Costume Change

On the seasons of ourselves

This time of year always feels like a tantrum. Winter flailing its limbs in the weeks before spring, refusing to go quietly. We get one sip of sun and then the snow whirls back in again, a defiant tyrant. I understand this move—getting my toddler to change clothes also results in tantrums. Transitions are messy and hard.

More snow, and more snow, and more. The ground looks like an overly frosted cake, a gaudy wedding confection. When I walk past the marsh down the road, I can make out a half dozen herons’ nests—normally indistinguishable from the other sticks and branches—because they all appear topped with a dollop of cream.

But underneath, the earth is changing. Invisible stirrings, insisting on greenness. Viriditas—that word loved by Hildegard von Bingen, who likened greenery to a manifestation of the Divine. Spring feels far away right now, and my spirit is malnourished. But soon the tantrums will pass, and the world will relent, and the white coat will slink off the shoulders of the land, revealing the willow-green body within.

I have not been feeling like myself lately. Winter wins, I wrote in my journal. Snow wins. Sleep deprivation wins. Postpartum wins. February wins. I relent. I let the brutality of this season sweep me away. I stop thrashing against it, go limp as a caught bird, submit to the teeth of it.

Perhaps I will recognize myself again when the snow melts and the light swells and the weather warms and the trees leaf and the baby sleeps and the hormones regulate and the rage abates and the grief lifts and the muscles ease and the birds return.

Or maybe this state I’m in is not a costume at all, not a layer to be shed but a fundamental expression of myself. Perhaps everything I’m feeling now—the whole snowy mess of it—is me too.

Last week, I left my kids at home with Nana for three hours so I could go perform in my friend Arone Dyer’s Dronechoir. I got in the car and flew down County Route 295, feeling myself lighten with each passing mile. When I got to the venue, I felt like a spy, a superhero, carrying a secret—I was a mother, but no one could see motherhood on me. No one knew I had nursing pads in my bra, that underneath the make-up and the performance clothes, my body was soft and stretched from two labors. I was handed an artist pass and shown to the green room.

The Dronechoir is a meditative experience of overlapping long tones. Fifteen singers weave through the room, parting the audience like beads of water. Each singer has an earbud in their ears, which pipes in directions of tone and gesture. Face the windows. Sing the note that makes your face hum.

I sang. I birthed note after note, each tone a lotus unfurling. My body hummed with the sound.

I sang, and a part of me was seen: the singer, the artist, the woman with lilac eyeshadow and silver-black hair worn long like a cape.

And then an hour later, I got back in the car, stopped at the co-op for my son’s favorite popsicles, and returned to a house where the baby was crying and the toddler was banging and my body was rocked by a different kind of sound.

It all happened so fast: in a flash, I was a performer, in another flash, I was a mother again. Like entering and exiting a phone booth as someone entirely new.

Which is my superhero costume, I thought, and which is my normal one?

When I was in preschool, I used to dress in a different costume every day. Good morning, Nandi! the teacher would sing-song when I walked in. I’m not Nandi, I’d say, tapping my sparkly red shoes, I’m Dorothy. The next day, the teacher would greet me: Good morning, Dorothy! And I’d whisk my yellow skirt around me and say, I’m not Dorothy, I’m Belle.

(What is she going to be for Halloween? the teachers joked. Turns out, it was my least inspired day. I went as a witch four years in a row.)

It has always been with me, this costume change, this code-switching. I guess that’s part of being a performer to begin with: the separation of the self onstage and off. To perform, to cross that threshold, you must switch on different lights in your circuitboard, bigger and brighter and shinier lights that can reach all the way to the back of the room. Beyonce famously calls her performance persona “Sasha Fierce.” Years ago, while on tour with Iron & Wine, I got a chic haircut in Europe and started calling my stage self “Gigi.”

So this feeling of a double life is not new to me. It should not be so surprising. And yet it has been gnawing at me throughout these early years of motherhood—this inability to integrate my selves, the whiplash of the costume change. It sends me into an existential panic. Which is the real me?

But maybe integration shouldn’t be the goal. What if I let these states of being—the musician, the mother—exist as separate things? Maybe in that way, I can learn something from winter, from spring. These seasons of the self, with their messy transitions. We don’t expect one season to be the same as another. We celebrate the shift in energy, the different perspectives that each season brings. We let each be itself.

And really, there is no costume in the end. It is all land.

In the time it took for me to finish this essay, the calendar flipped to March and the weather warmed to 48 degrees. Sheets of snow melted, icicles steadily dripped, two bluebirds sang above the thawing creek. The next day, it snowed again.

Switching between states is not always clean and easy. Not linear, not clear. It can take effort to get from one to the other. We might get a bit lost. But when we arrive, let us fully be there.

Any day now, a crocus will come punching through the ground like a fist. These flowers are superheroes of the season, strong enough to break through a thin shell of ice.

A birth of color, like a bloom of sound issuing out of a mouth.

Singing the note that makes the earth hum.