Perfect Songs - Winter

I have a playlist I've put together I call Zoey Sleep, that we use for the shocking purpose of getting my 4 year old daughter to sleep. It's not your typical set of lullabies, but instead features songs from Juliana Hatfield, Tanya Donelly, Bon Iver, Alison Krauss and several others. I add to it once in a while and she likes the songs I've added. But there's one that not only works best, it has a whole other impact on me: Tori Amos' "Winter.," a perfect song.

This song has taken on new meanings for me over the past 8 or so years, since the birth of our first daughter. Most nights, it works like a charm, calming Zoey down quickly which is a big deal if you know Zoey. It used to do the same for Shayera. And that calmness comes with a lot of reflection on my part as well as it gives me a few minutes of just laying with my daughter, listening to the lyrics and having images run through my mind. Every single time, there are tears. Usually they come after the girl is asleep, and I can just lay there listening to the rest of it.

I've always thought of this song as a (better) companion to Fleetwood Mac's "Landslide," complete with the father daughter relationship and the images of snow. The whole concept of growing older and somehow colder, from the daughter's perspective, and how the father is still there for her, knowing what the future will bring as she faces her teenage years, etc. Look, the song speaks for itself. It's beautiful and multilayered and it was always one of, if not my very favorite of Tori's songs. To the point that we briefly toyed with naming our first born Winter. But my moments with the girls tend to turn the song around a bit, because I imagine the conversation in it slightly different than is perhaps intended.

In my version, the father (me) and the daughters are both sort of saying parts of the lyrics to each other. "You must learn to stand up for yourself cause I can't always be around" is the guiding principal and heartbreaking truth that guides every parent that gives a shit about their kids. And maybe even more so when it's daughters facing a world that continues to be shitty to women. "When you gonna love you as much as I do?" could easily be my daughters telling me that when they were first born and I was really overwhelmed by what the love felt like from them and for them. And I hope it's not something I ever have to say to them, but then the song also goes into the complexity of what our relationship may be like as she gets older, when she says she'll always want her father near and he responds with "things change." By the time the song swells with the last verse about grey hairs, dreams on a shelf and wanting each other to be proud of the other, I'm usually laying in a puddle of tears.

I've always said the most tragic thing you can give a child is a balloon. It's really just a metaphor for mortality and never ends in happiness. It's just this ball of impending sadness. Either you watch it slowly die as it floats less each day, withering like a senile relative before your eyes in a matter of days, or it floats away before you had a chance to truly get to know it, forever a memory of happiness that really could never have been. Sure you can suck the life out of it and speak in a funny voice for a few seconds, but then you're a murderer and empty inside (yeah, just go with it). Even with all this pain, it doesn't prepare you for the realities of parenting. The dread you feel at maybe not being able to be there for them, no matter what, leads to panic when you realize you obviously can't. And then you scramble, daily, to prepare them for EVERYTHING, as if anybody possibly could. But you know full well you can't. You've lived this life and you know what it's done to you. I remember every balloon I've lost both literal and figurative. And it sucks that I can't keep my kids from losing their share as well.

So, yeah, I get a little warm in my heart when I think of Winter. 

Throwback Thursday - Bridge Over Troubled Water

This was originally posted on my Tumblr on July 6, 2012. 

Working on this technology now.

Bridge Over Troubled Water - Parental Nightmares

If you dig back into my music posts, you’ll know the original intent of my music blog was to talk about how music affected me. I haven’t written about that in a long while, but here goes.

The obvious nightmare scenario for any parent is losing a child. You don’t really need to be a parent to know and understand that. Ultimately, it’s a selfish thing too, because it’s about dealing with your own grief more than anything else, and I don’t say that to diminish it any way. It’s obvious because it is the ultimate nightmare scenario. But the other parental nightmare scenario, the one that isn’t as obvious and no one really talks about is not being there for your children. This one is harder to understand unless you actually are a parent, I think. And maybe even harder to understand if you haven’t lost your own parents yet. But, this is the nightmare that haunts me and it’s tied to a song now. 

