My Mom’s Pandemic Piano Taught Me You Can Always “Find Yourself”

This is Gold Stars, a column by Rainesford Stauffer that unpacks the idealization of youth, and the nuances of young adulthood that generation wars often ignore.

A return to a version of myself that had been tangled up in loose ends and stuck still in dreams on pause happened via Facebook Marketplace.

First there was the church baby grand piano, recently tuned and being discarded for a newer instrument, described as having “keys full of worship” by the seller. Then there was the small upright piano, a desk for music, that the seller ultimately couldn’t bear to part with, saying it reminded her of her mother.

I understood, because there I sat, parked at the kitchen island where I’d done homework and learned to bake cookies, sitting next to my own mother. She was returning to her own childhood self by determinedly searching for a piano, one to recapture the music of her young adulthood—a means of moving forward by going back. We scrolled, and hunted, and dug into little pieces of strangers’ lives and memories through their marketplace listings. There were new beginnings: new babies and new pets and new homes. There were endings: pianos sold in divorces, pianos sold due to deaths, pianos sold because their owners could no longer play them. Each moment meant creating room for a new life by clearing out the pianos of their old ones.

And in between the bids and losses and measurements of where a piano would actually go in the house, I heard about my mother’s beginnings and endings. She grew up the only child of a single mother playing in her grandmother’s house, where a baby grand piano sat center stage in the living room. She picked out chords from the Beatles and Billy Joel; her aunts and older cousins would fill the house with Christmas music or showtunes, depending on the season, on holidays and random weekday nights alike, a centerpiece of family. That piano was the last symbol of a childhood that bloomed into an adulthood where that family did not remain intact.

In time, the family fractured, and the piano ended up god knows where. The memories of my great-grandmother’s living room splintered as though a tune had been abruptly stopped in the middle, and my mother became an adult who never played again. Until now.

It was the first time I’d ever noticed growth or newness this way: reclaiming, or returning, rather than overhauling and chasing.

She was hunkered down with her adult daughter, searching for a used piano, determined to embrace a new self by reclaiming an old one. And there I sat, the thump-thump-thump of fear in my chest, an anxious forte note, on a journey of reclamation of my own. I wondered if I’d gone backward—come home—one too many times. As we searched, I picked the skin around my fingers that had never touched the keys of a piano, pondering who I was when not in the pursuit of newness. When I wasn’t starting over, and over, and over, with new places and new selves and new ambitions.

With every nudge that pushed me forward—a first book published and the immediate “what’s next?” that spilled from the mouths of well-meaning friends, another new test on my failing digestive tract, new jobs I applied for, and new apartments I Zillowed—I returned. The same sprawl of streets I roamed when I first learned to ride a bike was the one we took to retrieve the piano we eventually found. It was scuffed and well loved and over forty years old.

A forty-year-old new beginning.

*

It is not hard to track how profoundly young adulthood, and the twenties, are steeped in newness. New cities and new jobs and new loves and new recipes, tried out, in non-pandemic times, by a cluster of new adult friends bonding over questionable homemade cooking and the loneliness of being in an era of transition. New dreams that are fresh enough in your mind to imagine, with clarity, all the things that could be, as opposed to the grounding of what they are; new chances you’re supposed to take.

It’s inherent in the framing of young adulthood as an era of discovery and experimentation. It’s the reason nostalgia pours out of the language—the wistful “enjoy it while it lasts,” the aspirational quips about “the golden years,” often unrealistic descriptors of how this is the time for freedom, the time to “find yourself”—that we use to describe this time of life. Who doesn’t, after all, yearn for a fresh start and a clean slate and a new self once they’ve grown up and discovered who they’re going to be?

Over the past few years, a constant in my life was newness. And not the brave sort where the heroine version of yourself playing in your mind’s eye charges into the unknown with a level of fearlessness made for movie plots and Netflix series. I watched my graduate school plans fall apart in the middle, which felt like a life-defining failure I wasn’t in control of. I sobbed until my hands quivered after a marathon of medical tests, only for doctors to arrive at the conclusion that they don’t know what’s wrong, only that something is.

And yet, each time, I noticed, I framed it in newness: Great failures mean great opportunities to start again! Not knowing the answer means new discoveries are imminent! It was both Pollyannaish and avoidant, a means of thinking newness inherently creates meaning and value, a way of skirting around the messy pieces of my life left in my wake.

While reporting my book, An Ordinary Age, newness was the floodlight over everything. The promise of starting over seemed as tethered to popular conceptions of young adulthood as tossing graduation caps and cross-country moves. People spoke about new jobs that would change their lives, their routines, and their identities. They spoke of new cities that would offer up new selves to go along with a new neighborhood and new apartment furniture. With yearning in their voices that could be heard through the phone, they articulated an ambitious longing to abandon their previous selves through new hobbies, new places, and new friend circles. The more I heard, the more I wondered why the forward-looking, ever-upward, new versions of ourselves are the ones that inherently contain the heft of our worth.

