If it doesn't work for the family, it doesn't work.

Five years ago, Seth was suddenly ejected (read: fired) from his dream job.  It was a shocking and violent end to a short-lived but long-sought-after career.  Since the tender age of 14, he had dreamed of being a guitar tech for a major-label band (probably U2 at the time because, well, U2 in the 90’s), and the previous summer, he had gotten his big break as a touring guitar tech on a stadium tour with a major American band.  We had hit the big time.  Or so we thought.

It’s funny how things like “dreams” and “career paths” can be so damn blinding.  It’s funny how we can be willing to sacrifice so much for these things, especially when fame and reputation, or, in a different context, “God’s will” and “destiny” come into play.  The waters get very muddy and it can be difficult to actually discern the right path.  As Dante Alighieri so eloquently wrote nearly 800 years ago in his Inferno, “In the middle of the road of our lives, I re-found myself in a dark wood, for the right way was lost”. 

The day Seth left for this summer tour, our daughter, Harper, was 11 days old.  Fender was 2.5.  I was 100% on board with this family decision.  I totally expected this to pay off in the long run, and being a single mom for a summer seemed like a small price to pay for a chance of a lifetime.

About 3 weeks into this ordeal, I was cooking dinner.  The babies were downstairs watching Dinosaur Train.  I finally felt like I had a handle on my life as the shock of single motherhood had dulled to a silent throbbing pain, as opposed to the sharp, breath-sucking tear-jerker that it had been.  I was learning to cope. At some point I thought it best to check on the newborn who was (sort of) being watched by her slightly-older brother while I cooked, so I traipsed down the stairs absentmindedly.

And that’s how I broke my foot. 

Tumbling forward and down the basement stairs in a flurry of surprise and horror, I heard the bone snap, loudly, over the inane chatter of the TV and my own yelps if dismay.

Looking back, I wonder what idiot would willingly allow her partner to leave her for six weeks with a newborn and a 2-year-old.  I had no family in town and I was the only one of my friends at the time with babies.  Everyone else was kidless.  Gloriously kidless.  But I was so attached to the idea of my husband’s success in the music biz, so committed to our idea of success and “livin’ the dream” that I completely ignored common sense.  I just thought it would all work out eventually.  That our sacrifices would be well-rewarded down the line.

Nothing could have been further from reality.  A year later, after Seth missed most of Harper’s first year, the band fired him and all that sacrifice went up in smoke.  We were back at ground zero, our family and our marriage worse for the wear.  It was then that we began to learn the most important lesson of our lives:  If it doesn’t work for our family, then it doesn’t work. 

The months that followed that momentous firing are forever sealed in my memory as some of the best days of my life.  We borrowed a vintage trailer from a friend and hauled it across the country with our aptly named Honda Odyssey for 10 weeks.  It took that long to rebuild and re-connect.  It took that long to remember how to be together. 

In the years between that fateful summer and now, we have settled on this: no destiny, no career, no success is worth sacrificing our greatest treasure: each other.

It is, therefore, with great trepidation that we enter the music industry again.  I feel eternally grateful for that terrible and beautiful experience 5 years ago because it set us up to do our music the only way we can, the only way I want: in the context of family. 

We Did It! Alright Alright Returns Part 1

Well, wow.

We did it.

We hauled ourselves, our children, Katelin, our gear, and our vintage 1959 trailer across the country and back.  5700 miles, nine house shows, twenty-one nights, countless truck stops, a few state parks, a national monument, one national park, several national forests, and one Crazy Horse later, we have returned to our Colorado crash pad across from the train tracks.

It was epic, this tour we dubbed the “Tin Cup Nights Tour”.  Not because of the raging after-parties or screaming fans busting their way to the front of the stage, and not because we made out like bandits financially. I mean, don’t get me wrong, I‘ll take all of those things AND an invitation to open for Nathaniel Rateliff and the Nightsweats.  But this tour was successful because it proved something epic to us: that this weird musical lifestyle can actually work for us, for our family.

For so so long, I was convinced that I had to either be a mom or a performer.  The traditional avenues to success in the music industry are woefully un-family-friendly.  Believe me, I’ve experienced it, and I’ve watched other families go through it.  I’ve played shows that started at midnight, gotten home at three am and then woken up with the kids at six am.  I’ve watched wives become single parents for whole swaths of time while their husbands toured.  Heck, I’ve been one of those wives.  Ugh.  I still shudder when I think of those days.

