I Think I Love You

16

Getting to Know You: Music Therapy with Ashley

By Petra Williams, B.Mus., R.M.Th.
ABSTRACT

This case study describes weekly sessions over a two-year period with a ten-year-old girl with severe emotional problems. Ashley was referred to music therapy because of aggressive behavior and learning difficulties at school. Her mother was taking part in a drug-rehabilitation program at the time. Ashley had an excellent sense of rhythm and the weekly sessions became a place where we could improvise together and she could explore her feelings in a place she felt safe. The case study also illustrates how the child’s defensive modes of expression were worked with musically, to help her communicate her needs without anger and to modify some of her destructive tendencies so that she could mix with her peers and start to enjoy a more fulfilling life. During the sessions, an unconscious accord between Ashley and the therapist was created to not speak directly of her personal story, which was too hard and too sad. Rather, it was decided to let the music tell the story for her.

BACKGROUND INFORMATION

Ashley thinks of herself as the Girl That Nobody Loves. She was her mother’s fourth child, but did not share the same father as her three older siblings. Ashley was conceived during one of her stepfather’s periodic absences from the family home, and it appears that he never accepted her, frequently telling the child she was a “cuckoo in the nest.” Ashley’s own father never lived with her mother and disappeared from his daughter’s life altogether when she was four. He spent a period in prison, though she often said “my dad’s in heaven.” Social workers described the family as “chaotic,” and all four children had been taken into care for their own protection on two occasions.

Ashley is a graceful, pretty child who fought hard with her natural advantages to make herself as dislikable as she feels she is. She shows moderate deficits in cognitive and language areas, generally functioning at between one year and eighteen months behind the average for her age level. Her closest relationship was with her deceased grandmother—“Nana”—a pub landlady who played the piano and sang songs to Ashley throughout her infancy. Particular favorites were show tunes from musicals by Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein. Although her speech is often muddled, Ashley can incorporate song lyrics with great enjoyment and accuracy into conversation. Her teachers express surprise that such a “challenging” child could show glimpses of verbal precocity.

The death of her nana, six months before Ashley first came to me, seemed to be the trigger for increasingly violent outbursts at school. Such background information as I had about her came from her head teacher, Rosemary, who felt the child showed signs of depression arising from erratic maternal care. Some mornings, she would turn up to school dressed for a party in brand-new trainers with ribbons in her hair; on others she wore grubby clothes and was teased by her peers about her personal hygiene. “Smelly Ashley” is how she often describes herself in our role play. Rosemary felt that music therapy should be tried as a last resort after occupational therapy and swimming lessons had failed to make a difference.
Petra saves what she’s done, closes her file and then the laptop. It is dark in the room except for the fuzzy orange glow cast by the lamp in the road outside. Through the bay window, freckled with late-summer dust, she can look into the house opposite, an exact copy of her own solid Victorian semi, and watch the shadow play of another family. Observing how other people’s families work has always fascinated her. She reaches for the switch on the desk lamp, but changes her mind. Hello darkness, my old friend.

When she was making music with Ashley she felt she knew exactly what she was doing, which made a change from the rest of her life, but now she finds she can’t write it up. A case history requires her to impose the technical language of her profession—cognitive deficits, transference reactions—on the living child who came into her room one freezing February afternoon. Ashley refused to speak, yet was simultaneously shouting her distress. Undersized for her age, the girl wore a crop top with a Playboy bunny motif and dirty white terry-cloth shorts; the puppy fat wobbling between the two garments was mottled blue with cold. It was toward the middle of their fourth session together, with Petra guiding the child’s hands over the piano keys, that Ashley took out her chewing gum and sang “Getting to Know You.”

The crystal-clear diction of Deborah Kerr’s governess in The King and I had traveled down forty years or more, via Ashley’s nana on a pub piano, to a child-woman who probably had a vocabulary of no more than two thousand words. Petra made a point of not breaking down during sessions. The child’s emotions were always more important than any she might have, but that day with Ashley it was a struggle to compose herself sufficiently to be able to echo and answer the child’s song with the bit about getting to like her, getting to hope that Ashley liked her back.

