Julia Pinckney Jones Music

At the end of June this year, I was exhausted.  Not incredibly uncommon, I know - after all, I'm a music teacher and performer, and May and June are full of performance opportunities for my students (and for me)! The school year is winding down and students are more easily distracted, so it's a bit harder work to teach them than usual. And of course it didn't help that we were in the beginning stages of planning an out-of-state move and a ton of travel over the summer. But to be honest, while all of those things exacerbated the problem, the main reason I was so exhausted was that I hadn't really had a full, planned-for day off since January. There was the occasional day when all my students on a given day would cancel and I'd suddenly have no teaching work to do, but there was always a webpage to update, a blog post to write, social media content to post, schedules and accounts to update, etc etc etc. So I would usually take some of that unexpected "fre

Today is my mom's birthday.  I should warn you, before you read any further, that this post is likely to get a bit maudlin... since this is the second birthday that she hasn't been around for. But it's still her day, in my mind, and it's one of the hardest days for me in terms of my own personal "grief journey."  Now, I don't imagine that my experience is all that unusual or special, or that it's any "harder" for me than for anyone else who has lost a loved one. Everyone's experience is unique, and we can never really understand what someone else is going through. So all I really know is what I'm going through. And what I'm going through today is hard. I miss Mom every day, and a huge percentage of my time is spent doing things that directly remind me of her, every day. I can't avoid the "triggers" because my career is a trigger.  Today, as with most days, I spent a good portion of my day teaching musi