The first time I saw your face, angels sang—at least, allegorically. Dissonance followed on the downbeat. In the melody of me, abandonment was, and remains, the hook.

Look Ma, I get it. You had no choice, too young, society… But I was womb-wet, terrified, and suddenly solo. My ears permanently pricked, pining for that voice that had reverberated around me, when we were still a we.

Sorry. I don’t mean to dwell on that same old song and dance, but it still stings.

The first time I saw your smile, I discarded childhood projections of my superstar maybe-mom, who was always Rita Moreno. She mirrored olive-skinned me better than the lily-white family I’d been coin-flipped into. Mama Rita had surely traded me for celebrity, to sing and dance and scream “Hey you guys,” on The Electric Company.

Remember that show, Ma? It was the smarter, snarkier big sister to Sesame Street. Sure, I loved Sesame’s ginormous bird and garbagey grouch, but I could do without the math-obsessed vampire and despised that matching song they kept in heavy rotation, “One of These Things is Not Like the Other.”

I already was that thing.

I read an interview with Dave Grohl of the band Foo Fighters. He said that silly kiddie song served as a subconscious building block to his song, “The Pretender.” The chorus is him scream-singing in desperation, trying to convince the listener that he isn’t like the others. Lucky dude. I was never like any other, except perhaps you—my missing mother. Did you know that song? Maybe not. You’d matured into life by the time it dropped. You were no longer the wild, spiral-maned musical muse.

I loved music, too, practically from first breath. I could play piano before I could tie my shoes, even won a handful of awards. I was classically trained, but just like you, my soul was pure rock and roll.

I blasted my staticky AM/FM stuffed poodle radio, then graduated to LPs and cassettes. I immersed my teenage Aqua-netted self in lyrics and liner notes, holed up in my deep-pile shag-carpeted bedroom, rock posters push-pinned to my wall. I didn’t know then, that those men who sang to millions, to me, whispered to you.

I read all about you, just three years ago, in a hardcover tell-all about my almost favorite classic rockers. “Hot groupie” to “longtime rocker girlfriend” is how it described your trajectory, your life’s journey. That book, filled with outdated, problematic language, sits like a trophy on my shelf. Its pages are dog-eared. I highlighted every mention of you.

Time’s funny, Ma. You settled down as I was acting up.

Did you know that 17 years after you left me, both of our ovens got bunned—at almost the exact same time? Did you think of me? You were my first thought.

“You’re a knocked-up teenage loser just like your mother,” I spit at my reflection. Trash begets trash, I reasoned. Bad tree. Bad apple. Given choices you weren’t your first time around, I chose not to propagate the world with more of me. I vowed to never allow my poison seed to germinate.

That same year, you too made a choice you couldn’t the first time—to parent.

I met the one you kept, my half-brother, decades later. His was the first face I’d ever seen myself in. He shared his scrapbook, a mother-son book bursting with memories, and none of them mine. I kept a photo of you holding him—I pretend he is me.

Sometimes I even pretend he is mine.

“Did she play music?” I asked your son, “I played piano, flute, sang—”

“No,” he laughed, “but she sure loved musicians.”

I was a musician, Ma. Why couldn’t you have loved me?

You were gone forever by the time I found you. I was gifted your ashes in a mahogany cremation keepsake box—a consolation prize—that flawless face of yours encased in its built-in frame, beauty in perpetuity.

Between the one you left and the one you kept, there was a decadent decade of booze, drugs, and all-access backstage passes. There was music and the makers of. I wonder though—Did any of that make it better?

Did he?

Or did you ache like me?

The first time I saw your face, fifty years after you left me, a thousand dreams died, incinerated in an instant. A lonely refrain of what-ifs and unrequited love remains.

Ever-longing and forever more,

Your biggest fan.