And then the final verse together, the girl’s and the woman’s voices twined together in a silvery helix of sound.

Music can reach the parts that language can’t, it can perforate the armor that a wounded self builds very early to protect itself; that is why the therapy works, if it does work, and maybe the fact that the process is mysterious and beyond language is what makes it so hard to write down.

Bill Finn could write it down, Petra is suddenly sure of it. At the makeover, Bill asked about her job, questions that suggested he might even be interested in the answers, which he couldn’t possibly be. Petra knows that metropolitan type. Actually, she doesn’t know those types, not personally. But she’s read about them. Always flitting between the latest book launch and opening night, everything is marvelous or incredible or terribly interesting, if only as a ploy to make yourself interesting to the other person. Maybe that was unfair. Maybe Bill was more than the sum of his glossy magazines. They were sitting in the cafeteria at Nightingale Publishing when Petra found herself telling him about Ashley’s laugh, the most joyful she had ever heard, and thus the most crushing because it came from a place with no previous record of joy. Bill wanted to know exactly how the music therapy got through to a kid like Ashley.

“It’s not an exact science,” she said. “There are a lot of theories about how it works.”

“And what’s yours?”

“They think that early man may have communicated by song, don’t they? Sort of grunts with tunes. So maybe we were like birds and we lost it. Except we didn’t really lose it.”

“Birdsong is pretty strange stuff,” Bill said. “You think it’s all territory and sex. But it turns out they’re doing it because they love it.”

“You mean the birds.”

“This one guy, biologist or something, takes his clarinet to play in a forest. Flocks of thrushes around. At the end of it all, his only conclusion is they’re making thousands more sounds than they actually need to. Just for the joy of it, improvising as they go along. Like Charlie Parker.”

“You mean Bird.”

“Yeah,” Bill said. He paused. “I thought you were a classical girl, not a jazz fiend.”

“Just a general fiend,” she said. “If you get brain damage in your right temporal lobe, which controls higher auditory processing of sound—speech on the left, music on the right—”

“You’re losing me,” he said.

“No, you’re okay. Right temporal lobe, just behind your ear, here. I’m guessing yours is pretty well developed. If it’s injured, patients exhibit a complete failure to recognize recently heard songs, although they can still respond emotionally to them. It’s called amusia.”

“Amusia. Great title for a book. I love it.” When Bill smiled he looked like a different person.

“So what if humans sang before they spoke?” she said. “I mean, music may be profoundly instinctive to us, maybe it’s our truest form of communication.”

“You haven’t heard me in the shower at six in the morning.”

“Like I said, early man.”

“Ouch,” Bill said. “Where did you come from?”

As Petra thinks this over, she is returned to her living room by a loud rhythmic pounding coming through the ceiling above. Molly. Still awake and on her keyboard. At 10:25. On a school night, for God’s sake. She pinches the bridge of her nose, the part that’s supposed to take away headaches, or so the magazines say. All their worst fights these days are about bed. Not going to bed early enough, not being able to go to sleep, then not being able to get up the next day. Bedtime, her daughter announced loftily, is babyish. Petra thinks back to Molly in her crib, curled tight as a cashew nut, her tiny fists clenching and unclenching. That had felt like the hard bit; the night feeds, the bedside clock’s beady green digits telling you it was 3:15; back then, it always seemed to be 3:15. Sleep deprivation made you light-headed at the same time as your feet felt like they were shod in lead. During a concert at the Royal Albert Hall, Petra had nodded off for a few seconds, which would have been just about okay, except she was one of the performers. Petra always reckoned she could play the cello in her sleep, though only motherhood had given her the opportunity to test that hypothesis.

