Kathryn Lewek: On singing with a foot in her rib, homeschooling, and mental health
Advice from a soprano
Meet our next creator, Kathryn Lewek:
Kathryn Lewek
Age: 39
Kids: Mackenzie, 4; Charlie, 23 months
Vocation: Soprano
Location: Redding, Connecticut
Links: Website, Instagram
I was thrilled when Kathryn Lewek was able to make time to chat with me recently. She just completed her 50th performance of singing The Magic Flute’s Queen of the Night at the Met to rave reviews.
It was fascinating to talk with someone whose work is so directly affected by pregnancy and childbirth and whose work lifestyle is rather nomadic, which does not typically sync well with family life. But she’s learned, sometimes through trial and error, how to cope with these challenges.
One thing in particular that Kathryn said has stuck in my brain: “I’ve always been the type of person who’s like, I’ll show you; I can do it. But therein lies the best of me and the worst of me because I push myself, and I don’t listen to my body.”
The conflict here is that, so often, the qualities that enable a woman to become successful in her field—traits like stubbornness, ambition, perfectionism, workaholism—are the same ones that can be detrimental to motherhood and family life.
It reminds me of when I was pregnant with my first. I was in San Francisco, living in the Mission and working in SoMa. The easiest and cheapest way to make the commute was to go by bike. I am not a strong bike rider and have very little confidence when riding among cars, which is a dangerous combination. But I was thrifty. And impatient. So I rode. When I became pregnant, it seemed like a great additional way to get exercise. So I rode pregnant. I am also someone who is very stubborn and who prides herself on her, even if deluded, physical strength and stamina (runner’s syndrome). My stomach got bigger, and I got more awkward, but I kept riding. I planned to ride until the contractions started.
Then, when I was almost seven months pregnant, the clocks turned back, and it was suddenly pitch black when I was commuting home. I clipped on some lights and was ready to go. Then my husband sat me down. He said, “I know you’re really tough and you are perfectly able to ride your bike until you give birth. But you need to understand that if you get in an accident, the baby dies. He’s dead.”
One, kudos to me for marrying a man who knows how to handle my ego and talk me off the ledge. Two, that was the first moment when I realized that my decisions were no longer my own. They affected my baby. They affected my husband.
That was a hard pill to swallow. And this is just a minuscule example of the avalanche of sacrifices and hard decisions that sweep over us as parents and soon-to-be parents. But, often, in the end, if we’re making decisions that are good for us, they’re good for our family. And if they’re good for our family, they’re good for us.
Kathryn has faced her own difficult decisions, some that have risked a setback or missed opportunities in her career, and some that take the bravery to buck American lifestyle conventions. But they are all in the service of her family and her own mental health, a topic she has become passionate about speaking out on.
Now, Kathryn, in her own words…
On what it’s like to sing an aria while pregnant:
I sang until I was about eight and a half months pregnant. I would warm up before the opera, and then by the time I had to go out on stage, I had to re-warm up because the baby had moved, and I felt like I needed to rethink where I am going to be supporting this from because her leg is no longer sticking into this rib, it’s now sticking into the other rib.
There’s the huge aria of Act Two [of The Magic Flute] that everybody knows, “Der Hölle Rache.” It’s very physically challenging, very athletic. On the one hand, I felt like having that being inside of me gave me this extra thing to push against and to have that extra support. But that luxury sort of ended around month seven. After that, it became incredibly difficult to get enough breath to really fill up and expand. Because when you’re very, very, very pregnant, you constantly feel like you’ve had way too much to eat at Thanksgiving dinner. It’s just painful, and you feel like you can’t take an expansive breath.
I hate to say that there’s any silver lining to the world shutting down during COVID, but for me, it actually gave me an opportunity to have a pregnancy, my second pregnancy, where I didn’t feel the pressure to be performing all the way through. So that was a lot easier for me mentally and physically during my second pregnancy.
On learning not to be the hero:
After my first child, I made poor choices for me, personally, that looked really heroic from the outside. With Mackenzie, I was induced at 42 weeks, and I was scheduled to start rehearsals again at the Met for the Julie Taymor production of Magic Flute just six weeks after I had her. And of course nothing went according to plan. I was dreading the idea of having a C-section because when you have abdominal surgery all of those muscles are just sliced to bits. But I became preeclamptic, and they were really afraid about me having seizures, and they were afraid for the baby. So I ended up having an emergency C-section after 25 hours of actual labor.
