A Life Less Joni

I was going to be Joni Mitchell.

It’s not that I wanted to sing. I love to sing, but my voice was not built for an audience. Nor did I want to write songs. I know little about music and I’m only able to rhyme moon and June and spoon and balloon.

What I wanted was to live in the world that Joni Mitchell created in her songs. Joni painted a space of peace, where the highlight of the day could be the quality of the sun in a room or lemonade at a quiet café. I pictured children and animals nestled reading in quiet corners. Trips to the farmers’ market and impromptu meals whipped up with the bounty. Sautéing garlic and onions. Late nights with thoughtful friends, wine, and plenty of floor pillows. Fresh flowers everywhere. Everything was slow. Everything happened for its own sake. No anxiety, no rush, no goal. Even when her songs were about heartbreak and loss, as they often were, the richness of her melodies and the sweetness of her voice held notes of lightness and possibility.

Credit: Whoknoze – Own work, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=94908470

In my late teens and early twenties, when I was attempting to create the woman I wanted to be, I regularly saw myself in Joni’s songs or I heard her words and music accompanying my life. I wanted to live in the space of “Chelsea Morning” and “Morning Morgantown” and travel to her Paris and her Southern France. Unlucky in romance, I identified with the lovelorn yearning of her songs.

The Joni fantasies returned in my thirties, when I had my first child and decided to stay at home with him. I was tired of giving eight hours a day to a job that frustrated me and wanted to give my time to family instead. I began to dream again of that world of peace, songs, and sunshine as I raised and nurtured my chubby, smiling babies.

I learned very quickly that the Joni life I had coveted wasn’t really the life I wanted. Home with one boy, and later two, I was not a happy flower child mother. I was lonely, bored, anxious, and I missed grownups. Morning sunshine walks only killed an hour or so, and leisurely afternoons at home playing and cooking were far too leisurely. I spent as much time as possible out of the house, taking the kids anyplace I could find where they would be engaged and I could have company and conversations. Stimulating, intellectual evenings with friends were rare. Everybody was too busy with their children to lie around at night drinking wine. As it was, we had all lost our tolerance for alcohol in pregnancy and nursing, and we were too exhausted to stay up past the kids.

Recently, while visiting my sisters in Los Angeles and walking through their mountainy neighborhood, I discovered a house that looked exactly like the one I used to see in my Joni life. It was perched on a terraced hill overlooking the city, full of light, covered in flowers. I had long forgotten that imagined life, but it came flooding back.

The house gave me a momentary pang for the old fantasy life, but I quickly brushed it away. It turns out that the idyllic life I envisioned was not so idyllic for me. True, I do live in a town very much like Morgantown, I have a sunny, warm, inviting home, and I love sautéing onions and garlic, but that’s where the similarities end. I much prefer my untidy house, with grown-up children, and a stressful but always interesting life. I like activity, challenge, and change, maybe even a little controlled chaos. A complicated messy life is what I have, and it’s a good complicated messy life.

I still love Joni’s songs and recently went on a spree collecting those that I never bought on CD. When I listen now there is no feeling of the loss of a life imagined. They simply remind me of what I used to want and the peace I found with what I have.