I always wanted to be a wife and a mother, but I didn’t know that I’d forget how to be ‘me’ when I became them.
I graduated from Saint Louis University with a BA in Communications and married Emerson (someone who it turns out could have used a Comm class, or two). I took up a career in real estate because it gave me the opportunity to have a flexible schedule, raise the kids and pursue my lifelong love of painting. But somewhere along the way, my life got smaller and so did I. When I stopped painting and started painting by numbers, my Open Eyes closed.
But real estate was like art, at least to me. I’ve always loved people, probably a little too much: I’ve been called a people pleaser, one too many times for it to have been a compliment. But real estate allowed me to get families into happy homes and out of unhappy ones. I just didn’t know my suburban home would be one of those. I’d bent over backwards trying to make it work with my husband, but I was beginning to think that people pleasing tendency of mine might be the issue.
I needed to take a stand and reclaim my story, but I should have known that others would tell it before I had my chance to. Because when I walked into a weekly Scout and Cellar wine club and Bachelorette watch party, I knew my friends had heard about me and Emerson. They went quiet and watched me with pity, as if I was one of the contestants who had received a rose. I felt like a Victim, and any chance of reclaiming my story vanished. But then, May Dove pulled me to the side and told me about this secret manuscript that was floating around St. Louis that was getting ‘families singing together again’. I was skeptical. I had no idea what that even meant.
Emerson and I tried every kind of marriage counseling. Nothing worked. I’d just discovered my family had a trust fund and I knew this divorce was going to get messy.
“A musical?” I asked May. That was her big solution. And how did this ‘family system’ that this secret manifesto was promising to fix, tie into the capitalist system that broke my husband, and our marriage?
But I didn’t care about what the other women there might think in that moment. I was done people pleasing. I figured I’d give it a try and go to the Halloween party at Songa Studios St Louis in Tower Grove. I decided to wear my happy wife costume.
When I got home from the Bachelorette watch party, with my first piece of the secret manuscript in hand, Emerson and the kids were watching TV on their own separate screens in our living room. We were living under one roof, but we were hardly living.
How was I supposed to know it would their screens, the very screens that divided us, would bring us all together?
before your very eyes, and ears, at songa.live.