Something Is Always on Fire

by Measha Brueggergosman

  I say none of this during our relationship, but Jacob, insightful man that he is, eventually grows wise to my thinly veiled (albeit well-intentioned) contempt. To spare his ego, I am content to sacrifice my own standing, since it will still be intact after he inevitably leaves me.

  In the beginning Jacob is not emasculated. He is simply made to feel like he is being given access to experiences in which he always knew he could thrive. And he does . . . at first. Until he realizes the implications of none of it having been built by or belonging to him. He has no ownership. My life is like a kingdom behind glass, and in response, he either takes on a sense of entitlement or he’s overly grateful. But I do not want him to feel indebted to me. A man indebted to a woman is the height of un-sexiness. Jacob will soon come to that conclusion on his own, but for now he is sucked into what I offer as my “life.”

  At his core Jacob is kind-hearted. An old soul who is perhaps a bit naive. I tell him repeatedly that none of this—the fame, the attention—is real. What we have is real. But, I’m also thinking that I’m not sure if that’s entirely true, either. But I want him to believe it. Jacob is not maliciously manipulative, but he likes to have the upper hand (and I don’t mind giving it to him when the stakes are immaterial). He sees me as having chosen him, even though I make him feel like he chose me himself. It’s a win-win. Until it’s not.

  Beyond his desire to have his own balls back—to make his own money, to keep his own schedule, to make his own choices, to have his own success—my relationship with Jacob ultimately ends because I’m constantly dangling a life in front of him that I know he will never be able to belong to. (I remain openly married during these relationships, after all.) It is equally plausible that Jacob eventually decides I’m crazy and wants to get as far away from me as possible.

  As someone who can invoke a sense of intimacy from the jump, I know that the best part of any relationship with any Jacob is when I repeatedly create scenarios that allow him to believe I could be his. And the best parts of my relationship with him are when I can fantasize about somehow fitting into whatever exotic world Jacob has revealed to me: a niche culture; a language I don’t speak (or wish I spoke more fluently); a lifestyle; an exotic profession, philosophy, sport or cuisine. You name it, I consume it and it endears Jacob to me because I wholeheartedly embrace him.

  Jacob introduces me to his whole family, his circle of friends, his world. I assimilate myself into everything that is him because I love him and want to be a part of whatever matters to him. The reverse cannot be said. That doesn’t make Jacob selfish. Quite the opposite. He gets rejected at the border of the life I’ve sworn to protect, and eventually he starts to feel that inequity between us. He feels exposed in the gap between all that he has given and all that I have taken. It dawns on him (slowly) that he will never truly have me. He concludes that it will never be enough.

  If that’s not ruthless enough, Jacob doesn’t know that I dug my heels even deeper into my own sovereignty when I had my sons. There is a force field around my offspring that no one can penetrate. At least, that’s how I have felt up to this point, and I’ve met no one who possesses whatever it would take to change that. Including their father. Don’t get me wrong. He is an amazing father. But my boys grew in my stomach, and although the father-son relationship is life defining, it’s not the same as the bond between mother and son. My boys came from my soul and are my greatest accomplishment. My sons and I are not a quid pro quo. I’m not going to go introducing them to some random Jacob, no matter how much access he’s given me to his life.

  The tender morsels of myself that I do offer him would never, ever fully satisfy or sustain him, or our relationship. They are also possibly not what he was looking for in the long term. Exciting and novel, yes. But when I’m reading the receipts, I clearly needed to be someone else, somewhere else, doing something else, with less going on and more time or commitment or understanding or whatever. Jacob realizes that I am in truth very selfish and uncompromising. Maybe that’s what first attracted him to me, but now? It’s really stickin’ in his craw. I like to think I became an exceptional part of his process of elimination.

  The heartache I experience when he (inevitably) leaves me is real, prolonged and deep. Despite all the dissecting, I do know that I loved Jacob with my whole heart. I went to great lengths to bring him joy, and my investment was real. It was impossible to reconcile this great loss with the love and commitment I felt for my husband, whom I also loved with my whole heart. They simply did not exist in the same space. In my mind, they were compartmentalized, separate and unconnected.

  As the veil lifted for my dear Jacob, and he realized how narrow his access to me actually was, his disillusionment would send him into fits of mystified not-quite-anger and then, eventually, radio silence. I could always see the end coming, even though I fought hard and did my best to suck out every juicy tidbit and stave off the inevitable. At the outset with a Jacob, I seemed so generous, but in actual truth I was a chemist throwing him in a petri dish to see how he’d react under different forms of duress and newness. I pushed and prodded and pressured and pleaded until he broke.

  I am not friends with the early Jacobs, the ones to whom I was truly open and innocent. We don’t check in or hang out. After you’ve seen someone’s Oh God! face, it’s hard to un-see it in polite company. I don’t know how I didn’t connect the dots at the time, but I was simultaneously engaged in the traditional process of elimination—also known as dating—while also being someone’s wife. I killed two birds with one stone, and a little bit of me died at the hands of my deception and infidelity, as well. Now, through a process of trial, error and elimination, I am happily independent. The only ex I’m interested in being friends with—one of two men I’ve ever truly loved—is the one I gave myself to first. The one who gave me the two beautiful boys who put my world on its axis.

