My mother’s favorite musical was A Chorus Line.
For the uninitiated, it follows seventeen hopefuls through an audition for the chorus of a Broadway show. One by one, they make their way down the line, sharing their hopes, dreams, fears, and vulnerabilities (affectingly enough to win the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1976, a rarity for a musical). At the end we see who gets cast and who is left pounding the pavement. But first, there is the penultimate number, “What I Did for Love.”
Kiss today goodbye
The sweetness and the sorrow
Wish me luck, the same to you
But I can’t regret
What I did for love…
The original cast recording was a mainstay in my mom’s car, serving as the soundtrack across multiple decades and life stages. Over the many (many) hours I heard this song, I wrote it off as being about romantic or familial love — the sacrifices we make for those we care about. (Hell, I performed in the damn show at summer stock when I was twenty-two, where I sang this song every night for a month, but still didn’t let it sink in.)
It would take me years to grasp that it’s about another kind of love. The kind that drives us to live in ways others might find questionable; to sacrifice what’s wise or comfortable or certain or socially acceptable; to put ourselves on the line; to keep going when it’s difficult or even painful. The kind of love that, from the outside, can make people scratch their heads in confusion as to why someone would choose such a thing, chase such a thing, face poor odds or public scrutiny in the presence of another available path.
The irony nearly makes me laugh: If my mom didn’t want me to be an artist — which she very much did not — driving all over the state of New Jersey blasting “What I Did for Love” was a pretty strange way to communicate it.
“Life is hard enough,” she would say. “Why would you choose to make it difficult?”
Cue the song.
*
I was thinking about this lately because I haven’t finished my novel.
It’s a familiar pattern. I make room in my schedule, because I want to hold space for this thing. Then I start to panic — about finances and timing and “progress,” whatever the hell that means — and go scrambling to find other work, until I am left with no time or brain space for (my own) writing. I have been engaged in this cycle for, oh, my entire adult life.
But here’s the truth: