Something Is Always on Fire Read online

  But the singing itself is constantly kicking me in the tuchus. While some composers and styles seem to be an extension of my truest self, other music makes me feel stupid and slow, like I’ve never read a note in my life or taken a single voice lesson. There remain passages I’ll never get right, operas I’ll never sing and conductors and artistic directors who’ll never like me. I’m in a pretty consistent state of dissatisfaction stemming from how much needs to be done. I will die leaving behind untapped repertoire, remuneration, distinction and artistry.

  So why do it? In her book Big Magic, Elizabeth Gilbert writes that “holding yourself together through all the phases of creation is where the real work lies.” The phases of my creative process include every ounce of the daily grind of emails, paperwork, diaper changes, guilt, translations, delayed flights, jerks, budgeting, fevers, lost wallets, stolen passports, arguments, sinus infections, taxes and massive cell phone bills. I am tired pretty much all the time. I have zero job security and no unemployment insurance or retirement savings. Granted, I should probably do something about a lot of those things, but I’m too busy doing what I love to let all the garbage I have to eat in order to do it get in the way of me actually doing it. In other words, I know how committed I am to singing because I’m willing to put up with just about anything to do it. I have crossed an ocean to sing for one job, journeyed to remote parts of the world for the right diction coach, Skyped with directors who didn’t want me, stayed up all night doing translations, written countless emails to keep my career alive, travelled crazy distances to listen to those singers who really do it for me. I will fight for anything that feels expansive, restorative or strengthening, just so I can turn around and infuse that rejuvenation into my art.

  I try to keep my blinders on and run my own race, but I sometimes find myself blind with jealousy and envy, coveting the careers of my peers—and I don’t even narrow it down to classical singers! People have described me as happy and funny, perhaps even acquiescent, but the truth is, I want everything, all the time. I rarely live in the moment and am constantly looking for the off-ramp to something better. The different parts of me that push me in one direction for this pull me to another for that. I mean, I am an opera singer, not yet forty, writing a memoir. What could I possibly have to say and why in the world would anyone give me a platform to say it? I maintain that every life, no matter its current length, is “to be continued.” There’s no perfect time for anything, since everyone, regardless of age, is on borrowed time. I am entitled to nothing but my dreams. And I choose to dream big and go from there.

  Early in my career I was in a city that didn’t matter to me, in daily rehearsals to sing music that means nothing to me anymore. I hadn’t seen my parents for a long time and I was feeling homesick. While wandering during a rare afternoon off, I came by a Tiffany’s jewellery boutique, and I went inside to cheer myself up. After gravitating toward the perfume counter (the only thing in the store I could afford), I smelled one bottle, then another. Suddenly, I became this crazy lady, standing in front of the Tiffany’s jewellery display, sobbing, “Mom . . . Mom . . . ”

  For me as a kid, my mother had a special scent—a combination of her moisturizer, her hair products and her makeup—that infused her clothes no matter how many times they got washed. This combination of fragrances, in a row of innocuous, unoriginal scents in a shop I couldn’t afford to be in, smelled just like my mother.

  My olfactory system has always triggered memories of my childhood.

  My maternal grandmother smelled like food and roses. I spent a lot of time with her until she died when I was five. My mind’s eye pictures her smooth face in a bedroom filled with clutter. I remember wanting to rummage through it all because it was sure to unlock the secrets of the Matriarch. I had a keen sense of her prominence in the family hierarchy, but I mostly remember how warm she felt. Her comforting smell. Nanny once gave me a pair of white sandals with a picture of little bunnies on top of each foot. When she put them on my feet, I knew they were special. I was too young to remember how Nanny’s death affected me, but I do remember being at my Grampy’s funeral a few years later. I cried and cried and cried right along with the adults. My child’s mind had convinced itself that we would be at this funeral for all eternity and that the sadness would never ever end. But then we went home. The adults were eating and laughing. It was over. I thought, Oh! I guess dying’s not so bad.

  Since my father’s parents were both dead by his early teens, these are the only memories I have of the elder states-people of my family. We have always been open about such earthly things, but I didn’t grow up with any grandparents. Consequently, seeing now how my parents and my in-laws interact with my children—and the transformative abandon with which they generously cast their loving net of joy and indulgence over them—has me clinging to all the memories I have of the generations that preceded my own. I know that my reactions to the major touchstones of life—death, love, intimacy, loss—are in some way informed by these grasping, transient, multi-sensory memories from my early childhood.

  I was born on June 28, 1977, in Fredericton, New Brunswick, the youngest of Ann Eatmon and Sterling Gosman’s three children. We lived in a bungalow with a damp, carpeted basement, on Oak Avenue, on the less affluent north side—the dark side. My tiny room was decorated with Sesame Street wallpaper and rainbow curtains. Since it was next to my parents’ bedroom, I often heard my father snore. Today, I either sleep like a baby to the sound of snoring or I can’t sleep at all. Later, when I became morbidly obese, it was me who snored. (I would wake myself up and think, Who is making all that noise?)

  Oak Avenue was a short street with about twenty houses—the kind of place where everybody knew each other. The family who lived across the street from us, the Cronins, had, like, a million kids—all contemporaries of my older siblings. I would often drop by after school to say hi, and Mrs. Cronin, one of the few adults I was permitted to visit on my own, would give me either a pickle or a chocolate chip cookie, both homemade, as an after-school snack. To this day I love those two flavours in equal amounts, though never at the same time.

  My own mother is an effortlessly graceful woman. Like all of us, she is not without her faults, but she has loved me flawlessly. She is our family’s nurturer, who cooks with fluent intuition and sews like a champ. She had a full-time government job and I went to daycare after school until my parents picked me up.

  My father is majestic and steadfast. He worked for the CBC for thirty-three years, first as a cameraman, then as a radio technician. He was an athlete, who has been twice inducted into the New Brunswick Sports Hall of Fame for his athletic accomplishments. He ran every morning when we were kids. He would be out by 5:30 a.m., and Fredericton commuters could set their watches to his crossing of the Westmorland Street Bridge. He wouldn’t call it a meditation, but that’s what it was: time alone to focus his mind and keep his body fit as a fiddle. Throughout his life my father has been shrouded by his own difficult upbringing in a family plagued by poverty, alcoholism and unemployment. As he’s grown older, healed by God and time, he has mellowed, creating peace in his home and in his community.

  My brother, Neville, ten years older than me, turned fifty this year and is one of the wisest people I know. Oddly enough, when he was in elementary school, one of his teachers told my parents, “Your son is a joy to have in the classroom, but he’s stupid. We’d like to hold him back for a year.”

  “You put him through, and we’ll get him through,” my father said, and that’s exactly what happened. Neville is so much more than a pastor, with a PhD and more degrees than you can shake a stick at. He’s too over to be overqualified. He is inventive, ambitious and uncompromising in the standards he sets for himself and for his family.

  My sister, Teah, who is five years older than me, is our family’s pioneer. After competing internationally as a gymnast, she retired at the ripe age of sixteen (typical for gymnasts), and in so doing experienced her first crisis of identity.
She transitioned into a track and field star, then studied international development. After living with her Kenyan husband in Africa for a few years, she returned to the Maritimes with one daughter and another on the way. Like my father, Teah has, with aplomb and razor-sharp wit, played the hand dealt to her. She is loving, complicated and protective.

  As the baby of the Gosman family, I have always given the impression of being extremely obedient. My shift was pretty light overall, because, like all babies of a family, I learned our family dynamic by observing interactions between my parents and my siblings. In many ways, all three of us were “only” children because we were born five years apart. I’m emotionally closer to my brother, but my personality is more like my sister’s. Though we each have our own distinctive look, we all share that Gosman vibe. I have proof that that is an actual thing because I now see it in my own boys. As I was growing up on the streets of Fredericton, it wouldn’t have been unusual for me to hear someone remark, “There goes a Gosman.” Thankfully, it was always said in a good way.

