My Mom, My Musical Foundation
This photo of me at 22-months old (not even 2 years) shows exactly how far back music has been in my life. According to my mom, I would ride that plastic horse and listen to John Denver records through headphones. (Who knew those large headphones and vinyl would be just as popular today as they were in 1977?!) This photo explains why the lyrics to John Denver songs have been with me for as long as I can remember, and why I’ve always had a song playing in my head. There’s a reason music became a constant companion in my life. And that reason is my mom.
My mom is my musical foundation. Unlike my dad who appreciates music, but is not moved by it (although his fondness of Harry Chapin taught me many life lessons), my mom is constantly listening and singing along. She gave me a deep appreciation of songs, and instilled in me from a young age that it’s important to know the names of the oldies and classic songs, as well as the artists who sang them.
Mom used to do a thing. We’d drive in the car and listen to the radio, usually an oldies or “soft rock” station. Mom knew all the oldies and as she’d sing along, she’d tell me the names of the songs and the singers or band. “It’s the Beach Boys,” she said when “Surfin’ USA” came on. Or she’d sing along to “Peggy Sue, Peggy Sue …” and would tell me Buddy Holly is the singer. This is how I learned about music, and began to recognize different singers and paired songs to their voices. Before the days of the Internet, mom was my go-to source for pre-1980s musical knowledge.
So many of the artists I love today are ones my mom introduced me to as a kid: James Taylor, Jim Croce, Gordon Lightfoot, Carole King, Elton John, Carly Simon. All those classic 1970s singer-songwriters, mom loved them and I can’t help but love them too.
When she visited me in Indiana earlier this year, we spent some time listening to records on my turntable. Not surprisingly, the bulk of my record collection is from the 1970s and late 1960s. She was thrilled to see Carole King’s “Tapestry” among my vinyl, as mom had that record when it debuted in 1971. We also listened to Buffalo Springfield, Eric Clapton, John Prine, America and Emmylou Harris. Mom asked how I got so interested in those 1970s records. “From you,” I replied.
Our shared love of music does not stop at oldies and 1970s singer-songwriters. When I started listening to country music in college, she listened along with me and fell in love with Mary Chapin Carpenter with as much fervor as I did. We attended many of Carpenter’s concerts together, all of which hold a special place in my heart.
Relationships with mothers can be a tricky thing (especially for daughters). I think we sometimes neglect that bond because we know, deep down, moms are always there in some way. So as much as my mom’s quirks have caused me to shake my head over the years, I give her credit for helping to build the deep musical foundation of what’s become critical to my life.
Fast forward to today, I find myself with Sophie doing exactly what my mom did with me any time an older song plays. Like a natural instinct, I automatically tell Sophie the song and singer.
“It’s ‘La Bamba’,” I tell Sophie. “Ritchie Valens is the singer. He’s the one who died with the other musicians on the day the music died. The ‘American Pie’ song. You need to know this.”
“Oh,” she replies, sounding bored and acting like she doesn’t care.
Yet the next time Sophie and I are in the car and “American Pie” starts playing, she asked me, “So who else died in that plane crash?”
She remembers. And in a strange way, this makes me proud. I’m not the best person to help Sophie with math homework, but at least I can give her an appreciation of music. Just like my mom did for me.
Today is a bittersweet day. It’s Sophie’s last day of fifth grade; her last day of elementary school. She’s now officially a sixth grader, bound for middle school in August.
Some days, it feels like just yesterday she started kindergarten. Or her first day of third grade, which was her first at a new school in Terre Haute. And other times, those moments feel like a lifetime ago. I’m not worried about her going to middle school. In fact, I’m excited for her and the opportunities she has in front of her, and I know she’ll be fine in a new school.
I think what gives me pause and some sadness about this milestone is thinking about all the years and time that’s gone by. I wonder constantly if I’ve done right by her in terms of being a good parent. Could I have been more empathetic toward her at times? Did I support her endeavors and give her the right encouragement? What about all the times I freaked out or made snap judgments toward her, and then later regretted my words and actions? Was I in such a hurry to get to tomorrow that I forgot to enjoy all the todays?
I guess, at some point, I just have to accept that I’ve done the very best I can. And hope she takes all the best parts of me and all the time that’s passed, and it helps make her the best possible person going forward.