Then the baby years passed, like an April shower, and the hard bit turned out to be the easy part, only you didn’t find out until it was over. Motherhood was like being in a play and only ever having the lines for the scene you were in at any given moment. By the time you figured out how to play the part, the curtain dropped and it was on to the next act. Some days, she felt so nostalgic for that little baby.

“Being a parent doesn’t get any easier,” Carrie said. “It just gets hard in a different way.”

Petra was the family disciplinarian, a role that Marcus had been quite happy to delegate. No, happy to abandon, she thinks, and then checks herself. She can’t stand being bitter, the taste of it like cheap mouthwash. Walking away from the solicitor’s office after discussing an amicable settlement—Mr. Amos used to be their solicitor, but suddenly he was Marcus’s—she retched up the bile that had been accumulating in the back of her throat into a green wheelie bin.

I have become the kind of woman who spits in the street and doesn’t carry a handkerchief, she thinks. If her mother were alive, it would have killed her.

Now that Marcus is gone, Petra must somehow be good cop and bad cop for Molly. Cagney and Lacey.

Which was which? She never did get that straight, though the blonde was definitely harder, the brunette rounder and more maternal. You didn’t see enough portraits of women who loved and depended on each other like those two; in real life, it was female friendship that kept most women going, in her experience, especially once the rivalry over men had fallen away.

Every weekday at ten to seven, Petra goes into Molly’s room and stumbles across the carpet. With its scattered heaps of debris, the room is like a beach after the tide has gone out. She switches on the radio—some jackass DJ irritating enough to raise the dead; then, fifteen minutes later, she yells up the stairs, by which time her daughter is usually in the shower. This morning, though, she had literally had to shake her awake. Molly, her features snared in a mess of golden hair, surfaced like a marsupial from some deep burrow. This was not sleep, it was hibernation. Petra had gotten angry. “Lost it,” in Molly’s tearful accusation.

“And if you’re going to wear your hair long, young lady, you’re going to have to learn to brush it every night or we’re cutting it off.”

Young lady? Where did that come from? How prim and predictable are the words that travel down the maternal line on the reproachful gene. Did Darwin guess that survival of the fittest involves a hairbrush? No, but mothers do. Greta used to grab Petra by the hair and say, “Ach, it’s szo greasy.” So many of her mother’s sentences began with that guttural ach of disgust. She thought it was because Greta was disappointed in her daughter’s looks. Now that she has a girl of her own, Petra sees with frightening clarity how the world will judge Molly, and it won’t be for her dry humor or her wonderfully mobile hands, which straddle complex chords like bridges made of flesh and bone.

She loves her daughter passionately, but she is highly critical of her. With a son it might have been different; she always wonders about that. Instead she has a teenage girl, a creature with a whim of iron. Will of iron. No, whim of iron is better. The way Molly juts that heart-shaped chin of hers, determined to have the last word in any argument, most confident when she is most ignorant. And it stings when she accuses Petra of not understanding her. Compared to her own mother, Petra feels like a limbo dancer of flexible compassion and comprehension. Greta could have taught those ayatollahs a thing or two about rigid intolerance. At least Molly has not inherited the relish for gloom and disaster. Petra was brought up to believe that anything invented after 1959 would give you cancer.

“Not the old days again,” Molly sighs if Petra dares to suggest that, once upon a time, there were mothers even stricter and more annoying than she is.

“That was like twenty-five years ago,” says Molly.

Not for Petra. I am approaching the middle of my life, she thinks. I am a grown woman. A mother. I have a home in a pleasant suburb of London with a south-facing suntrap patio where I grow surprisingly good tomatoes and basil, which I tear with my hands to release the fragrance and then strew over the chopped tomatoes with a little balsamic vinegar. I have come to like the word strew. Strewth. I have a job that I love and that may even do some small good in the world, I am supposed to be a mature person anchored by all the trappings of a decent, slightly dull life, yet increasingly I feel like a child who suspects that the past is sweeping round in a big circle to ambush her.