It was probably some time last year that I heard Simon and Garfunkel’s “Bridge Over Troubled Water” for the first time in a long time. I don’t think I’d heard it since my daughter was born. But on that day, it was fresh after having a very vivid, sad and disturbing dream in which I had died but was a ghost and watched my daughter grieve me (yeah, I’m disturbed like that) so the song took on a new meaning. I was choked up from the opening note and by the last verse “Sail on silver girl, sail on by, your time has come to shine, all your dreams are on their way,” I was close to needing to pull over. “I’m sailing right behind” just killed me. So now, whenever I hear the song it gets me, hard.

I don’t believe in life after death or anything like that. I accept the beauty of having only one chance at life and making the best of each moment. But the sadness of the permanence of death still haunts me. As I get older my own mortality becomes more prominent in my mind and the fact that I would not only miss being there for my daughter, but miss watching her grow is a heart breaker. Not that I spend time obsessing over this, but certainly, this song now brings it up. It’s sad, but it’s also, as grief usually is, comforting to know that I am capable of love on this level. Time and again, music is responsible for these realizations and these emotional journeys, for me. Anyway, the next music post won’t be so melancholy.

Little Girl's Songs

Five and a half years ago, I had been listening to this song that for some reason was making me think of growing up and my life and the next step. For about 6 months, every time I heard the song, I'd reflect back and think forward with excitement and a little fear and a whole lot of expectation. I'd wonder if I was ready and what life was going to be like. And then at the end of those 6 months, I heard it again right when it made a difference and it really hit home.

"And now my fur has turned to skin

And I've been quickly ushered in

To a world that I confess I do not know"

Five years ago, exactly, I listened to Blitzen Trapper's Furr on one of several drives back and forth from the hospital where my wife had brought our first born into the world and it made all the sense in the world that my life had gone through the stages it had to prepare me for a moment that I was not prepared for and had no idea how to deal with. Those doubts, those exciting doubts, they were the result of not really understanding. Not getting it because it couldn't be explained. But it was a sign of readiness. Understanding, if it ever comes, comes later. It comes when you do what the next song is about. It comes when you do what I've done and continue to do.

Lenny Kravitz's Little Girl's Eyes (coincidentally on his album, 5) is a song I always thought was kinda cheesy. And really, it is. But the thing is, at one point, after looking at Shayera's eyes a few times, I heard the song again after years, and it just killed me. There's a moment that can happen and I'm sure I've written about it somewhere before, where you look into your child's eyes and it connects you to the way you looked at your parents and the way they looked at you and back through the generations and forward in time, where you finally understand. I had that moment once with her. It changed me and I'm reminded of it every time I look at her now.

This isn't that moment.

She's cool.

Today, she is 5 years old and she's the funniest person I know. Coming from two smart-ass parents, she's taken it to a whole new level of artistry. She's sensitive to the point that it worries me as much as it fills me with joy, because I know what it's like. She is learning to read and loves books. She seems to be interested in science to the point of recently saying she loves Beakman so much she is going to "kiss him on the mouth!" She has been into music from day one and will dance to anything. She will watch everything from My Little Pony to Batman and who knows what else it'll be today, because she knows things aren't just for boys or girls. She teaches me something new about life and what it means to be human almost daily. In her eyes I see my successes and failures as a parent and I see my temper in her tantrums, but we learn together. In the past year, watching her be such a natural at the big sister role has given me the opportunity to live through her and her sister what I never had as an only child. Her laugh is the greatest sound in the world and her cries may as well be punches with flaming, electrified barbed wire knuckles to each one of my bare nuts. I already miss the last 5 years of watching her grow, but I can't wait to see the next 5 and the 5 after that, etc.. It's a bizarre thing. You wish you could somehow stretch time out like paper dolls so you could see them at every stage into the future.