Archives for October 2021

As we prepare for the rerelease, I was listening to “Every Single Album’s” deep dive into Taylor Swift’s Red. The album is great, obviously. A journey through a break up ending full of ballads and dance bops.

It’s hard for me to play favorites with Taylor’s songs and even her albums. Each has a “mood” and as far as songs go, so many were important to me starting with the illegally leaked, “Tim McGraw,” which I found on Limewire freshman year of college. In “Tim McGraw,” I found so much of me in her lyrics and was instantly brought to her fandom.

So, I am thrilled for her rereleases and her owning her whole discography. I am planning a very cozy listening party with a couple fan-friends in November the weekend Red comes out. In the Red album, I really, really like some of the slower, acoustic versions of the songs like “Treacherous” and “State of Grace.” I feel like “Holy Ground” is an underrated bop. Unpopular opinion: I think “The Moment I Knew” is sadder than “All Too Well.” And, I always loved the title track, “Red.”

Like Taylor, I also think about feelings and people as if they are colors. I have for a long time. What I didn’t realize was that there is a word for this: synesthesia.

My sister, Kerry, and I got to talking about synesthesia and she was 1. fascinated and then, 2. Curious what color she was.

The first time I talked outloud about my ability to read colors it was Kerry’s color. And, it was my first realization that not all people feel colors for people like I do.

I was in college and people would ask about siblings and life at home. There would be conversations with friends about how we differed from our sisters and brother and I recall telling my friends, “Well, Kerry is more a maroon compared to my hot pink.”

Stares.

I went on to explain my feelings: Kerry is smart and a focused athlete. She is traditional in style and demeanor. She is more fall to my summer. She drank coffee and tea. She read long, smart books and had good longtime friends. She liked cool, moody music that would never be on Casey Kasum’s Top 40. She is prep school maroon.

I wanted to be more maroon. But, I was hot pink.

I liked magazines, parties and celebrity gossip. I lived for fashion trends, talking on the phone, reality TV and pop and country music. (See Also: Taylor Swift.) I thought because I liked these things I couldn’t possibly be maroon. Moreover, because these interests of mine were deemed superficial by so many, I felt that meant I couldn’t possibly be smart either.

My hot pink compared to maroon felt cheap, tacky and manic, all real fears of who I might be. So, sometimes I dulled these things even though they were things I loved. They didn’t seem like things a career woman should enjoy. Or, a mom should be into.

As I am growing up and learning so much more about how things are almost always never black and white, I am learning that I am not just hot pink. Liking the seemingly superficial, doesn’t make me “dumb.” In fact, as I look into my interests now and even who I was in college when I made the comment outloud, I on US Weekly’s website or listening to Taylor Swift lyrics, yes. But, I was always digging in so much deeper. I was gaining words and understanding for my relationships and others around me. I was curious to know more. I could take a column about Hillary Duff and Lindsey Lohan and have a seed planted in my mind about body image or even wealth and knew it represented more than just gossip. I could feel something in Taylors figurative language and analyze it in my mind like an AP Lit assignment. (Still can… and do.)

An interest or belief in one thing doesn’t mean just one thing. We all contain multitudes. We should be allowed to explored and show these many sides of us.

Just like how Kerry is still very maroon. But, also a cheery mustard yellow and even some earthy evergreen. As for me, I recently made this piece of art using a palate knife and so many shades of pink– from nearly white to deep maroon– to bring to life the many shades of me.

Leaning into my son, jamming on the air guitar, I sing the lyrics along with him. My daughter, pulling the move we called “Happy Feet” growing up (well before the animated penguins), moves her feet so fast and joyfully to the music and I can’t help but laugh out loud. Hits from “Powerline,” the pop sensation from Disney’s The Goofy Movie play out of my phone as my husband emphatically taps the beat with his fingers on the edge of the table. 

I smile thinking of all my dreams of “family.” Dreams of Christmas traditions, memorable vacations, the future wedding and retirement parties celebrating all that we had built together. Of all of my dreams, the after dinner dance party is a favorite and watching it play out in real life feels like a memory I want to bottle every time. To somehow capture and hang onto the magic of this moment, a reminder of fun and togetherness. I send up a prayer for my kids to always remember the dinners that ended with music and cool moves and think, “In my family, this is just what we do.”

The soundtrack moves on to the next track. I pick up plates, still humming along, and carry them to the sink. Habit has me reach for my phone on my way back in to the dining room. My thumb hops on the well traveled track to my Facebook app and taps. 