  My first crush was a boy named Mark Leblanc. He lived next door to us on Oak Avenue. With my bestie at the time, Sarah Mahoney—who to this day remains a kindred spirit and close friend—we made up a chaste threesome. She was Mark’s girlfriend number one, and I was Mark’s girlfriend number two. One day in kindergarten I saved a swing for Mark on the playground and Sarah didn’t. That’s when I was promoted to girlfriend number one and Sarah was demoted to girlfriend number two. To say nothing of what this interaction says about childhood gender dynamics, it was an early taste of what it felt like to win, and I liked it.

  Brunswick Street United Baptist Church in downtown Fredericton, with its congregation of about three hundred, was the cornerstone of my family’s social and spiritual life. The state of Christianity being what it is, I’m always quick to point out that this church was not one of those weirdo, Bible-thumpin’, close-minded, extremist nightmares but, instead, a community-driven place of mentoring from which the teachings of Jesus radiated into our lives in practical, sustainable, challenging and joyful ways. Though the non-white representation in our congregation consisted of us plus one East Indian family (with some good-natured folks naturally assuming we were related), racial prejudice was never an issue, because Christ (unlike us earthbound humans) does not discriminate. Now, I know it might make for a juicier memoir for me to tell a coming-of-age story about a scrappy black opera singer pulling herself up by the bootstraps in the face of small-town racism, but that just wouldn’t be my story. The first time I realized my skin might be slightly darker than what I saw as average was when I was ten years old, running toward the pool at Green Hill Lake Camp. Suddenly, I noticed the other kids at our church’s summer camp looked lighter. I thought, If they’re not gonna make a big deal of it, then neither am I. And that was that.

  I know from seeing the parts of town where my parents grew up that racial issues were a very real struggle for them. I can only imagine what they endured in that black-and-First Nations, poverty-stricken quarter, where the cycle of low expectations, no education, no funding, crumbling infrastructure and no prospects was destined to repeat itself in my generation. It bred in my father the need to bring up his children in a neighbourhood where they would have a better chance—whether he could afford it or not.

  Though people in my father’s generation weren’t hung up on the luxury of liking or not liking their work, I think my father would say that he had a good job at the CBC when he needed to have a good job. Early retirement allowed my father to enrol in university for the first time. He graduated from Acadia Divinity College and became a Baptist pastor, exactly as my brother had done a decade and a half before him.

  My mother’s approach to our upbringing was to subtly instill pride in her children’s identity. She never let her daughters play with Barbie dolls, or even Cabbage Patch dolls, because they reflected an unsustainable image she was not willing to endorse. Instead, she had dolls made for us in our own image. My sister’s doll wore a little gymnast outfit, while mine was dressed as a majorette, since I was a baton twirler at that time. I don’t remember being particularly attached to this doll (I wasn’t much for play), but I knew that it was me and that it was different from the other kids’ dolls, so I guess my mother accomplished what she’d hoped. My actual favourite toy was an Easy-Bake Oven, and I still prefer to eat what I cook myself.

  High on my family’s list of values are unconditional love and a good sense of humour. We laughed a lot, often over things no one else would find funny. Once, while driving home one Sunday after the evening service, one of us said, “Hey, Dad, if you go down Main Street, some of the stores will still be open,” hinting, of course, that it would be nice to stop for a treat. My dad replied, “It’s not a question of the stores being open but of my wallet being closed.” He had every right to be pleased with himself. My father is not generally one to crack jokes on the fly and this one had us all laughing to tears.

