Silent Night
By Laura Leinbach
@lauraleeme
It’s Christmas Eve morning, and the kids are at their dad’s house until noon. I sit down at the piano, flip open the keyboard, and play through “Silent Night,” a living room concert just for me. I guess it’s possible that my neighbors are listening. The shared wall connecting my house to theirs, a mirror-image of mine, is thick but not soundproof.
If they are bothered though, they probably would have said something in the weeks that have passed since I initially dug out my Christmas music in mid-November. In fact, since I moved into my fresh-start brick twin in August, they’ve commented on how quiet I am, though I wonder how that can be true on the days I have custody of my three kids five and under. I repeatedly beg them to use their indoor voices, if only for my own sanity.
When it’s just me, I do tend to keep it down. I don’t throw wild parties or blast the TV. My work from home activity flies under the radar too, with nothing louder than the gentle clacks of keys or laptop Zoom meetings. And up until a few weeks ago, I hadn’t touched the piano in at least a year.
Twenty-eight years ago, I walked up the steps to Mrs. Doris Ketner’s cheery yellow house for the very first time. She showed me how to cup imaginary bubbles with my tiny five-year-old hands to practice proper hand posture, and we clapped out rhythms as I learned note values. I went back once a week for the next eleven years for 30-minute lessons at the piano with Mrs. Ketner. I learned to read music the same year I learned to read words—letters and notes building a rich world within my grasp.
Through music, I first began to learn about myself. Sight-reading and expressiveness came naturally to me. Music theory was my weakness, and I’ve always hated finger exercises. Over the years, Mrs. Ketner challenged me to work through what wasn’t easy and find the value in what I didn’t like (see: Bach). She also knew what I loved (see: anything dark and moody). Nothing perked me up in a lesson like when she pulled out a crisp new piece of sheet music and said, “I picked this out for you; you’re going to like it.”
Through the songs I played, I could tell a story bigger, bolder, more sophisticated, and much more confident than with my voice. In my early teen years, when I didn’t get the world or my place in it, I could pound out a loud and angry melody on the keyboard to get out what I didn’t have words for.
Today, alone in my living room, I chuckle a little at the thought of this humble performance for an empty room compared to the real concerts I performed in when I was taking lessons. Recitals and competitions were another part of the education with Mrs. Ketner, and while getting up in front of a crowd didn’t turn the introverted little girl into an extrovert, it did help me grow a little braver. There was also nothing like the pressure of a performance to motivate me to spend more time on the bench practicing.
I played in shopping malls, grand cathedrals, and everything in between. Mrs. Ketner’s Christmas recitals, held in the common room of a local nursing home, were always my favorite of the year. I didn’t mind wearing a scratchy dress and uncomfortable tights when the Christmas spirit was in the air. Many times over the years, I played versions of “Silent Night,” and the sheet music on my piano’s music stand right now is from the last Christmas recital I performed in almost two decades ago.
This piano is nowhere near as nice as the baby grand of that final recital, though. This one was listed for free in a newspaper classified section a decade ago, and my family has lovingly grumbled through heaving it in and out of moving trucks four times since—all so I could have a piano of my own.
Back then, I thought I’d play all the time, and I dreamed about teaching tiny hands to cup imaginary bubbles and recite, “every good boy does fine” while learning about notes and music. In reality, the piano goes untouched most of the year, but when I hear the first strains of Christmas music on the radio or in the grocery store, I get nostalgic for the Christmas magic of recitals and memories, and feel pulled back to the bench.
I did play often as a newlywed. My husband worked evenings and Saturday mornings while I worked a traditional 40-hour workweek—leaving me with a lot of time by myself. But when we brought our first baby home two years into marriage, playing the piano was one of my first hobbies to go out the window. A baby now filled the previously empty evening and weekend hours, and I wasn’t about to risk waking her during naptime with piano practice.
When Christmas with a four-month-old rolled around, I wished for some literal silent nights and left the piano music tucked away inside the bench. But that baby grew, and motherhood got easier. I found time again here and there to play the piano. The next Christmas, that baby had grown into a toddler. I imagined she’d be enthralled by her mama making music out of thin air. Toddler and toys settled on the floor, I pulled out books of Christmas songs and began to play for her. She barely registered the sounds, then took her toys and wobbled off toward the steps, unimpressed.
