If you cannot sing, then hum along!

To all of you who wear a watch, you know those days when, you don't have your watch on? You catch yourself looking at your bare wrist every ten minutes. And after an hour goes by, you start to realize how much you check the time every day. Now, when you have your watch on, you don't notice how often you look at it because, you get what you expect and you move on. But, on that rare occasion when you don't have your watch on, you look at your wrist, but you don't get what you expect; thus, you are more conscious of the fact that you are looking at your wrist.

Last Friday I lost my voice; I guess it comes with the teaching territory. Anyway, initially I thought it was pretty cool--I've always wanted to lose my voice, I don't know. But you know how you aren't grateful for something until you don't have it anymore?

So there I was, driving in the car, Gwen Stefani comes on the radio. Without thinking about it, I start to sing along....oh wait, the message was sent from my brain to my mouth, but no sound came out...dang, that was weird. Later that night, I am getting dinner ready and a well-known jingle plays on a commercial. Same thing--I don't really think about it, but of course I want to sing along, so my mouth starts moving but....no sound. Next morning I made a nice "Saturday cleaning" playlist on the ipod....started to clean....started to sing along and....you guessed it...nothing.

In this experience of losing my voice, I not only became more grateful for the ability to have a conversation, or answer the phone, but I am so grateful to be able to sing. I do not have a good voice; I don't really know how to read music, but man, I love singing along to commercials, radio, CDs, movies, you name it. Now, I didn't know I had this love until (like the absence of a watch) it was taken away from me and I was overly conscious of every single time I tried to sing, which seemed to be ALL the time.

I am still recovering, but on Sunday, I was able to sing about four notes in a row. Today, it is even better. It sounds close to awful, but, what have I learned? It doesn't matter what it sounds like, I am grateful just to be able to get sound out period.

--Jenni