{GUEST POST} Wife of a Musician: 5 Facts About Being Married to a Musician
Today’s guest post is written by my lovely wife Eleanor. Eleanor is a high school history teacher in Orange County, California and an amateur singer, guitar player, and ukulele player. Make sure you check out her other guest posts here.
My husband is a musician. Since you’re reading his blog, you probably know this already. What you may not know is what it’s like to be the WOAM (Wife of a Musician™). Here are five facts about being a WOAM:
Your husband works weird hours. This may not be universally true for all musicians (music teachers, industry reps, film and tv composers, etc) but it’s definitely true for us. At his craziest and most overworked, John was working FIVE different music jobs: his music transcription business, his church accompanist gig, TWO high school choir accompanist gigs, and a gig accompanying a catholic church on Saturday nights. On top of this, he’d play random weddings or memorials or parties, so I rarely knew when he’d be not working, and for the most part the answer was NEVER. This left VERY little time to do fun things, and when our son was born, I convinced him to give up three of those five jobs in favor of actually seeing each other and our son. He still takes the odd gig here and there, but at least the schedule is predictable, if not normal.
Your husband will worry about money. Because he’s a freelancer, John feels slumps acutely. If he has a low traffic week, he spends about three hours enjoying the break before panicking about when the next job will come. Luckily for us, these slumps tend to be short, but they are an ever present worry of a musician and a WOAM.
Your husband will sing ALL THE TIME. I didn’t realize this would be a problem until we were married. We weren’t living together, so when John would sing about random nonsense, I chalked it up to being a cute quirk. It wasn’t until we were together 24 hours a day that I realized that he sings 24 hours a day. Sometimes the songs are well known, but other times they are about doing dishes or folding laundry or changing diapers (the “NEW DIAPER” song is probably the most catchy and memorable of his nonsense songs). Interestingly, I haven’t learned to drown out the singing and now my three year old son narrates his life to the tune of ‘The Farmer in the Dell’ so there’s no escaping this one.
Your husband will be adored by older women (and men). This sounds worse than it is, but not a single Sunday has passed in the history of our marriage in which at least one older lady or gentleman (usually who sings in the choir) finds me, asks me if I’m “John’s wife” and tells me how much they LOVE my husband’s playing and what a blessing he is to the church. Sadly, this happens so often to me that I don’t treat it as a compliment as much as I ought to. This is something I’m working on. At least we know John will have options if I suffer an untimely death.
Your life will be filled with music. Not always music you like or want to listen to, but really, what could be better than this?