  The flip side of family love (or perhaps the same side) was discipline. It was predictable, not erratic, and I now recognize it for its comfort and stability, and I endeavour to create the same parameters of safety for my own sons. In the household I grew up in, we knew the meaning of “just wait till your father gets home.” My parents never indulged in empty threats, and their consistency in all things is something I respect. As a child, if I acted up at a Sunday evening service, my mother would give me that look, and I knew full well what it meant.

  During the last spanking I ever got, my father was devastated into weary silence. I’d never seen him that way before, and haven’t since. I’d likely lied about something and been caught. My father was waiting for me in my room, with tears in his eyes. He said, “I want you to know how much this hurts me. I’m very disappointed in you, because you’re old enough to know better, so I’m never going to spank you again.” I started to cry and to apologize. I couldn’t believe that my behaviour had finally exasperated this huge beast of a man. To this day, he remains my moral barometer.

  After that pivotal experience, I was either more obedient or more cunning. Most likely, a mix of the two.

  It’s a wonder that my parents managed to create such a sense of security in our home while chronic conflict plagued their own relationship. My parents fought. A lot. I heard them fight over everything and nothing: the kids, fear of abandonment, the weather, the car, independence, jealousy, bitterness, the finances. Married people always know what buttons to push, and though my parents stayed together, I often prayed that they would put us all out of their misery and just get a divorce already. Both my parents had come from nothing, which created a lot of fear. My father’s parents were dead by the time he was thirteen. The loss of his mother was especially profound, and everything in their rickety house fell apart after that.

  I reveal all this to illustrate that in a Christian home, strife is accompanied by the love of Christ, without exception. That may sound weird to a non-Believer, but the fact that Jesus was so present in our lives created an underlying sense of genuine peace. Like we were all of us held in the palm of the Father, come what may. Perhaps part of the reason my parents stayed married was out of an unhealthy sense of habit. But with forgiveness and perspective, I choose to believe that they stayed married because through their relationship to each other, the God we serve is faithfully continuing the good work He started in them. They stayed married because they both accept the respective flaws and strengths that each brought to the partnership. They stayed married because of unconditional loyalty, support and fidelity. They stayed married because they are in love. Today I can think of no better witnesses to their sacrifice and humility than each other.

  I sang my first solo in grade two. “Petit enfant Jésu” for the Christmas concert at Park Street Elementary School in my hometown. I remember our school’s intrepid music educator, Mrs. Dianne Wilkins, on the Friday before our Monday concert, naming another little girl in my class as an “understudy” should I happen to get si
ck. Just as a precaution.

  “Oh, I never get sick,” I bragged, so of course after church the Sunday before my big debut I started vomiting. God’s karmic joke, showing me who was in charge. Fortunately, I recovered by Monday. The concert was in the gymnasium, with all the other students, the staff and our parents in attendance. I remember being excited about the opportunity to finally reveal my true self in front of so many people. I understood their applause was a way of showing appreciation, but my sense of accomplishment was born of a desire to make my parents proud and to do a great job for Mrs. Wilkins.

  I’ve always understood how damaging the addiction to outside approval can be. It’s an inevitable downward spiral to self-doubt when that unreliable praise is absent. I was raised to a higher calling, a purpose. My gift, which I must nurture and develop, will be taken from me if I don’t see it to its fullest potential, and to this day I have to keep my blinders on and make sure I let only the most trusted voices hold sway.

  Apart from the contribution I made as a budding singer, Park Street Elementary School was a nightmare. I was bullied mercilessly.

  Most of my friends from Brunswick Street United Baptist Church lived on the south side of Fredericton, whereas Park Street Elementary was on the north side. I didn’t know many of my classmates, and my parents generally didn’t allow me to go to the homes of families who didn’t attend our church. Though the boys were the most aggressive, the girls—no shocker here—were especially creative in their cruelty. Having come from such a loving home, I discovered how ingeniously mean people could be without reason or cause. Purely for sport. I was uncertain how to deal with the new horrors that would greet me daily.