She has only the faintest grasp of Einstein’s theory of relativity, but she knows that something strange has happened to time since she found the letter from the David Cassidy magazine in her mother’s wardrobe. Her brain, which generally spins through a Rolodex of worries, has started making dramatic leaps between the years and decades, as if some invisible director were putting together a package of Petra highlights for an awards ceremony. While she was reading in the bath the other night, it was Steven Williams’s penis that surfaced. She saw it for the first time when she was babysitting, for her Geography teacher and his wife, and Steven dropped round unannounced. (Petra and he had just started seeing each other, after Gillian grew tired of Steven. She had never wanted him; she had wanted others not to have him.) Petra remembers, for example, how, when she opened the door, he was standing there on the porch with a bottle of Woodpecker Cider and a hopeful grin. How he took off his leather jacket and threw it over the banister as if it were a saddle and the buckles jangled like stirrups. The way they both padded upstairs to check that the two little girls were asleep, and how it felt as though they were trying on adulthood for the first time. How she found herself scrutinizing Steven’s face in the glow of the toadstool night light and realized, to her mild astonishment, that she was looking to see what kind of dad he might be. She could only have been fifteen.

She startles herself by recalling things she didn’t know she’d noticed. How, when they’d been kissing on the settee, he lifted himself onto one elbow to keep his weight from crushing her. The way she liked being crushed by his weight. Her heart pounding like she’d run a hundred miles. When his mouth found her breast, it sent an electrical signal Down There, a spasm of longing that created a new pathway as it convulsed. He undid the button on his jeans, adjusted himself with a single movement and there it was. Huge and unmanageably alive. No Chinese whisper in the needlework room, no Biology lesson, not even Carol’s mime with a saucisson on the fifth-form trip to Paris could have prepared her for the thing itself.

She didn’t know whether to laugh or faint, though neither would have been right because it was unmistakably a solemn moment. Knowing that something had to be done about the erection—done with it, to be exact—and finding out what that was just at the moment the Geography teacher put his key in the front door. Steven leaped to his feet, tucked himself back in and scooped her bra up and into her bag with a single movement, years of training on the rugby field paying off.

Petra said the girls had been no bother. No bother at all. The teacher knew, and they both knew that he knew, but they were saved by mutual embarrassment.

Steven gave her a lift home on the back of his bike, along the seafront. Petra felt happy simply to be alive. The salty wind on her raw, kissed lips, her hands laced round his middle, her body and his leaning together to take each corner. Her first brush with sex left her feeling drugged, hugging the secrets of womanhood to herself.
One whole wall of Molly’s room is wallpapered in boy. The same boy, in picture after picture. A boy on the prow of a ship, a boy on a beach. A boy with cool, blue eyes and a prominent, dimpled chin. A boy whose floppy, too-long fringe is parted to the side and threaded with blond streaks. Petra doesn’t think much of him, this boy. With his button nose and round eyes, he looks like a child’s drawing, not entirely real. She dislikes the fact that her daughter’s bedroom looks like some kind of Renaissance chapel dedicated to the cult of this youth, but she doesn’t say so. Instead, in a pleading voice she dislikes, she says: “Mol, I’ve told you before, if you use Sellotape to stick posters up, it’ll bring the paint off when you take them down.”

Molly doesn’t respond. She is in bed, listening to her Discman and writhing with the duvet as if it were a sea monster.

“You know we can’t afford to redecorate.”

As so often with her daughter, Petra finds her tongue keeps talking when silence would be the wiser course. That’s not what I meant to say, she thinks. This is not who I am.

“But I’m not going to take the posters down, am I? Duh,” says the shape under the duvet.

“Don’t say duh.”

“What’s wrong with duh? Honest, Mum, I don’t get you sometimes.”

“There’s no need to get me. I’m your mother.”

Petra bends to scoop up an armful of tights and underpants.

“Is that the boy from Titanic?”

Molly sits up, incredulous with disdain. “Leonardo DiCaprio, Mum. He’s world fay-mous.”

