It’s not my mother’s birthday today. Or her death day. She died before my children were born, more than 30 years ago. But I want to write about her.

I’ve been using Claude for a few months now, to help me with this blog. I gave Claude a bunch of my writing about my family, and now and then I ask it to suggest something new to write about.

Today’s suggestion:

The uncomfortable one Your mother. One scene. You’ve been circling her for years.

OMG, Claude, shut up! You think you know me?! How rude. You think you get how I feel about my mother?! You have no goddamn mother! What the hell do you know about anything?!

But of course, Claude is right. My father has been the hero/villain of most of my memoirish writing. My father the drinker. My father the almost-priest. My father the teacher of the Keane Rules and teller of stories. He craved attention, and he got mine.

Today, something different. A portrait of Barbara Keane, by me, decades removed from the last time I ever saw her.

It would be easy to start with the wheelchair. The botched spinal surgery in her 50s, the paraplegia, her sudden permanent residence downstairs in our house, in a hospital bed in the den. But I need to resist the pull of that dramatic context. Because she was so much more than her scoliosis and its effects.

Let me start with her singing. “Something in the way he moves … ” she croons next to the piano in the den. No one is playing, but she has the sheet music on the rack, and she’s learning the Beatles tune. I don’t remember the year, but it’s the 70s, in the times when she could walk.

She’s singing in the den, but her voice carries across the first floor of the house, to the sunporch, three rooms away, where I’m trying to watch Mike Douglas.

“Mom! Can you please stop that?!”

She doesn’t hear me, or pretends not to. Either way, I close the door, and the sound stops.

We lived with her singing “Something,” or “Mr. Wonderful,” or “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes,” or any number of American Songbook standards throughout the house. While she was sweeping the kitchen floor. While she was changing a little one’s diapers. While she fried pork chops on Monday nights.

My mother was always a singer, but I have no facts to relay here. I know she started when she was little, and she won a local singing contest in her hometown, in Lynn, Massachusetts, when she was a teen. She got glamour head shots done during that time, and I think she had some professional gigs. I never got to ask her more about her dreams, or her musical journey. As far as I know, there were no other musicians in her family.

But in our family, out of her nine children, most of us loved and played music, from an early age. Piano lessons for a bunch of us. One fantastic singer. Two drum-and-bugle corps horn players. A guitarist. And me, a saxophone player. My mother raised some serious music aficionados.

I typically credit my older brother, John Michael, for turning me on to music. He was the one with the Cars album, the Boston album, and The Who, and many many more. But years before JM’s influence was that blasted singing.

“I don’t want to leave him now, you know I believe and how …”

“Mom! Please! Can you practice later? Partridge Family!”

Somehow the sunporch door had gotten open, probably when Joan came in, or Mary. Slam.

Mom was a featured performer at the annual Lions Club variety show/fundraiser that they held in the Saugus High School auditorium every spring. It was a jam-packed evening of song and dance and skits, featuring your eye doctor as the director, your music teacher conducting the band, your plumber and your electrician dressed up like little girls, and your dad wearing stage makeup and an unbelievable getup that I think I’ve blocked.

The show was coming up soon. My mom and my dad would go off to rehearsals and leave us all to ourselves. When they came home, they seemed tired but happy. It was strange to see them that way, out in the world as a couple, apart from their brood.

All us kids got to see the show, and boy was Mom a hit. Up on stage in her spangly gown, wearing the dangling ball earrings she saved for the show, she kept the audience engrossed from the first note.

You’re asking me, will my love grow? I don’t know, I don’t know …

The audience around us were watching her, my mother, and they were feeling what she was feeling. My mom was doing that. With her talent. With her voice. All that practice around the house, all that desire she had to perform, it was all for this moment.

You stick around, now, it may show. I don’t know, I don’t know

When the show was over, strangers would come up to us and tell us how much they loved our mother. People I saw once a year, whose name I never knew, were her fans. They paid money tonight to experience what I had tried to block out at home every day. Yet on that one night each year, I wanted to hear her too. I could see what they saw: She was a star.

Back home, Mom would keep singing the tunes she’d performed that year, even after the show had closed, because she knew them so well. They became a part of her repertoire. And of ours.

There were no recordings of my mom’s performances over the years. I feel that loss deeply, because it was her singing that made her who she was. But as the scoliosis worsened in the 70s, her pain increased, her breathing was more difficult, and she stopped singing. After the surgery, in her weakened state, she never tried to perform in public again.

My talented sister Joan grew up singing, just like my mom. She recently performed with a singing group in Sacramento, and it sounds like it was a fantastic night. The theme was Yacht Rock, and that would have been right in my mother’s wheelhouse. Before and after Joan’s show, all of us siblings on the group chat were dying to hear about the show, from our various spots around the country and the world. JM in Pittsburgh, Mary in Tempe, Jules in Thailand. Stephen in San Diego. Ann, Elizabeth, and Katie in New England. My mom would love the fact that we’re all still so close. And she would have given anything to see Joan on that stage.

Me, I’d give anything to hear my mom in the den again, learning “Something” from the sheet music. I’d sit at that piano, smile at her while she dusted and sang, clap when she finished, and then tell her to take it again from the top.