How in the world could we possibly make touring work for our family?  I mean, there was no way we were going to let our kids sit in a nasty greenroom for and hour and a half while we played to half-listening, half-drunk people at 11pm.  And we aren’t quite at the stage where we can hire a full-time nanny to tag along with us, whisking the kids away at bedtime while mommy and daddy sing pretty songs.  Nope.  It had to be a whole-family affair.  A road-trip with some singing involved, and a few strategically placed destinations to buoy our cute little charges along the way.  It had to be musical, professional and family-centric. Somehow, almost accidentally, we struck that balance.

In the following days and weeks, I will tease this out, devoting a blog post to each of the intentional or completely accidental tenants of our success.  We are home now, and honestly, I just want to get back on the road.  It’s easier there.  Life on the road is definitely difficult physically, but oh! The freedom from the trappings of houses, pets, lawns to be watered, pianos to dust!

The duality of this life we have chosen, the necessary stasis of home and family and school and soccer and music lessons juxtaposes, sometimes jarringly, with the equally necessary gypsy-like life of a troubadour.  It is not for the faint of heart. This re-entry into the Typical American Life has been like shifting from fifth to first gear.  Clearly, there are lessons to be learned on this side of the adventure, but thank God we had the adventure in the first place.  

Starting Over

Seth got "let go" six and a half weeks ago. It was one of those ugly incidents full of bewilderment and betrayal that ends up feeling like someone took a blow torch to one of your appendages. An arm, a foot. When he told me I was driving, leaving a long day of killing time at the mall behind me. I was good at that whole how-to-fill-a-day-with-enough-to-help-you-forget-your-loneliness thing. I guess you could say his job was prestigious, important. Not in a white-collar sense, but he worked for important people, and was on the road to his dream. And as a result, I spent a large part of this last year as a single, albeit, married mother of two.

It was a slow descent, that loneliness. Like a long dreamy Southern Belle descending a spiral staircase on a torpid Georgia afternoon. It was full of valor and idealism. I was such a good wife, so committed to my husband's dream that I thought the emptiness almost charming. I had found so many creative ways to entertain the kids that my life felt like one long succession of play dates and trips to the zoo.

So, when he got fired, I felt like I had gotten fired too. And I was mad. Mad at his employers, mad at the company, mad at the industry, and mad at his employers again. My sense of outrage was heroic, fueled by my loss of identity and that ugly feeling of being victimized, of being scorned.

But immediately Seth and I were a team again, and that felt amazing. My typically non communicative husband had suddenly begun to talk to me constantly about how he was feeling, and I was over the moon! Conversations would just start up at all times of the day and night. Most of them revolved around his ex-job, but some were the beginnings of forward thinking for our family. And suddenly, in the midst of this great tragedy, I started to feel alive again, for the first time in a year.

Which means I was dying before and hadn't realized it.

I guess I had been like the toads my mom always warned me about.

"Don't you be like those toads, " she'd say, and I would roll my eyes.

"You put them in a pot of cold water, put the pot on the stove and then wait while the water heats

up. Those frogs don't know they're in hot water until it's too late 'cause they're cold blooded and

their bodies just adjust to the heat 'till they die!"

I think secretly she's always wanted to try to actually boil a frog, she's just that curious.

But, Mom, you have a point.

I guess I believed so blindly in my life that I thought loneliness, emptiness and lackluster were just par for the course, and as the water "heated up" I absorbed it, thinking I was somehow being righteous or a good wife. Yeah, good and miserable.

Blech. I want to scratch and re-write. I want to crumple that sorry acceptance of mediocrity, of a life of chosen unhappiness, of voluntary aloneness and toss it baseball style into the deepest darkest trash bin I can think of. To think that I was beginning to sacrifice my own soul for the comforts of steady income, a husband with a high-profile job, and *maintaining* said comforts!

We are leaving this town for a while to go re-write our story. Our dream right now is to buy an old bus that's been converted to an RV that runs on Waste Vegetable Oil (WVO) and drive it across the country to a few weddings, a family reunion, and some good old-fashioned family vacation time. We leave Monday, actually, and, um, honestly, we still do not own a vehicle that will transport our family across the country. I have said many times that I feel like Noah, only for me, the flood has already occurred, I'm just herding and packing and praying like crazy that the boat is going to appear!

And, dude, I know that I sound utterly insane.

Stay tuned for more news. I promise I will blog more.