Much like myself, I’ve seen the most growth and change in Sophie these last three years in Indiana. It’s not easy to leave behind the only life you’ve known for a brand new start, in a new part of the country. But she took that challenge and soared to new heights. Sophie is so much braver than I ever was at her age, and I couldn’t be more proud of her.
There are so many days when I wonder how I got the daughter I have. Sophie and I are so opposite, in so many ways. She’s an extrovert; I’m an introvert. I often joke that if I don’t know what piece of clothing to buy her, I should choose the one that I dislike the most. Because that will ultimately be the one she wants. She cares very much what others think of her; I care more about what I think of myself. I process everything internally and am very guarded about revealing too much of myself to others. Sophie is an open book and the definition of external expression. Growing up, I had a lot of fear of the unknown, which kept me from pursuing opportunities. Sophie has courage; and while she won’t go after every opportunity presented to her, she won’t let fear get in her way if it’s something she truly wants.
A friend once told me that, when it comes to parenting, we’re given the child we need. I think there’s something to that statement. Because as much as Sophie can frustrate me at times, I’ve learned so much from her. And I know she’s made me a better parent, and a better person.
“Then the child moved ten times round the seasons
Skated over ten clear frozen streams
Words like, when you’re older, must appease him
And promises of someday make his dreams
And the seasons they go round and round
And the painted ponies go up and down
We’re captive on the carousel of time
We can’t return we can only look behind
From where we came
And go round and round and round
In the circle game”
— Joni Mitchell, “The Circle Game”
I’ve thought a lot about the ideas of fate and destiny and higher powers and roads taken/not taken since moving to Indiana almost three years ago. It makes sense really. The life I knew for 40 years suddenly changed and I had to make sense of an entirely new life – and with that new life – a new self concept.
I’ve never considered myself a New Agey-type or religious in nature. But as the years have played out and I’ve seen my life unfold in a place – and in experiences – I never thought I’d be in, I think more about the idea of becoming, or that there’s something much bigger at play. That perhaps I’m not in control of what’s supposed to happen in my life.
Now I’m not saying I’m resigned to the will of others and I have no control over my life choices. What I mean is that perhaps there are things we’re supposed to do in life … and that the seeds for these things have already been planted and we’re just waiting for them to grow and come to fruition.
I think about this a lot with respect to songs I loved for years, but didn’t know exactly why. Or movies and television characters that resonated deeply with me for reasons I could not explain. Or book passages, poems and words that seem to represent a bigger idea than I was capable of explaining. All these things that resonated with me so many years ago … perhaps it’s because they were signs for something bigger to come. Such as roads I didn’t know I would take. Or different people I was destined to meet. Or a place I was supposed to live that I never could have imagined.
What if all those songs, books, characters were part of a grander plan that I’m just now seeing play out?
To help explain this concept in a much better way than me, I turn to writer Cheryl Strayed, most known for her memoir, “Wild.” I recently finished reading her book, “Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar,” which is a collection of letters she answered while writing the Dear Sugar advice column for The Rumpus. In a chapter entitled “The Ordinary Miraculous,” she answered the following question:
“The general mystery of becoming seems like a key idea in many of your columns, of how you don’t know what something will turn out to be until you’ve lived it. It’s made me want to know more. Will you give us a specific example of how something has played out over the years of your life, Sugar?”
Strayed goes on to give the example of a child’s red velvet dress that she found at a yard sale while shopping with her mother. She didn’t have any children at the time, but there was something that drew her to the dress; though she couldn’t explain what that was. Her mother bought her the dress and told her to keep it in a box for the future. Strayed later goes on to explain that many years later, she would watch her 2-year-old daughter wear the red velvet dress at Christmas, long after her own mother passed away and never had the chance to meet her granddaughter for whom she unknowingly bought the dress. It was then that she realized the significance: her daughter is wearing a dress that her grandmother bought her at a yard sale. She goes on to explain that the moment was so ordinary to many, but extraordinary to her.
She ends the chapter with the following paragraph:
“I suppose this is what I mean when I say we cannot possibly know what will manifest in our lives. We live and have experiences and leave people we love and get left by them. People we thought would be with us forever aren’t and people we didn’t know would come into our lives do. Our work here is to keep faith with that, to put it in a box and wait. To trust that someday we will know what it means, so that when the ordinary miraculous is revealed to us we will be there, standing before the baby girl in the pretty dress, grateful for the smallest things.”
