She was singing, and I was crying.

Standing there on a small bar room stage, long after she passed away was my mother, and she was singing. One evening last year,I was invited by my wife to attend a get together at a small intimate club to see a childhood friend of hers, Diane Durette, who became a locally known female singer. Shortly after we arrived I heard a voice from behind me, it was Diane and she had come over to greet us before she started to play. I turned to look at a pretty middle aged woman who I thought resembled someone I knew but I couldn’t quite place who she looked like. We exchanged introductions and then she made her way to the stage and started the first set. It was then that it hit me that she reminded me of my mother. Her face, hair and physical build was eerily reminiscent of my mother when she was younger. But the most important aspect of seeing this visage was the freedom of her personality.

She was not the mother who raised three sons, who bore the brunt of an abusive husband in order to try and spare her children his wrath. She was also not the mother who was born of a time where men were men but in actuality men were big kids who by societal excuses got away with too many mental and physical slashes.

Fortunately I was sitting facing the stage away from the others at the table so no one in the dimly lit room could see the tears that were silently running down my face during those first few songs until I could regain my composure. I wasn’t crying because of the pain of losing my mother so many years ago. I wept because she was finally free, that my mother in some strange twist of the universe was standing in front of me, free from all of the things that hindered her spirit before.

As I sat listening to Diane sing, it could also hear my mother, a mother who had been forced to be mute for so many years while she was alive was now being able to find her voice, to express herself, to raise her voice no longer in fear but to joyfully lift it up and share it with all who listened. I imagined that she, my mother, was able to finally realize her dream of being free, of being her self.

So I sat there while,

She was singing and I was crying.

Comparative pictures of Mother and Diane Durrett