Tip of my tongue to the back of my teeth. Hand on belly, thumb at my tummy button. This is the term she’s using. I chuckle. Might as well be nine again, ready to audition for Annie, the songs memorized and determination gleaming in my eyes.
I let sock feet sink into the crevices of the longsuffering slatted floor. My toes are tree roots imbibing breath. An “s” sound before vocal folds press together.
I sing.
Keep warm-ups simple at the beginning. Every music teacher knows this. I’ve offered a descending five note scale to more choristers than I can count, but at 43 I haven’t taken a lesson in years.
My new coach’s name is Caroline. “I’m not for everyone,” she said on the phone from her porch in West Virginia. “I won’t be offended if we do one lesson and you decide it’s not the right fit. But I’m a good diagnostician.”
Two minutes into the first lesson, she pinpoints what has been causing strain in my middle voice. “It’s tongue tension. The tongue is the strongest muscle in the body per square inch, and the back of yours is pushing down on your larynx.”
It’s simple, the answer I’ve wanted for almost a decade. I feel exposed and quavery: the elated child who got called back for the role of Annie and was told I cried so realistically and the older girl will play the part.
“You’re swallowing your sound,” Caroline says to my midlife eyes, which blink away embarrassed tears. “You take it back like an apology.”
She isn’t talking about my voice. She’s describing my career, my marriage, my life.
She tells me to move the tension from the back of my tongue to a gentle arch at the tip. “Imagine your tongue like a dolphin leaping. That’s good!” She nods and leans forward. “You don’t have to drop your jaw so much. Try again.” Her smile: torchlight.
As we finish the first lesson, she tells me I have natural placement. There is nothing wrong or damaged, just an outmoded pattern of holding tension. My voice – “the gift,” she calls it, is a big one. I don’t have to work so hard.
“This is how we heal a voice, with the simplest little exercise,” Caroline says. “Let it be a meditation. Don’t listen with your ears, the ears judge. Listen from your third eye. We are looking for sensation. Hand on your belly: include yourself in the conversation.”
Each day: the five-note scale between sips of tea.
In our second lesson, Caroline pays close attention to my breathing. She spots tension in my neck and sends me to my kitchen for a straw. “Purse the lips, move the tension forward. Inhale through the straw.” It takes me a while to get it because I usually sip drinks politely.
“All the air in the room is yours,” she exhorts me like a preacher. Again I’m a child, sucking down air instead of Dad’s root beer float.
At the top of the inhale, I pause like a gymnast visualizing her vault. Belly and ribcage expanding, balanced pressure for the onset of the sound, prepare the lower abdominal muscles to sustain the phrase.
Caroline notices. “A lot of people hold their breath when they think.” I admit I’m intent on getting it right, on being the A-plus student. She chuckles. “I don’t want you to try, I want you to play. Perfection is an insult to God.”
So I slurp air through the straw and let the sound out sloppy, simple, somehow more true. “That’s it,” she exclaims. “Sing in the space of joy.” My tears are relief now, and I shake them off more easily.
For decades I’ve nurtured the voices of others: choral conductor, voice coach, Montessori trainer, hospital chaplain, crisis therapist. Some of Caroline’s words I’ve said to my own voice students and clients, so I laugh to hear them come from someone else’s mouth. But I couldn’t have said them to myself, because a coach can’t be her own coach, just as a doctor can’t be their own doctor.
In nineteen months, I’ll wriggle out of my latest semi-plausible grasp at perfection. It will look like a perilous nosedive from my underpaid nonprofit career and an uncoupling from the man of everyone else’s dreams.
Friends and family will question my sanity and distance themselves. The person I poured myself into will prefer his pension to old promises. Some will call me brave; others will berate and belittle. Integrity comes at a price I don’t yet know how to pay.
I like to go back to that first lesson, to remember the cicadas outside my window, Caroline’s chubby dachshund yipping, a butter-yellow valance fluttering against the unforeseeable.
I close my eyes and breathe. I become the child who returned that day: nine years old, confident she deserves center stage.
I sing.
For a taste of dyadic voice work, check out my interview with voice coach Caroline Khella Hope, discovering & expressing your authentic voice.