I remember lying on the operating table, and my midwife says to the OB surgeon, “You know, Kathryn is an opera singer, and she’s really hoping to be back on stage in six weeks.” And the surgeon said, “Yeah, that’s not gonna happen.” But you know, I’ve always been the type of person who’s like, I’ll show you; I can do it. But therein lies the best of me and the worst of me because I push myself, and I don’t listen to my body. I performed at seven weeks postpartum, with rehearsals at six weeks. And I mean, because of that, I didn’t give myself the necessary time to recover from what my experience had been, which was pretty traumatic to me. My mental health really took a nosedive. I started suffering from severe postpartum anxiety, where some nights I would get like five minutes of sleep at a time and then just keep waking up. I had fears about everything, about the health of my child, about my career, about everything. I was obviously under tremendous amounts of stress that I was doing to myself. They were decisions that I was making for me. It wasn’t other people putting pressure on me. It wasn’t my husband putting pressure on me. It wasn’t anybody other than me. And so it was really self-inflicted, but that anxiety turned into postpartum depression that I suffered for years, actually. Well into COVID, I was depressed.
When I had my second child, my son in 2021 in July, I made a different choice. I was supposed to fly the whole family over to England to do my debut at the Royal Opera House at eight weeks postpartum. And I had some complications right after my scheduled C-section. I had some major internal bruising, so I had to go on some heavy narcotics, and I was in a lot of pain. I started thinking about my mental health struggles that, again, I felt were self-inflicted from my first pregnancy, from my first postpartum experience. And I decided to make it different. I felt like I owed my family a better version of myself. Even if my career suffered for it, it felt like that was a sacrifice that I had to make.
So I announced that I was pulling out of my debut at ROH. They really were very understanding and immediately rescheduled my performances for the following season. This past season, I did actually get to make my debut there. I got lucky because not everybody can make a drastic choice like that to give up a major debut at one of the most illustrious opera houses of the world and then still be able to have that chance again. I made 100% the right choice for me. And I feel like I’m a new woman now, even with the sleep deprivation. So I’m very lucky.
On keeping the family together:
When I first decided to be a singer, people were like, “That’s crazy. What are you going to do for your day job?” And then the singer thing kind of was working out for me. I’ve just never been a person who ever wanted to give up anything that felt like a priority to me. And it became even more important to me to start a family after I met the love of my life. A tenor, of course. Has to be a tenor, right? But it was also a priority to him, and we talked a lot about what it would be like to have a family. We both agreed that it was really important that we try to stick together as much as possible and arrange our schedules if we could so that we weren’t apart a lot. And then we both agreed that when kids came along, that would remain a priority, that we would keep the family together. And we decided to homeschool the kids until a certain point, maybe around high school.
We want them to have the opportunity to get to learn stuff really hands-on rather than just read things in books and classrooms and be told that they exist. They get to discover it in real time, which I think is just super cool. I mean, my daughter can order pineapple juice in four different languages. She’s four. That’s amazing.
On prioritizing mental health:
I remember teachers of mine saying that it was really only possible to have a family if you were in that elite class of singers at the very top. I feel like I have this incredible luck that I am busy enough as a singer and I make enough money as a singer that I can bring my family with me. I can buy flights for them to fly with me. But I’m not going to pretend that that’s possible for everybody, and I am super passionate to try to figure out ways of making that lifestyle more attainable for every level of singer. Not just people who are jetting off to sing at the greatest opera houses in the world, but people who have sustainable careers singing at regional opera houses in the United States. They should be able to bring their families with them if that’s something that they choose to do. We can’t expect for this to be a mentally healthy, stable business and industry if people are constantly separated, kids from their parents and parents from their kids.
I am really becoming proactive in trying to change this industry for the better. I’ve been meeting with upper staff members at opera companies, including Lyric Opera of Chicago. I had a wonderful meeting with one of the staff members there about trying to figure out non-monetary ways that opera companies can help traveling families because I want it to become a little less unapproachable, and I would love for families to feel like they can navigate this business while sticking together because I think that’s the best thing for the family. There are situations where it is better for kids to be in school and to have professional educators, especially if there are disabilities involved. But I think for most nuclear families, the best possible thing for the kids is to be together with the parents, and it feels so impossible to so many people, to so many parents right now for that to be a reality. And I would love, love, love, if there’s anything I do in this world, I would love to make it more possible for artists to not just dream about being with their families, but to actually be with their families when they’re traveling.
Thank you, Kathryn, for sharing your story!
*Interview has been edited for length and clarity.