Meanwhile, my mom continued to look back. Playing back time, playing back selves, to the lilt of Taylor Swift. Cautious at first, with pauses between plunks on the keys, came the tune of “Love Story” from the living room—then faster, and steadier, and enough to suddenly crave rolling my car window down and bellowing in the silence: “We were both young when I first saw you!”

She hadn’t been interested in revisiting the basics, or even the songs she’d played as a child. She propped her laptop open atop the piano, coffee beside her, and practiced picking out the chords of “Love Story,” and then “Daylight,” and “Teardrops On My Guitar,” before work first thing in the morning as the first buds of spring blooms popped up against the windows, in the evening as conversation and pets chasing each other whirled around her, in thirty spare seconds. A thirty-second new beginning.

It was the first time I’d ever noticed growth or newness this way: reclaiming, or returning, rather than overhauling and chasing. As I listened, I realized my own return to an old self was running parallel to hers: As her hands found the familiar notes of childhood and “Love Story” filled the house, I was writing the final notes for my first book at the same desk where I wrote high school papers. I crossed the t’s and dotted the i’s and tied up the loose ends on something I’d never done before, in the place I’d always sworn I’d leave.

And yet, it was clear there were unfinished pieces of me that never would’ve been found venturing outward: The comfort to fall apart. The reminder of the things that mattered jumping out from the noise of all that was supposed to be. A self as is.

Like a lot of young adults, in my mind, coming back—to an old home, an old self—was spun as regression. There is so much anxiety blended into our perceptions of progress and growth and even healing, what they should look like and the timelines on which they should unfold. Timelines popped up in conversation around the piano too. “Who does this?” laughed my mom, with the giddiness of a kid who had gotten away with something—who, in reality, was a fifty-something working woman who’d gotten a steal on a used piano.

Who were the timelines of newness for anyway? My mom, in her fifties, is more adventurous than I am in my twenties. She’s a parent, an employee, and a caregiver. She’s someone fearless in trying new dessert recipes; someone who started a new job that put her front and center with classes of children months into a pandemic, after being so sick she realized there were no more fresh starts to wait for, there was just now; someone always game to teach how to do cartwheels whenever the need, usually from a neighbor kid, arises. The idea that the newness of life, the sheen of starting over, wears off at twenty-five or thirty or whatever arbitrary marker the “Save one million dollars by age twenty-five!” articles and endless “30 Under 30” lists would have us believe never seems more naive than when I’m talking to her.

With every key she touches, I hear the myth of moving forward fall away. Move-forward-at-all-costs has persisted even over the past year. There was all the talk of “optimizing” this time, reconfiguring your work-life balance (a burden on workers), taking up new hobbies (which assumed everyone could afford to), or becoming a fitter, smarter, more in-tune, more patient, perhaps taller, certainly more productive version of you (at what point do all our endless “better selves” just become exasperating?). But the external signals we were moving ahead toward new chapters stalled.

I’d given up on so many things simply because I thought growing out of them meant growing up.

We move forward, toward newness, because of capitalism, because of the fantasy that there’s always a next-best thing and next-best self to go along with it, and that the only thing standing in our way is hustling. We move forward, toward newness, for fear of being stagnant—for fear of being this person, our current version of ourselves, never changing, never growing, in perpetuity. We move forward, toward newness, because where else are we supposed to go, really?

Yet, by means of an old hobby, I’ve watched my mom become more of herself than it seems she’s ever been. Sure, the piano was new, but the intention behind it was to reach backward, to grab the hand of the girl she’d once been and steal her back from all the fear and second-guessing and loss. I watched as my mom grabbed the part of her past self she wanted and heave it into the present, one Taylor Swift song at a time.

There were plenty of reasons to chase a new self growing up—plenty of sources of shame, of things I wish I’d known better, scenarios I wish I’d handled differently. That’s the form of growth, it seems, that expands us—not just aimlessly pushes us forward toward a new self, but molds the self we are through self-awareness and lived experience and learning and maybe some compassion. But I’d given up on so many things simply because I thought growing out of them meant growing up.

“You can return to something and it be a signal of growth instead of regression,” my mom told me, when I expressed frustration that I was falling behind my own ideals for my life. I’d come home, but I hadn’t gone backward. I’d grown up by going back. Not in spite of, because of.

Our brains are wired to latch onto newness—novelty and fresh starts and new experiences help us learn; we crave them, and our brains reward us when we have them. But we’re also human beings, embedded in our histories and psychologies and dreams. Shouldn’t there be a version of young adulthood where our old selves—where revisiting, where rediscovering—can coexist alongside the new? Do we really have to leave it all behind just to charge forward and grow into somebody?

As my mom plays, and much overt newness that our society ascribes value to remains out of reach, I think of quiet newness—of coming back to who we are, internally, rather than so much of the external self-exploration that’s hailed as the ultimate version of finding ourselves. We have a million selves to be found, some brand-new, some mirrors of our pasts. Some rooted in growing. Some rooted in returning. A lifelong new beginning.

• 0