In my piano lessons with Mrs. Ketner, there was always a shift in the weeks that led up to a performance. The focus changed from working on problem areas to “just keep going” mode.
“If you make a mistake, just play the next notes,” she would say. “Don’t keep repeating it; move on. That’s how you recover.” It didn’t matter if my music fell, my hair was in my face, or I played all the wrong notes. I’d just have to keep going to get past the mistake.
When I was about 12, I sat down at the piano in front of an auditorium of people to play “Funeral March of a Marionette,” and my memorized music evaporated from my head. I started, and it was wrong, but I kept playing. I’d get through a phrase, forget what came next, and stumble through a made-up, wrong mish-mash of notes. I started crying before I was halfway through but kept playing one wrong note after the other until I eventually, blessedly arrived at the end, completing the most disastrous performance of a song I’ve ever given or witnessed.
Only it wasn’t really the end because I still had to play another piece. My deepest wish was to disappear into the piano bench or leap up and run from the room. But the only way out was to keep going and finish the performance. My cheeks burned, and tears streamed down my face as I played the next piece exactly as it was written. The audience erupted into loud applause as I wiped the sleeve of my dress across my now snotty nose and puffy eyes, then shakily stood and bowed before scampering back to my seat in the front row. I’ll never forget the triumph and relief of that recovery.
Back in the present, the rust from not playing in months isn’t completely gone, but muscle memory combined with regular practice over the last few weeks has gotten “Silent Night” to sound less clunky and more peaceful. Between the new shared custody arrangement and working from home, I’ve had more time to play without anyone to bother or be bothered by than I have in years. The routines of my old life got thrown out the window, and I hate that my kids don’t spend every night in my house. It’s unfamiliar and hard, but there’s a new rhythm inside the upheaval if I’m willing to work it out.
I wince when my finger hits a wrong note in “Silent Night.” A pencil-mark artifact written decades ago by Mrs. Ketner’s shaky hand shows “C” over the offending note, placed to help me avoid this exact mistake. It sure would be nice if she was perched on a chair behind me like she was all those years ago in my lessons—or even better, if life came with little notes about mistakes to watch out for.
With practice, motherhood with one, two, and then three kids got easier, but my marriage did not. I was still parenting alone on nights and good portions of the weekends. Even when we were all together, I felt unimportant and ignored. We had the same conversations with promises to change, and “this time it’s different,” over and over again, followed by the same promises broken on repeat. I began to feel that my mistake was who I’d married, but I didn’t know what else to do but keep going.
Last Christmas, I couldn’t be bothered to dig out “Silent Night.” My third baby was five months old, and I was bone weary from living in a marriage I realized would never change. There would be no happily growing old together, but maybe I could keep going long enough to see the performance through until the kids were out of the house.
Then spring brought a global pandemic and a lockdown at home. It was impossible to avoid the problems in our relationship without work schedules and busy lives to hide behind. When I was forced to face the music, I realized that with nothing left to give or hope for, I had already stopped playing. My marriage was over, and I wasn’t bravely soldiering on through flubbed notes and forgotten melodies, I was sitting paralyzed at the bench in silence with tears streaming down my face.
Making the choice to file for divorce, upend my children’s lives, and start fresh was terrifying. I’d thought for so many years that a divorce would be the end of everything, and I couldn’t see the fresh beginning that would follow. I thought bravery was to just keep going no matter the cost, but sometimes the courageous choice is to let go and write something new.
The kids will be here soon to do Christmas Eve with me in our first year working through a strange duet of new holiday rhythms. I sit on the bench and take “Silent Night” from the top once more while I’m still alone. When I get to the end of the second verse, I smile, remembering the times I’ve played for an audience who thought the decrescendo (gradually quieter) and poco ritardando (just a little slow down) were signaling the end of the piece. It wasn’t uncommon for people to start clapping there, thinking the song was over.
“Just you wait,” I would think to myself, “I haven’t even played the best part yet.”
Guest essay written by Laura Leinbach. Laura is a single mom of three who logs 40+ hour weeks as a marketing director and is slowly coming around to the idea that “work-life balance” doesn’t actually exist. Unread emails and red notification bubbles make her twitchy, and Starbucks lattes are her favorite little luxury. When she's not at the office or chasing after little ones, she flexes her creative muscles by writing, cooking, and updating her century-old fresh-start home. Follow along on Instagram and her blog.