Image: © Courtesy of Manchester City Galleries
After I gave birth, the world became sleepless. We spent a year lost in an exhaustion so deep it split my brain. I saw rainbows refracted in the kitchen’s french doors, opening out to the yard glistening under the soft morning light. My eyelids twitched. My body swayed as it carried me through the kitchen, onto the back porch, a tangled dog leash in my hands. Sometimes I imagined I wasn’t the only one walking my auburn dog. Could I hear the voice of the late composer, Florence Price, with her black and silver hair smoothed into short waves and her brown eyes full of sympathy?
“Sleep training didn’t work for my second daughter either,” Price’s ghost whispered condolences for my sanity. She had a voice like melted chocolate, dark and rich.
This daily ritual, alone with a ghost as my son snuggled in my husband’s arms, was brief yet sacred. I adjusted my headphones. A silky, syncopated bassone solo opened Price’s Symphony No. 1 in E Minor. Florence was one of the first African Americans to write a widely performed orchestral piece. Flutes side in, delicate, following the lush violins and cellos, which start steadily increasing the tension. It wasn’t long until the whole symphony —drums, trumpets and all— joined in. The music became a river, pulling me under. Waves of triumph flow between valleys of fresh, demure twinkles. A symphony always circles back, patterns and peaks, yet each time it explored a fresh perspective or tone. It took me three dog walks to finish listening to the whole symphony, my headphone wires twisting down into the pocket of my oversized grey coat. Behind our house, the meadow was a sea of frost flowers and white crystals in the winter. Tall, winged crownbeards peeked out between stalks of blonde grass and naked trees with bare branches.
The music was brimming with dramatic shifts, from joy to awe, almost as if humbled by the grandeur of a throne room, followed by a flash of rage or the sudden, a shivering pang of desire. It carried me through so many emotions. Thank goodness for moments of repose, sometimes marked by the murmured secrets of a clarinet, when I could catch my breath. Other times the flattened thirds or sevenths infused Florence’s melody with a bit of the blues. What I heard in the music included more elaborate details than when I heard classical music before I gave birth. It’s one of those secrets women don’t talk about.
Many mothers gain more sensitive ears. (Doctors at Lady Hardinge Medical College in New Delhi published research in 2019 proving it’s not our fantasies. But it doesn’t matter. Who would believe our postpartum mumblings about reality changing shape?) Behind my eyelids I saw the subtle variations and transitions layered in black notes on white sheets of paper by this composer who was herself a single mother of two.
“I wrote this symphony in 1931, when I broke my foot,” Price told me and I nodded.
Perhaps my deepened love of music was inspired by the waning walls between magic and reality, weakened by fatigue. Or it could have been the way that creating new life changed my body. My mother-self emerged during pregnancy, when my stomach was so round it looked like I swallowed the moon. There is no going back to who I was before.
The violin bow danced across the strings, climbing the scale, then descending. The music flowed down like a peaceful river. My ribs expanded as I breathed these sounds into my body, inhaling ever so slowly. Phantoms of light followed me back inside at the end of the walk. My forehead throbbed.
The vibrato of the cello felt intimate, like a lover’s breath against the shell of my ear. Pure echoes. Maybe motherhood has its own musical language. Or maybe sleep deprivation made me delusional. I removed my headphones. I tried to see what time it was, but my vision doubled, wobbly as if peering through water. My son whimpered. I picked him up and he returned to sleep against my chest. His plump cheeks inflated with tiny exhales. The dog curled up on her fluffy bed in the living room, a space otherwise covered with unfolded laundry and disassembled breast pump parts. Our street outside was so quiet you could hear a nearby flag flapping in the wind. Inside, the only audible sound was a few birds in the yard saying hello. Even Florence was speechless.
Leigh Cuen is a writer and editor from California. Her journalism has appeared in TechCrunch, Vice, Playboy, Business Insider, Forbes, San Francisco Public Press, Newsweek, Teen Vogue, Salon, Al Jazeera English, The Los Angeles Times, History Today, and The Jerusalem Post, among others. Her creative work has been featured in World Literature Today, The Vagina Zine, Transcendence Magazine, Synaesthesia Magazine, Poetica Magazine, Canyon Voices, Circa: Journal of Historical Fiction, and the Sweet Wolverine Anthology. She won The Nomad Review’s Best Essay contest in 2025 for her piece “Wild Horses.”