Reading that paragraph broke me wide open. It summed up exactly how I’ve been feeling about all the signs and indicators of what my life may mean, or what I’m supposed to heading toward.
I suppose some people would say there is no grand scheme of life. That there aren’t really signs and hidden plans. And for me, someone who tends toward control and wanting to be in charge of my life, it can often be hard to simply have faith and let life unfold.
But it was comforting and reassuring to know that, as Strayed suggests, perhaps we just need to sit back and wait for life to play out as it’s meant to be. I have to believe it all means something. And that perhaps all those songs, characters, books and words that resonated so deeply with me and left me raw were given to me for a reason. And just maybe I’m on the exact road that I need to be traveling on in my life.
I never appreciated spring until moving to Indiana and experiencing winter. In San Diego, the seasons are simply dates on a calendar and are indistinguishable from each other. But in the Midwest, spring feels like the reward for getting through winter.
I’ve written before that January and February are not my favorite months. And while I do enjoy winter in the Midwest – especially the early onset of the season in December with snow and warm clothing – I noticed more this season, that parts of winter felt very “heavy” to me. So this year in particular, I’m so happy to welcome the lightness of spring.
These first few days of the season – when the sun is shining and you can feel the warmth on your skin; before the humidity takes hold – feel like a gift. It’s time before the bugs come out and windows are open for the smell of fresh air. When the grass is regrowing and returning to green, and the flowers are blooming and leaves fill the tree branches again. The birds return to the outside world and sing their tunes for the world to hear. It’s a magical period that makes me appreciate the passage of time, and the movement away from the cold.
Living in a place where seasons change, spring cleaning is necessary. I welcome the opportunity to clean out the old and welcome the new. Just this past weekend, I joyfully put away all my long-sleeve running clothes; hallelujah for no more layers! I went through my closet and dresser and put away the sweaters and flannel; and said farewell to my boots. I unpacked my short-sleeve shirts, sleeveless tops and shorts, and brought the flip flops back out. All of this felt so exciting.
And this week I decided to clean out another big area of my life — my music playlists. As many of you know, music plays a big part in my life. Songs keep me company while I work and play in my ears when I run. They’re in the kitchen as I cook dinner, and while I’m driving in the car. And they’re my soundtrack to relaxing at home and even join me in the shower. There’s never a time when a song is not playing in my head.
Many of the “frequent flyer playlists” I’ve been listening to as of late are comprised of songs from this past winter and late fall. So I was fully on board with the concept of “putting away” those tunes and was eager to welcome new and “lighter” tunes into my daily mixes. I’m already finding myself wanting different music with the onset of the new season. Kind of like how we crave different foods in the spring/summer versus the fall/winter, and watch specific movies in different seasons.
But when it came down to the execution of this project, it all felt overwhelming and sad. Perhaps because, for me, music and songs are deeply personal, and are often associated with memories, people, places, events and activities, emotions, long car drives … you get the idea. So the process of moving the songs to a more archival playlist almost felt like I had to say goodbye to the memories, most of them happy ones.
I realized that’s not the case at all; that I’m not actually closing off the past. Just because a song is now on a “Winter 2018-19” playlist, I can still listen to the tune and I’m not saying goodbye to the memory. It’s just freeing up space to welcome new experiences and music.
As I started moving the songs, it felt like I had given myself permission to appreciate everything that’s happened in the last six months and move forward to everything that will come ahead.
I have no reason to think I won’t fill up an entirely new spring (and summer) playlist with awesome new tunes and fulfilling memories. I’m already on a roll with 15 songs from the last few weeks on my “Welcome Spring 2019” playlist. And the wonderful memories and experiences of the past still exist, as do the great tunes. But now I have the mental (and digital) space to welcome new songs, memories and experiences. I’m not constantly listening to the past; I’m listening in the present.
This week, not only am I welcoming the sun along with my warm weather clothes and the rebirth of nature, I’m also embracing new music and memories yet to be made. I’m excited for the warmth, the change, and what will come ahead. Let’s go spring – I’m ready for you!