“How did he end up with a name like that?”

“His mum was pregnant with him and she was in Italy and she was looking at a painting by Leonardo da Vinci.”

“How on earth do you know that?”

“Because I read it in a magazine.”

Petra sighs, exasperated. “You can’t believe everything you read in magazines, darling.”

“It happens to be a true fact. Ac-tchew-ull-ee.”

Petra bends forward slightly to allow this falsehood to go over her head. “You know, when I was your age I wasn’t allowed posters on—”

Molly doesn’t wait for her to finish. “And your point is?”

The awful, hand-on-the-hip sarcasm she has learned from those American TV shows she watches.

“Molly, please don’t talk to me like that.”

“Like what?”

Along with the rest of her generation, Molly is bored by foreign languages, but somehow manages to speak fluent Beverly Hills brat. “It’s sooo gross,” she will say, wrinkling her nose. Petra, who still thinks of gross as a pay packet before deductions, feels old and weary.

“Always try to remember you’re the adult.” That’s what a neighbor with older children told her when Molly started nursery. It seemed such a strange thing to say—who was the adult, if not the mother? Now her baby girl is a teenager, Petra knows exactly how hard it is not to be provoked into childish retaliation. Well, how do you think I feel? is what she finds herself wondering.

Molly doesn’t care how Petra feels. Petra’s job is to absorb whatever Molly feels.

“Mol?”

“Okay, I’ll use Blu-Tack.”

“Good.”

“Fine.”

“It’s so late. I hoped you’d be asleep by now, my love.”

Petra perches on the edge of the bed and strokes her daughter’s forehead with her index finger. Over the past few months, the child’s features have been going about their urgent task of morphing into a woman’s; right now, they are slightly too big for her face—eyes, nose and pillowy lips, all slightly out of scale. Molly complains that she is not even pretty, but one day she will be beautiful, her mother thinks. The prettiest girl in class seldom grows up to be the beauty.

A sudden image of Gillian at their school reunion, four years ago. A Home Counties wife and mother now, living in one of the shires—Berks or Bucks—pleasant features under a neat bob with expensive caramel highlights, just a millimeter too wide. Gillian Edwards as a grown woman, talking about their place in Portugal, the palms of her hands stained a telltale Darjeeling by self-tan. Gillian. All her fearful magic gone.

“Can’t sleep. I keep telling you,” Molly says. The bags under her eyes are a livid plum. Her lids, fluttering as if a moth were trapped beneath.

Petra bends to kiss them. “Is everything okay at school?”

“Fine.”

“Hannah okay?”

Said casually. Tricky Hannah, the volatile one in Molly’s group. Hannah, whom Petra long ago spied as a threat to her daughter’s happiness, though she keeps that thought to herself lest she make Hannah more attractive to her daughter. Tricky Hannah, the queen who moves the other girls around the board. Every group has one. Hannah, who regularly demands to be Molly’s bestest friend, hers alone and no other. More demanding than any lover.

It’s just teenage girls, Petra tells herself, but she knows the other things that teenage girls can do, so she stays alert. Petra counsels Molly to maintain a wide circle of friends. She doesn’t say that the more friends you have in different groups the less chance there is of being abandoned. Adolescence is a worrying time for mothers, but Petra knows she worries more than is strictly reasonable. Her antennae for rejection are overdeveloped; even though she seems to have produced a popular, well-adjusted kid, she can’t switch them off.

“Mu-um, it’s no big deal, okay?”

That’s what Molly says whenever Petra inquires why she isn’t part of a shopping trip the other girls are going on or has, inexplicably, been left off the guest list for some disco. Petra experiences every snub to her child, both real and imagined, with a lurch in her belly. She can’t help it. Even Molly hates it if they’re running late for a sleepover, yells at Petra when they’re stuck in traffic; hates the other girls to get started without her. Fear of missing out is married to the twin dread of not being missed at all. Some things never change.

