at the beginning of the year, he started playing the French horn. I wasn’t sure how it would go, but he stuck with it all year. Since he’s my fourth kid of five, this is not my first rodeo (concert). But it was unlike any I’d attended before. It was held in the cavernous multi-purpose hall of the school, and even though I showed up half an hour early, it was already packed with people. 

The show started first with something that sounded like Zumba music played over the sound system, and all the kids started dancing. What I mean to say is: all those dozens of middle schoolers, better known for awkwardness and hating to be seen as uncool, started dancing. And not with the furtive glances around like, “I’m not the only one doing this, right?” but with true, “Dance like nobody's watching!” carefree abandon. Audience members joined in. We couldn’t help it. Once everyone was loosened up, the concert started. For almost two hours, the show went on with an energy level that rivaled that of—yes, I dare say it—a Taylor Swift concert.

Watching the concert and hearing the crowd (myself included) cheer wildly for every musician there whether or not they went a little flat or hit the wrong note or squeaked, I understood what was so different and wonderful—so unique—about this band and choir teacher: here was a musician who truly loves music and wants the world to love it too. As strange as it might sound, I don’t believe that’s not a given—and I’ve known many musicians. A shocking number of them treat music like an exclusive club that only the elite are allowed into. This holds true for really anyone who creates for a living. But this man, who is every bit a musician in his own right, loved every shaky attempt as much as every perfect chord. There was no cringing, no grimacing, no embarrassment—just sheer delight in the creation of joyful noise.

When I picked up Wyatt from rehearsal the day before his concert, he told me his teacher had cried at the end of it. “Like, a happy cry, Mom.” It made me smile how he thought that needed clarification. I glanced over at him as I steered the car out of the middle school pick-up/ drop-off zone and saw so much pride—and a little awe—on his face as he told me this. He knew now the immense privilege of being a part of creating something so beautiful, it moved someone to tears. 

This week, while on Instagram, I saw one of my favorite quotes incorrectly attributed to a certain podcast’s guest instead of the woman who actually said it: Mary Anne Radmacher. I’m pretty sure I’ve quoted it before somewhere in my writing, because these are words that help calm me in the moments of feeling weighed down by my not-enough-ness. So of course, they bubbled to the surface of my anxious thoughts as I considered my shortcomings in April.

“Courage does not always roar,” Radmacher says. “Sometimes courage is the little voice at the end of the day that says, ‘I’ll try again tomorrow.’”

So I guess that’s where I am, or at least where I’m trying to be, as I shake off the dust of April—reminding myself to keep dancing, even if the notes are wrong, and trusting I can try again tomorrow.

In closing, please enjoy this video of Allen Strawbridge, the middle school music director, rocking out to a most excellent version of “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” Was I headbanging? Maybe.

1. This is really interesting because Germany is (in?)famous for its abundance of and adherence to rules.

2. Which I most certainly have not seen, because I already have a hard enough time sleeping and don’t need that in my life. Nope nope nope. But I know the gist of it. If you’ve never heard of it, click the link above and read the Wikipedia descriptions (which stressed me out enough!).

3. Related side note: Exhale Creativity is having their enrollment period May 6-17, and you can sign up for $5 your first month with the code EXHALEBFF.