MADAME BUTTERFLY
We found the recording in a box of my mother's things she saved from High school. Amid programs of plays she’d starred in, dances she’d attended, dried corsages from dating. A 45, the label handwritten in careful script: Marlene Threet, Juilliard submission.
My sister slid it onto the turntable. The scratch and pop, then my mother's voice filled the room. Nineteen years old, singing an aria from Madame Butterfly.
Her voice soared and fell and climbed again, full of longing.
I was twelve. I'd never heard her sound like that. Not in sacrament meeting, where she sang hymns with perfect Mormon propriety. Not at home, where she sang while folding laundry or hummed lullabies we'd long outgrown.
This voice was something else. Hungry. Alive. Uncontained.
"She gave this up?" my sister whispered.
For my father. For marriage. For us.
The aria ended. The record crackled into silence.
Neither of us knew what to say.
THE FINISH LINE
At fifteen, I made the Varsity Track Team and won the 100-yard dash in the district country meet.
My father left work early to watch me run. He stood in the stands near the finish line, rare pride flickering across his face as I crossed. That night at dinner, he told the story three times,my time, my placement, my determination.
My mother set plates on the table and smiled but said nothing.
I didn't notice her silence then. I was too busy basking in my father's attention, something I'd spent years learning to earn. Achievement. Discipline. Toughness. These were the currencies he recognized.
I chose them. Chose him.
And in choosing, I pushed her further into shadow.
THE BREAKING
The migraines started when I was a young teen.
She'd retreat to her bedroom, curtains drawn, a cold washcloth across her forehead. The house would go quiet. We'd tiptoe past her door, speaking in whispers.
They came after church plays closed, ones she had directed and coached. After Relief Society meetings where she'd smiled through criticism about the ward's visiting teachers outreach. After my father's rages, when she'd absorbed his fury and said nothing.
When she developed nodules on her throat and couldn’t sing, she believed God was punishing her. That's what she told her bishop. She was too proud, wasn't righteous enough, wasn't faithful enough, wasn't enough.
After nine children, she did lemon juice fasts to keep her figure after each baby. She bore her testimony with trembling conviction. She performed perfection until her body broke under the weight.
But I didn't see it as the system crushing her.
I saw it as weakness.
THE REAL WORLD
My father valued the real world. Facts. Achievement. Intellectual rigor.
My mother valued beauty. Music. Art. The warmth of unconditional love.
I learned early which one mattered more.
I stopped daydreaming. Stopped playing the guitar. I focused on running, on grades, on debate team. Things that could be measured. Things that earned his nod of approval.
When my father dismissed my mother's parenting style as "ineffective and soft-hearted," I said nothing.
My silence was agreement.
I became stoic. Intellectual. Driven. I became my father's daughter, and in doing so, I became complicit in making my mother small.
THE CIRCLE
In college, I joined a women's support group. We sat in a circle in a basement classroom, reading about patriachy, about socialized gender roles, about the ways systems shape us before we know we're being shaped.
I understood it intellectually first. Saw how the Mormon Church had molded my mother into silence, into service, into disappearing.
But understanding didn't touch the anger yet. Didn't undo years of choosing my father's approval. Didn't make me stop seeing her as the cautionary tale,the woman who gave up everything and got nothing.
It would take another decade before I felt it.
THE APOLOGY
Eventually, I realized the damage I’d done in siding with my father. I called my mother.
"I'm sorry," I said. "For choosing Dad. For not being more supportive of you. For all the years I made you feel like loving me wasn't enough."
The phone line was quiet for a long time.
"Oh, honey," she finally said. "I never blamed you for that."
But I blamed myself.
BECOMING A MOTHER
When my children were born, I thought I'd parent differently.
Strong. Logical. No guilt trips, no passive aggression, no martyrdom.
I'd be the opposite of my mother.
But you can't raise a child on stoicism alone. You can't teach emotional intelligence by avoiding emotions. You can't build connection through achievement. I realized I’d also adopted my father’s anger, and that it came out when parenting my children. It was unacceptable to me. I had to learn other ways to be a good parent.
I needed the soft skills I'd spent years rejecting.
I needed to know how to sit with feelings instead of solving them. How to create beauty for its own sake. How to love without conditions, without keeping score.
My mother had given me all of that. I'd just been too busy chasing my father's approval to notice.
RECONCILIATION
Long before she died, we reconciled, and I enjoyed two decades of making it up to my mother.
I told her about the recording. About how hearing her voice, that young, hungry, uncontained voice, had cracked something open in me.
"I was good, wasn't I?" she said, smiling.
"You were extraordinary."
"Well," she said. "I made different choices. I don't regret them."
I wanted to argue. Wanted to rage against what had been taken from her. But she was at peace with it in a way I couldn't be.
Maybe that's the difference between us.
She survived the system by accepting it. I survived by leaving it.
Neither choice was wrong. Both came with costs.
REACHING FOR LIGHT
Here's what I didn't understand when I was young:
My mother wasn't weak for choosing softness in a system that demanded hardness. She was brave.
She wasn't failing when she couldn't protect me from my father's rage. She was surviving in the only way the system allowed.
She wasn't small. The church made her small. My father made her small.
And I, reaching for the light, pushed her further into shadow.
FULL CIRCLE
I think about the recording sometimes.
That aria from Madame Butterfly. The story of a woman who gives up everything for love, for a man who never sees her as an equal. Who dies waiting for him to return.
My mother must have known that story when she sang it. Must have felt its tragedy in her nineteen-year-old throat.
And still she chose marriage. Chose silence. Chose to make herself small enough to fit into my father's dreams, the church's expectations, a life that was never meant to hold her.
I don't know if she ever mourned what she lost.
But I mourn it now. For both of us.
MY MOTHER’S GIFTS
What my mother couldn't give me was simple:
She couldn't give me what was never given to her.
She couldn't model ambition when ambition was called selfishness. Couldn't teach me to take up space when she'd been trained to disappear. Couldn't show me how to want things when wanting was a sin.
But here's what she did give me:
The ability to love without conditions. To find beauty in small moments. To create art for its own sake. To forgive.
It took me twenty years to recognize those as gifts instead of weaknesses.
To see that I needed both parents' strengths to become whole.
To understand that the friction between us was never personal failure.
It was evidence of a system doing exactly what it was designed to do.
WHAT I KNOW NOW
I wish I still had the recording. I long to listen to it.
My mother's voice, nineteen and full of possibility, singing about love and sacrifice and waiting.
I’d hear her differently now.
Not as the woman who chose wrong. Not as the cautionary tale.
But as a girl who had a gift, and gave it up, and somehow kept singing anyway.
That takes a different kind of courage than I understood when I was young.
The kind that doesn't announce itself. Doesn't demand recognition.
The kind that survives.
With Love,
Lyn