Petra adjusts her position on the bed so she is lying alongside Molly, their two heads next to each other on the pillow. The cushion between them is Molly’s breasts, a recent addition and swelling fast. She is glad about her daughter’s breasts, proud even. Is that normal? Recently, Molly has become very private, banning Petra from the bathroom when she is in the bath. Not long ago, they used to chat about their day, with Petra perched on the loo and Molly lying back in the water like the girl in that Millais painting, hair a skein of seaweed floating behind her head.

She wonders now if she will ever see her daughter’s naked body again, the body she grew inside her own—probably not. The next person to see it will be a boy, a real one, not the Leonardo kid in the posters on the wall.

As she puts her arm around her, she feels all the fight leave Molly. When she was a toddler, Molly would go quite rigid during a tantrum, until the demon departed and she allowed herself to be cuddled and soothed by a warm drink from her bottle. She liked to have the bottle held for her so she could twirl her hair with one hand and clutch her blanket with the other. How easy it was back then, Petra thinks. You could comfort her, smooth it all away, tell her everything was going to be all right. And it was. Because you could control the world. You were the world, pretty much.

Drifting now, Molly burrows closer. If she’s honest with herself, this is what Petra misses most about Marcus. It’s not the sex. It’s another body that can, as if by osmosis, drain all the tension out of your cells. She has to hand it to him, Marcus was good at massage, his cellist’s fingers powerful and nimble, finding the knots.

“I knead you,” he said, turning her over and pressing his way down the rungs of her spine, springing each vertebra like a catch. He always was terrific at vibrato.

By the end, she couldn’t bear for him to touch her. Tried to get the sex over with as quickly as possible, hating herself for even letting him near, still thinking maybe he’d stay, and hating herself for that also. She’d read somewhere that the higher the pitch of the woman’s cries the faster the man climaxes. Well, well, well, it turns out that, sometimes, you can trust what you read in magazines. It was that easy, and that hard.

“When you and Sharon are in America, you can go and see Leo,” Molly murmurs.

“Who’s Leo?”

“Leo DiCaprio.”

“Oh. The most famous boy in the world.”

“Such a cool name. I love him so much, Mum.”

“Yes, my darling, I know.”
Downstairs once more, she needs to get back to the computer, but the air in the living room is hot and sullen, so she lets herself out through the patio doors. The dark garden twitches with scents. Earlier, eager for distractions from writing up Ashley’s case history, she’d wasted at least an hour out here watering her plants, picking her favorite sweet peas and some tomatoes, which she put on the kitchen windowsill to ripen. She likes the dusty green smell they leave on her palms. Absentmindedly, she starts to deadhead the nicotiana in the terra-cotta urn by the back door. The withered blooms feel like parachute silk to the touch. Fingers poised to pinch, Petra suddenly feels the terrible power of life and death. She hesitates over one collapsed flower. No, let’s give the poor thing one more day in the sun.

The cream trumpets open only in the late afternoon and release their musky, throat-constricting fragrance throughout the evening. How strange to think that nicotiana, pretty and blameless as a Victorian nightdress, is a little sister of the tobacco plant that kills millions. Helped to kill her father, took what was left of his lungs after pneumoconiosis, and his glorious voice. If Petra kneels down next to the container, she thinks she can smell Dad’s pipe and hear him tapping it on the top step in the garden at home to loosen the thick tarry molasses that gathered at the bottom of the bowl.

Several times, Petra has tried to tell Molly about her grandfather. Ei tad-cu hi. By the time Molly was old enough to be aware of him, Dad was half the size of the man who toiled in the steelworks, a whiskery husk under a trembling sheet, scarcely able to shave and struggling for breath, though still holding out his arms to his granddaughter.

“Come by y’ere, lovely, and have a cwtch with your grandad.”

She desperately wants Molly to carry that template of a good man in her heart, but when Petra tries to describe Dad to her daughter it just comes out as words. He was so lovely. Gentle. Kind. Wonderful baritone. Dancer. Dean Martin. That’s Amore.

