February Memories: The Audition

When I was high school, I loved singing in the choir.  My mom also loved to sing and really loved watching each of us perform throughout our high school years.  During my junior year, it was time to audition for the next years choir spots.  Not only was I planning on being in the big main choir, but I had my eye on grabbing a place in one of the specialty choirs.  With my musical background and piano experience, I felt I had a pretty good shot of making it.  I will never forget the day I got the letter in the mail informing me I had made the main choir but not any of the other choirs.  I was absolutely devastated.

For days and days, I moped around the house and just felt that I would never get over the disappointment.  My mom did her best to cheer me and up and encourage me, but nothing worked. Then one day after I was crying to my mom about it again, she surprised me by bursting into tears, too.  Now my mom was a very emotional person, but generally she would just get teary eyed over things.  Seeing her sobbing really took me off guard.  And then she told me how she was just so sad for me and that there was just nothing she could do to make it better, and she would make it better if she could....I do not think she realized it at the time, but she did make things better, because she really got it.  She really understood and empathized with how disappointed I was...and then she told me to dry my tears, and move on enjoying the opportunity I had been given.  And that is what I did.  I am sure in her mind she may have been thinking that the whole choir thing wasn't really that big of deal ( and looking back it wasn't!) but she took the time to understand me by just crying with me.

A while back, one of my girls had a disappointment...instead of giving her a lecture on how it would all turn out for the better, I just let myself really feel her sadness (sometimes that is hard for me as I am not a terribly sympathetic person)...and we shared some tears together... and then we dried our tears and moved on...another lesson from my mama.  I am forever grateful to Mom...I just felt like she really got me, that she really understood me and was always there for me through thick and thin.  I think my siblings felt the same way.

(Now that the years have passed, we can joke about it now...my sister Mel really didn't have much of a desire to be in a specialty choir and tried out just for the fun of it...of course, she made it...and never was really sure how she felt about singing in that choir.  She and I always have a good laugh about that!  In this picture she is not in her choir dress, but it would have been taken around the same time)