  Part of truly being inside someone is also knowing when you’ve hit the unyielding wall. I knew my husband had reached his breaking point with me because he couldn’t look me in the eye. It’s like he had moved on and I was an afterthought that he had folded up and neatly tucked in the glove compartment in order to get back to driving his own life. He gave me the worst case of freezer burn in the history of the Arctic. He looks at me now like he knows exactly what I’m incapable of, how I’ve betrayed him, and like he has to get me out of the way so he can clear his head and make room for his next family. I feel like he won’t listen to a word I say because he assumes it’s a lie. And it’s true, I’ve lied to him more than enough. Yet I can absorb all that because he is completely devoted to our boys. I can tell he has more he wants to do with his life and he is resolved to me not being involved. This is the wall I walked into every time I came home from a gig during the months we were living together but apart. It’s an agony I do not wish on my worst enemy but one that I earned. I do my best to describe it, because I again refuse to believe that I’m the only person to have ever gone through this. And as long as he shoots that venom at me and not at my boys, I will pay my penance, swallow my medicine and take my lashes.

  Before I had children, if I loved someone, I would give the person access to all the material things that, ultimately, make people comfortable but not happy—the house, the money, the dinners, the hype. I like those things, but I’m not attached to them, because they’re an illusion. The real motivation behind my work is the process to which no one is privy and for which I get no glory (save for knowing I’ve done my due diligence): highlighting a new score, coming to terms with how much music I have to learn and how much work it’s going to be not only to learn it but to sing it until it feels comfortable, second nature. I get excited just thinking about it! Because then, in the same order every time, there’s the translation or deciding what the text is about. I decide on the big emotions in the music: Is this happy or sad and why? If there’s time, I’ll do some light harmonic analysis to see where I fit in the compositional scheme of things. I do an inner happy dance a
s I write in my international phonetic alphabet (IPA) symbols over every syllable; fill in every accidental; colour-code the time signatures, the dynamic markings, the key changes, the composer’s notes; and then (finally) I start to learn the actual music by playing my melody over and over and over with the bass line and the instrumental cue that precedes it so that I can understand my harmonic context and get my pitch from them.

  Let’s say I start with twenty-four bars of singing. I will isolate the section and sing it on every vowel down the octave, lip-trill (or motorboat) it in the actual register, re-sing it on every vowel (still no words), and then I’ll speak the words to the twenty-four bars in rhythm—with the metronome that has been beating this whole time anyway. I’ll say the section over and over and over until my mouth has conditioned itself around the words and I know what consonant is coming, and plant the muscle memory of the shape of the vowel that comes after it. I do this with every intersection where vowel meets consonant meets vowel again. I train my jaw to relax and hinge freely instead of tightening itself to the consonant I’m about to shape, I flatten my tongue (in vain, because I have a tongue that sometimes moves in rhythm to my vibrato when I sing in my higher register), and then I proceed to sing the line, in tempo, but only on vowels so that I can make sure I’m not wasting any air when I finally do add the consonants. I do not add said consonants until the vowels are clear and pure and distinguishable from one another—not some gobbled, mushy mess of imprecision. Pure. I might go back and repeat this process again to make sure I can hear the melody I’ve just learned in my head before I have to create pitch. That’s the only way I can be sure it’s totally internalized. Only then will I add the consonants, bar by methodical bar, making sure my t’s and d’s are released properly, that my l’s are placed forward enough that I don’t swallow the vowel (which would disturb the flow of the legato by changing the vowel’s place of resonance) and my upper lip springs upward whenever there is a p, b or m, for the same reason. It won’t be perfect. I won’t be happy with it. But it will be time to move on to the next twenty-four bars.

  To any young, inexperienced, lazy or unemployed singers out there, I would humbly advise that you make your peace with (good) singing and musicianship being this much work. I’m sure there are singers better than me who do much more! Who are more thorough, more disciplined; who speak more languages; whose lives are wholly dedicated to their voice, its health and what it sounds like. For me, the balance and variety of my life are what make me a good artist. But, my dear young singer, you need to learn who you are and how you work. But it is a lot of work. If you enjoy the solitude and the repetition of the uncompromised, then this job is for you. But it doesn’t just happen. All those singers we look up to—the Jessyes and Kiris and Pavarottis and Montserrats and Renées and Cecilias and Placidos and Leontynes—they didn’t just stumble into excellence. It wasn’t luck that made them fabulous. It was a willingness to put in the extra hours, beat the pavement, and a refusal to believe they were put on this earth to do anything else.

  Truthfully? You are onstage maaaybe 5 percent of your whole career. The rest of the time is spent, at least in my case, creating a life that makes it easier and more fulfilling to do that. I understand, from the outside looking in (at least before you picked up this book—ha!), that my life appears very generous and ample and varied. And I enjoy sharing this luxury with people I love, especially with someone seeing it for the first time. But my real reward is in executing the lessons that I learned from Mary and Edith, as well as the coaches who made me better than I was. My real reward is troubleshooting my vocal technique and rendering things easier or more efficient. The closer I get to any subject, the less willing I am to see what would’ve been clearer had I kept my distance. And when your friends see things that you can’t, don’t blame your friends. Take what they say into consideration because they love you. But if you’re bullheaded like me, you’ll need to come to your own conclusions, in your own time.