How was she meant to sum up the human being who sheltered her as best he could from her mother, as the blows rained down on him? Occupational hazard.

At least, Petra thinks, her own daughter doesn’t feel she has to hide—not her Leonardo DiCaprio posters, not her feelings. Molly may not like her mum to come into the bathroom anymore, but she knows she has a vagina, not some indeterminate, shameful place called Down There that it’s not nice to touch. Achafi!

Petra is glad about that. She rarely allowed Greta to see her feelings, knowing they would only afford an opportunity for disapproval or even gloating. One day, she was walking along the breeze-block wall in front of the bungalow they were building opposite and she fell, cutting open her knee and grazing her new shoes. The toecaps, glossy as a conker, were scarred with angry pink streaks. She came in crying, because she knew she’d be for it, but crying also for her poor new shoes, as the blood trickled down one leg onto her white sock.

“There you are, see,” her mother said.

Pain was there to teach you a lesson, although what that lesson was she never learned. Greta’s self-appointed role in life was to toughen up her daughter.

“Taking control of your emotions, please, Petra.”

When Petra thinks of herself as a child, she sees a mute who dare not speak. Music was her way of speaking, her therapy, too; William Finn—Bill—had said as much to her at the makeover. She’d never thought of it quite like that before.

“I must move house,” Petra thinks suddenly, closing the patio doors behind her and sliding the bolts across. It was in this room that she had her last outbreak of grief for her marriage, the only one the world knew anything about. But it was terrible, flinging herself at Marcus’s legs and giving herself up to her misery. Promising him things, begging. He had shaken her off, wanting to get away from her, eager to get back to what had taken him away. He told her that he had tried to let her down gently. You have to be cruel to be kind. Why? Why not just be kind?

After he’d gone, she sat in the dark sobbing and talking to herself. “There, there, you’ll be all right.” As if she were her own mother. Even then, she had listened for his steps on the path, thinking that perhaps he might come back, as he always had before.

Now, for the first time since Marcus left, she feels a faint stirring inside, the sense that she might have a future. The day after tomorrow, Molly will go to stay with Carrie round the corner, and she, Petra, will go to Vegas to meet David. Petra and Sharon and David. Sharon and Petra. And Bill. It no longer seems like quite such a mad plan. She finds herself singing “Breaking Up Is Hard to Do.” The lyrics as fresh as paint in her memory. Still humming, she consults her notebook and begins to type, the words coming easier now.
Every week for the first few months we worked together, Ashley said, “I donwunna tell you my story, Miss. I don’t have to if I donwunna.”

As the work with Ashley evolved, using a combination of the show tunes she knew so well and free improvisation on cello, keyboard and percussion, she began to speak differently, to show a sense of self-worth and to be able to admit her desire to be safe. The familiar song structures offered her a certain predictability in which she began to trust our relationship. Ashley started to find another way to communicate and began to realize that her behavior could be a conscious choice, not just an angry reflexive response.

By mimicking clear phrase structures in songs that matched her moods, I could “hold” her feelings, musically transforming them into normal excitement and pleasure.

CONCLUSION

Music therapy is a very important activity in Ashley’s life: the one time when she can safely release all of the feelings, including the rage and the distress, that she has been locking down. Most of the grown-ups she has met have dealt with her unsympathetically, often aggressively, and I have been in the privileged position of being able to offer something better. The one advantage she brought with her was a rich trove of musical memories; the show tunes learned from her beloved grandmother equip Ashley with one of the few constant and reliable structures in her experience. Among all the children I have taught, I can think of nobody for whom music has been a more vital outlet.

Ashley has had to say many good-byes in her short life. By singing “So Long, Farewell” from The Sound of Music, I took on the role of the many adults who have left her. When she started to sing the words back to me at the end of each session, her confidence growing every time, tears came to my eyes. She had obviously taught herself how not to be hurt by the act of saying farewell.