"The Mommy Diaries" by Erin Morley

“How does having a baby physically affect an opera singer?” This is the question I have been asked most in the last year. Before I found out I was pregnant one year ago, I wondered the same thing myself. And although I could fill a book with the changes my body has gone through in the last year, I enjoyed my pregnancy quite a bit. It's a weird mixture of horrifying and miraculous, certainly a grand adventure, and a privilege to experience it. In the case of the singer, the body is the instrument. All throughout pregnancy and in the 3 months after delivery, my body felt like a different one just about every 2 weeks! Here are some of the more interesting physical challenges of my pregnant singing life . . .


In the beginning, the main physical issue was morning sickness. I was singing the Queen of the Night at Santa Fe Opera, and the only thing I could stomach backstage was ginger ale and saltines. Eventually, I vomited so much that I got laryngitis and couldn’t sing one of the performances.

When the nausea finally lessened a bit, I was into my second trimester and in New York for a couple of concerts. This is when my first round of “relearning” occurred. When I arrived in NYC, my body had recently started to inflate, and I had to sing the Brahms Requiem in Carnegie Hall. As the uterus enlarges during pregnancy, the internal organs are squished into an ever-decreasing space; the lungs start to feel crowded and breathing becomes shallow. It seems like I had about 13 voice lessons within the 4 days preceding the rehearsal period, in order to teach my new body how to breathe! I felt like my breathing was good and low before I got pregnant, but when the belly started to grow, the breathing had to get even lower. I found a connection with muscles that probably should have been working more anyway!

A couple weeks later, I sang a concert in Zankel Hall with the Met Orchestra. Baby had a growth spurt and my tummy felt like a different one again. Time to relearn! About this time, baby also started kicking during rehearsals and performances! I think she just wanted me to know she was listening.

The biggest singing challenge I had during pregnancy was rehearsing Zerbinetta at the Paris Opera. By this time, I was six months pregnant. Laurent Pelly's production of Ariadne auf Naxos is incredibly physically challenging for Zerbinetta. I was covering the role, but I had the great opportunity to do rehearsals for a few weeks. The set had beaucoup de stairs, beaucoup de cement, and the staging had beaucoup de running and jumping over and onto furniture and people. As a pregnant woman singing such a physically challenging role, I had to be extra careful about how I treated my body. I carefully warmed up, vocally and physically, before every rehearsal. I slept longer hours and took in more calories. And although I ate a greater quantity of food, the quality had to remain high. I was careful not to eat unhealthy or heavy foods; otherwise, I couldn’t move around as well. I spent rehearsal breaks stretching, breathing deeply, and eating healthy snacks. In rehearsals, I had to pay attention to my balance (which was out of whack now that my belly was extending out into space) and rehearse stage movements slowly until my footing felt secure. One day when rehearsing the quintet with the commedia boys, one of them remarked that my belly seemed to have undergone a growth spurt. “Eet eez so beautiFOOOOL!” They celebrated by decorating my belly with caution tape! I was extremely blessed to be surrounded by wonderful, supportive people in this production, cast and crew alike.

Of course there were times when I was just too uncomfortable to sing, and I did take some time off near the end of my pregnancy. But now that my sweet baby has arrived, and my singing life has begun to resume, I am experiencing the flip side of these issues, i.e., dealing with a shrinking body. I started practicing again about 5 weeks after my daughter’s birth. On the upside, I no longer had to deal with things like reflux, nausea, and feeling like there wasn't enough room in my torso for breath to fill it. But my newly deflated stomach was not functioning nearly as efficiently, mostly because I had to have a C-section. The severed nerves surrounding my incision are still finding their way back to each other, so I’m numb in some areas of my stomach. The connection to low stomach muscles has been harder to relearn. Core exercises at the gym help tremendously, and slow vocal warmups with a focus on those low muscles is key.

All of what I learned while I was pregnant has remained very useful. I don’t think my singing technique actually changed over the last year; I just had to relearn it according to the new anatomy I was dealing with. Building your voice from the ground up teaches you quite a bit! And in this way, I feel like pregnancy actually caused my technique to improve. We’ll find out when I sing my first post-pregnancy concert at Caramoor this month!

Have you ever undergone a career changing experience? Tell us about it!

For tickets to see Erin Morley in concert on July 17th, visit us at https://tickets.caramoor.org/public/show.asp