There are those who are born with beautiful singing voices and there are those who stand outside that magic circle, humming under our breath and looking in. You can guess which category I belong in. I’ve always loved to sing, but I never did so in front of other people because I was convinced my voice wasn't "good enough."

When I became a mother in my mid-thirties I sang to my child, of course. Babies are wonderfully uncritical. And once my little girl learned to talk, she often asked me to sing. Hit The Road, Jack ranked among the Top Ten Car-seat Request Line Hits for over a year. But graduation from car seat to seat belt and, in the mere blink of an eye later, her inevitable enrollment in junior high brought a halt to any such requests. In fact, despite my promise to keep all the car windows rolled up, I was prohibited from singing within a five-mile radius of her school. Which didn’t allow me to belt out even the first line of the first verse of a song as we were backing out of our driveway. Once again, I found myself relegated to humming outside the magic circle.

Suddenly, when I was fifty-six, everything changed. By that time, my daughter had become a successful music producer who begged me to record a CD on her label, a CD that went platinum and made both of us millionaires! Oops, sorry: there goes my happy fantasy life intruding on reality again. No, what actually happened is that my beloved only daughter, now a junior in college thousands of miles from home, stopped speaking to me—ceased to communicate in any way. It nearly killed me. We had reached an impasse due to grave concerns my husband and I expressed about a choice our almost-but-not-yet-21-year-old daughter was making. She was angry with both of us, but especially with me. What better way to prove your independence than to cut your mother out of your life completely?

She stopped talking; I stopped writing. To write about anything else was impossible—there was nothing else in my mind and heart and soul my every waking moment. But to write about the pain I was experiencing as a result of the situation with my daughter was constantly to relive it, which was unbearable. Do you see where I’m going with this? For a writer, not writing is the equivalent of being rendered…voiceless.

Somehow, some way, in some dark, dark hour (and I wish I could remember the exact moment this happened) I discovered that if I wrote a song I could hold all that strong emotion in my hands like a length of fabric and--by cutting and stitching and embellishing--make of it something new. Something I could release into the world via secret code: you hear this and it makes you feel something that connects us, but at the same time my secret is safe, you can never know exactly what I was feeling and thinking when I wrote it, you can only know how it makes you feel.

Except: to release a song into the world, one has to sing it. Which brings us back to standing outside the magic circle, only now I wasn’t even humming.

I took the most obvious course of action open to a 21st-century person in dire circumstances: I Googled. I typed the words voice lessons austin texas into the search oval at the top of my laptop screen, and turned up the answer to my prayers in the form of a link to a warm and wonderful Australian singer-songwriter who vowed she could teach even me to sing. Two months after that, I started teaching myself to play guitar. Thus began a journey that culminated a year later in, of all things, a public performance of three of my songs at a bona fide live music venue in Austin “The Live Music Capital of the World,” Texas. Okay, it was actually a student showcase my voice teacher scheduled to give all of her students a chance to perform in front of an audience. But still… Me, singing and playing guitar in public last Saturday night at Kick Butt Coffee on Airport Boulevard. Who’d ever have imagined such a thing?

You may think this is the happy ending to the story. It is not. Because in the course of contemplating whom to invite to hear me sing my songs in public for the first (and possibly only) time in my life, I found myself drawing a circle of my own. Inside it were friends and family members I knew I could count on to be supportive of my musical effort, no matter what. Everyone I invited to the student showcase at Kick Butt Coffee had already demonstrated interest in and enthusiasm about what I was doing.

And then there were The Other People.

People who knew I’d been writing songs and learning to sing and teaching myself how to play guitar but who never, ever asked me how it was going. People who got funny looks on their faces when I offered to play and sing for them.  People who, if they did listen to me perform, left no doubt whatsoever that while my songwriting and guitar playing might merit some grudging acknowledgment, my singing left a lot to be desired. One longtime friend even went so far as to ask me, after I’d finished singing and playing a few of my songs for her, “Do you think your voice might sound better through a microphone?”

The thought of looking up to see any of these people’s faces during my public performance filled me with dread. Dread, and a resolve not to put myself—or them--through that. Because in the course of finding my voice and nurturing it and gaining confidence using it to sing I’d come to realize that in the community of musicians and singers and songwriters, circles are ever expandable. A “good” voice is a subjective thing, an opinion that varies among listeners. You only remain outside the circle if you choose to do so. All you have to do is to sing out in your own, wonderfully unique voice and—like magic—the circle opens up to let you in.

The circle I drew isn’t really closed, either. I’m just waiting to hear The Other People say they want to come in. And if they don’t? Well, I’m pretty sure I still remember most of the words to Hit the Road, Jack. Oh, and my daughter? We’ve been back on speaking (and hugging) terms for some time now. In her opinion, my voice has improved tremendously since I started taking voice lessons. In fact, she’s one of my strongest supporters and biggest fans. So there’s your happy ending—and mine.

Nita Lou Bryant likes to write, sew, sing, play guitar, swim, cook, take photographs, make jewelry, and concoct custom-blend aromatherapy sachets. In other words, she devotes her every waking moment to inventing as many distractions as possible from going to the gym and keeping house.  She is sole proprietor of Sedbi Design Studio and intermittently blogs at Studio Nita Lou and Nita Lou Recommends. She also spends an inordinate amount of time hanging out on Facebook.