I am a proud member of Generation X. I was born in 1975, making me 43-years-old. My formative years were the late 1980s and early 90s. I graduated high school in 1993. At that time, technology in my house consisted of an Apple IIE computer and the Oregon Trail. The Internet was still years away from even being a remote household possibility. When I packed my belongings for college, my prized possessions were my CDs, cassette tapes and portable Sony stereo and walkman.
My parents are Baby Boomers, turning 73-years-old this year. My dad is a retired college administrator and my mother, a retired elementary school teacher. Like most Boomers, they believe you put in your 30+ years at one job/company, work hard, and then retire. They raised four daughters – me being the oldest – with this mantra that echoed throughout my youth: “Work hard. Don’t accrue debt. Don’t rely on others.”
My daughter, Sophie, was born in 2007. She’s 11-years-old and, and according to the generational research, she’s part of the iGeneration or Generation Z.
Most of what I read online and presentations given are about Boomers and Millenials co-existing together. Us Generation X kids are nowhere to be found. (Is it any wonder we’re the jaded latchkey generation?). But as I parent, it’s becoming very clear to me how incredibly different my life experiences are from my daughter. And this has been a challenging path to navigate.
You see, the biggest generational gap between my Boomer parents and myself was with respect to how things became more expensive (inflation, of course) and the emergence of different music genres. The “When I was your age …” typically finished in a comparison of cost.
There were technological differences but, I would argue, those were variances of the same technological concepts. For example, both my Boomer parents and myself had television growing up (we both had color too), and I remember life before the VCR. The difference between our generations was more channel choices and the emergence of the remote control (but even those came years into my childhood). We both grew up with telephones in our homes and pay phones outside the house. The answering machine and call waiting were probably the biggest distinctions; but both my parents and I remember the busy signal all too well.
My Generation X was the last to experience life before technology and the Internet changed the world. I had to do research in the library and using encyclopedias. So did my parents. I learned how to tell time on an analog clock. Again, so did my parents. I had to be able to count money and know exactly how many pennies, dimes, nickels and quarters made up a dollar because I helped my dad roll up pennies and change to be deposited at the bank, and debit cards weren’t a means of payment yet.
I knew which albums contained which songs and in what order because my generation and the Boomers had to buy an entire album even if you just wanted one song. There was no iTunes to download or Spotify to find a single tune. As a result, I can still name the order of most songs on a given album. I also still know phone numbers of neighbors and family members from the 1980s because if you wanted to make a call, you had to memorize the number or look it up in the address book. (I cannot, however, remember any current phone numbers since they’re all saved automatically in my iPhone.)
Sophie is a different breed entirely. She still can’t clearly comprehend time since she was born in the digital age and she wasn’t taught how to read a clock. Money is currency that’s virtual and used to pay for iTunes and Roblox credit, or comes out of her parents’ plastic debit card.
I worry constantly that perhaps I should be teaching her how to tell time on a clock. But then again, is there a reason to learn it that way? How long will clocks continue to exist? And the majority of watches are digital or smart devices.
She doesn’t have to get off the couch to change the channel when watching television. Really, she doesn’t even need a television because she spends the majority of her time watching YouTube videos on an iPad. The other night, she instructed Siri to turn off her alarm for her.
I feel bad that I occasionally think of her as lazy because she doesn’t need to put forth the same effort I did as a kid to accomplish life tasks. But maybe it’s not really being lazy. Perhaps it’s just evolution and growing up in a technological age where everything is at your fingertips.
Interestingly, however, while she has the entire world at her disposal to learn new knowledge and acquire facts via Google search, she doesn’t want to put forth the effort to look up answers to her own questions. Almost on a near-daily basis, Sophie will ask me a question and I’ll respond with, “I don’t know. Google the answer.” She never does. Yet she knows all about conspiracy theories because a YouTuber has rattled them off to her through passive viewing.
Parenting is a tough job for any generation. I’m sure my parents thought raising their daughters in the age of MTV, missing kids on milk cartons, and AIDS was no picnic. But I think there’s something to be said about being that last generation to have to think and do differently – and our formative years being before the technological boom – that causes a real struggle with raising a child who will never know those situations.
I don’t want to go back to the way things were when I was a kid, and I know it’s unrealistic to make Sophie adapt to the way I grew up. But perhaps there’s some value with kids learning how to live a life where they have to think and do more for themselves. Or maybe that’s just not the reality of life in the 21st century. I don’t have the answers. But maybe Sophie does from a YouTube video.
