Our daughter, Carolyn, just turned three. It’s hard to believe! The time has been so fast and so intense. Has it been as good as expected? It’s hard to remember, really, what we expected. We are blessed to have a healthy, intelligent, and personality-filled young lady sharing our lives.
She seems to have inherited our love of singing, as well as our dramatic flair and stubbornness. She has proved to be a real trouper, and a fine traveler, with an occasional grouch day or morning, just like the rest of us! She has loved the trains, planes, taxis, new hotel rooms, and new cities and countries. On our recent audition tour to Europe, Carolyn spent the night in five different French cities, visited Switzerland, Belgium, and Germany, and passed through Luxembourg. She is usually willing to try to say things in foreign languages to foreigners, which they love.
We have spent more time at home in Modesto, California than ever before, creating home life for us and for her. No doubt this has caused us to lose audition and job opportunities. We have both developed voice teaching studios at home, helping to smooth the financial way a bit and doing something of worth, as well.
We have both felt parenting to be overwhelming at times, and yet it has really given us so much joy and satisfaction and completion, that opera alone cannot and does not provide. We both feel that our perspective on our singing and our voices and our careers has changed a great deal, and we are much more relaxed about it (although not always!). And when good things happen in our careers, somehow we are able to enjoy them more. It’s a wonderful, complicated, thrilling, overwhelming, life-giving experience—one we wouldn’t give up for anything!
