Soundtracks

I don't watch a lot of movies, but when I do I generally look forward to the sound tracks most.  The way someone sitting at a desk with a script and a stack of music can artfully (or sometimes not so much) pick just the right song, the right tempo and cadence to fit in a particular scene, it fascinates and  astonishes me.  It's a gift I don't have.  In fact, I can't sing at all.  Don't get me wrong, I love making my joyful noise to the world, but I have managed to squeak out actual notes on less than a dozen occasions in the last decade.  I know this because my husband is lovingly keeping track.  Thanks sweetie.

But poetry set to music... there's something universal and completely personal about that.  You approach a song from your distinct background, your particular color pallet of life.  Sit in a concert of any kind though, and you realize among the raised cell phones and giddily hoarse voices that you all are coming to the same song, at the same moment, experiencing a new together.  That's powerful.

Maybe it's just me.  Maybe I'm too deep or too shallow or something like that.  For me, though, I love the moment when I can sit back and pick out the soundtrack to a certain year or period in my life.  My husband had his garage band/grunge years, full of Green Day and who knows who else.  Thankfully, I didn't know him then.  This year has been a year of seriously powerful songs, ones with a quickening tempo, a general trend towards minor falls married to major lifts.  Many of these songs, for better or for worse, have been shared with my offspring.  My two year old knows just as many words to the Fight Song as her six year old brother.  Not my proudest mamma moment but most certainly not my worst.  Besides, she's so stinking cute!

In those times of reflection about the validity of letting said two-year-old continue in her path of pop music, I often slide down the steep slope of deep, unbridled and unapologetic concern over my kids.  I don't worry about sex or drugs or grades or college.  I worry if they'll travel enough, if they'll be open to new experiences or view points.  I worry whether I'm identifying and cultivating each of their deep-seeded uniquenesses that are woven into the fabric of their hearts.  It's not a worry in the sense of paralyzing fear nor is it something I'm particularly attached to, something that helps me keep them small.  It's me, being their mamma, trying to figure out how to help them be who they are and not stop short at seeing only what they can do in this life.  My biggest fears for my children are not that they'll be hurt.  My biggest fears are that they'll be centimeter deep but kilometer wide people.  That life, for them, will be a college level 100 class, even now.  I don't want them to be the kind of people who read CliffNotes, abide in someone else's summary, or deign to be a subcategory.  No pressure, right?

I know, someday, somewhere down the line, they'll come to me and tell me all the ways I did or did not screw them up for life.  And I'm honestly terrified and totally at peace with whatever they say about me and my parenting.  The thing I want to know, in that instance (or at least what my current self thinks I'll want to know then) is what was the soundtrack as they heard it?  How did event play out from their vantage point?

I can watch the exact same movie as my husband but he will have missed the music completely 90% of the time.  I, on the other hand, have the grit of the guitar strings still phantomly causing my fingers to ache.  Same experience, different take-away.

I know the sound track to my mommyhood, my children's lives as it were.  It's filled with Leonard Cohen's Broken Hallelujah and Rachel Platten's Fight Song, Bob Dylan's Forever Young, Avicii's Wake Me Up and the rasping sweetness of Jason Mraz, all of it.  Without fail though, every single sound echoing from my beautiful, strong, kind-hearted and terribly forgiving first-born is always tinted with the twang of South Africa, the lilt of her preschool teacher and the brashness of the township on my soundtrack of mommyhood.  It's possibly the most lovely sound I've ever heard, my baby's voice.  The problem is, she no longer speaks in that voice.  She's become an American speaker, body language, facial expression and all.  Somehow, somewhere along the way, in the space between her first "he-yur" and her last "eish" my baby realized how harsh and big the world can be.  I've been told, more than once, that I'm too melodramatic, that it was all just a move.  I know things in my heart the way a person knows their own marriage.  This was more.  It's more than a changed time zone or a slight vocabulary adjustment.  In a dozen big and small ways I know this was a divorce, an inability to get back to a certain degree of trust, of security.  And the worst is, my child was just old enough to have learned to read the letters on the wall as it happened.

I am sure the soundtrack for my Steadfast One will be full of Eye of the Tiger type songs, a few love sick ballads and a whole lot of dancing.  Of that, I'm sure.  But what I'm not sure is if I'm willing to own up to my part in the making of that particular soundtrack, in that particular order, at that particular time.  I didn't get the choose the time or place for this, our Love is a Battleground number, but I know for certain in my very marrow which formed the lungs that now sing that song, I would have chosen differently.  Not for me, but for her.