  In the fall of 2009, when I arrived back in Toronto from a trip to Korea, they were standing in the arrivals terminal at the airport in a trio, waiting to save me from myself: my husband (who had moved out of our house two months before during our first separation), my father and my brother. My husband had staged an intervention. While his concern was undoubtedly well-meaning, I could never respond positively to that kind of pressure. I’m not sure if I’ve fully forgiven that group that gathered, but even now I’m not sure what else they could have done that would have gotten my attention. I’d had my blinders on for quite some time and had convinced myself I needed to stay focused in order to keep working. The reality was that I didn’t want to deal with any of the trouble—financial, health, marital—I’d gotten myself into and Jacob was the most accessible escape. But I wasn’t about to tell them that.

  I went with the Interventionists to the Toronto home that, according to a separation agreement, I now owned, along with the mortgage and all our debt. The best neighbour in the world, who’d been staying in my house, was waiting in the living room. He was accompanied by a collection of my closest friends. I don’t want to name names because who was there wasn’t important. There were people I trusted, and they were there to right a ship they were convinced was on course to run aground.

  Each person spoke to me in turn and I listened to everyone, but I heard nothing. When I wasn’t dumbfounded by the shock of it all, I was seething mad and concentrating on not giving them the satisfaction of seeing me cry. Their words were drowned out by the rage throbbing in my head. I think I could’ve sung the actual pitch that rang in my ears I was so angry. I could taste blood in my mouth, and at times I was so overwhelmed by the intrusion that I was on the verge of blacking out. I kept silent. It was me against them, and although I could understand what they’d hoped to accomplish, I was not going to give them anything. Not. One. Millimetre. It was all so humiliating. I like to think it would eventually dawn on some of them that there was no way this was going to work on me, but by then it was too late. I’d already shut down. First I was publicly mortified at the airport, and now I was being privately shamed by the only people I had trusted. I felt ganged up on and betrayed, because they had clearly been talking about me and devising a plan behind my back. How little did my family and friends know me? Why would they approach me by committee? I felt completely alone.

  Mary was there on the phone. As always, she was the best. Strong and upbeat, but slightly bewildered, she said, “I’m not really sure what I’m doing here, but what I do know is that these people clearly love you.” How horrifying! I could hear in her voice that this all felt a bit too personal for her to be involved in but that she cared enough for me to be part of something she had likely been told would help.

  No one knew what was going on with me, apparently. I was unreachable. I wasn’t present. I was running from my fear about my mortality and I had disappeared into my gallivanting, disappeared into my work schedule, disappeared into my guilt and, according to them, I was nowhere to be found. And they were worried where it would all end if they didn’t voice their concerns.

  Of course they were right! I was completely lost, I had no idea what I wanted, I didn’t know where my priorities had gone and nothing seemed to have any meaning. I felt dead inside and was jumping from high to high—professional and recreational—in the hunger to feel something. One thing with all the Jacobs is that they tended to insist they were always right. Which made me? You guessed it. Always wrong. But still I was willing to bear it because I thought it was all I deserved, considering how badly I’d treated my husband and how I’d blown up the only relationship in which I truly flourished as a Christian, a woman and a partner. I believed I deserved all the hardship that could rain down on me, because I was a cheater and a liar and I didn’t deserve to be loved properly, so why not be with some guy? Why not allow myself to go into crippling debt? I didn’t deserve to have anything anyway. And I certainly didn’t deserve to be happy.

  After my husband moved ou
t (the first time) and I had confessed my infidelities to my family, my brother was the first to reach out. The eldest, my brother, who is quite possibly the wisest human I know, told me that no matter how much I felt I had screwed up, I was not to live my life motivated by guilt. I had a family who loved me (all of me!) and I was not to keep punishing myself over and over for the wrongs for which God—and this family—could forgive me. He repeated that accepting forgiveness was just as important as asking for it. He told me that the process of forgiving yourself was ongoing and would require several attempts, and that if we were not careful, we could fall prey to satan wanting to keep us down and sink us lower than we ever thought possible because satan prowls about like a roaring lion looking for someone to devour (1 Peter 5:8).

  Seven years later I’m in the same position for the same reasons, but this time I will not allow my guilt to shame me into abusing myself like it did during that difficult period. I can see the parallels between my life then and my reality now, and I have chosen to strive for a different outcome. I already feel blessed this time around, because instead of a dissected aorta, I have two beautiful sons; instead of trying to keep a house in Toronto, I am trying to keep a house in Nova Scotia, close to my parents. I am older and the stakes are higher. Though my marriage would reconcile in 2010, it will likely end permanently in 2017. And the end of my marriage will force me to become what I should already be by now: financially responsible and independent. It might take me a decade, but I’ll get there. I have already said that God won’t use what you don’t have, so I refuse to obsess about what I’ve lost. And now that I have tiny eyes watching my every bob and weave, I need them be confident Mama is a fighter they can bet on.