There has been an accident.

Two local teenagers, on their way to Prom, were killed.

Disney music still croons from the phone in my hand as I am overcome with sadness and my mood completely shifts. The music and dancing are now something I can’t do, even though they came so easy just seconds before.

“Oh my god,” I say out loud, getting the attention of my husband and share the news with him.

He takes the kids into the living room, knowing highly sensitive me well enough to know the party is over.

As I take on the dishes, small tears burn on my under eyes. I didn’t know these kids or their parents. They were in a community close by, but not ours. Yet, this news crushed me.

It’s a strange place to be, I consider, sandwiched fifteen years since my Prom and fifteen years until my kids go to theirs. I am so easily both the student and the parent in my active, emotive imagination. With little effort I can be in both places, remembering my own Prom night so vividly. The stress I felt as my hair appointment ran too long, leading me fumbling into my dress at the last minute and not loving how I looked. My high school boyfriend, in a tux and his dad’s car, assuring me I was beautiful. The thrill of feeling grown up out to dinner, dancing at the downtown venue and lots of late night kissing. 

But also, my breath catches as I clearly can see my own daughter on the landing of the stairs we walk up and down every day. She’s stopped for a photo, while I— as well as a young man in a tux beside me— are certain there is nothing more beautiful. I imagine sending her into that boy’s dad’s car, excited for her to experience what should be the magic of dinner, dancing and late night kissing.

________________

“Maybe we aren’t supposed to see so much,” my friends voice echos through the speakers in my car.

The two of us, always finding our way into deep, existential conversations, even in the casual report from me on how I was completely taken down by the news of the two kids who died on the way to Prom.

She continued, “It’s terrible what happened. And because it happened in our community, we would know about it, but all the other tragedy that happens day in and day out? I just don’t think we were meant to see all of that. We aren’t meant to hold all of that. It used to be that we didn’t have super computer’s in our hands and we couldn’t see it all.”

It’s a well discussed conundrum: Is the world getting worse? Or, are we just seeing more because of the “super computers” in our hands?

If you go looking for it, statistics point to many signs that the world is in fact getting “better.” Extreme poverty is lower than it ever has been, child mortality is up, more people are educated than ever before and even things like violent crime is down. But, those things are harder to see— or even get too excited about— when the last year was filled stats on COVID deaths, data on traffic stops that ended in violence, the numbers on how the pandemic drastically and disproportionality impacting those less privileged, and the dismal trends on “happiness” amid isolation. They get even harder when in more recent months, “getting back to normal” means scenes of passengers yelling at flight attendants, ransomware attacks threatening every part of our country’s infrastructure and back to back to back mass shootings. 

And, if that wasn’t enough, we are also constantly available to the clangor of the ever present ways children die in pools, their beds and the womb; To the notice that home invasions, weather disasters and cancer can happen anytime and to anyone; and, that any should-be magical night can and sometimes does end in tragedy. These sad realities have been just that— sad and realities— for decades, but now we can see it all and have to find a way to hold space for the emotion that comes with them. 

Many days it feels like too much. It grinds me down and I don’t love feeling like this. But, then I consider speaking back to her, “Yes. But, my phone has also been such a life line this year. Can you imagine quarantine without it?”

That super computer in my hand also delivered so much good news. It taught me things and made me laugh. It helped me feel connected to a friend who started cooking classes over zoom, to other creatives trying to write or draw when inspiration felt hard to come by and to my own parents who I missed so, so much.

“No, not at all” my friend immediately agrees, clearly thinking of similar things to me. “It’s definitly one of those ‘both/and’ things”

For all that makes me want to throw my phone against the wall, the desire for a boost of serotonin or hope of connection has me reaching for that super computer more than I care to admit. Both of these things are true and it’s just what I do.

_______________

The muffled rush of water sounds cueing the start of the dishwasher’s cycle. I set my palms down on the counter to take a deep breath. I still have to bake a cake, I remind myself.

Ten minutes earlier it was a task I happily placed after bedtime. Now, with the weight of this sadness, it seems a lot harder to complete. 

Chocolate Oreo cake, at the request of my newly five year old. I could put it off until the morning, I think. Or, go buy one. Other people do that all the time.

I consider it as I can already hear the other moms at the party. The comments like, “You made this?” and  “You are so good” were sure to ring out in tones that are always hard to discern from judgment or compliment. But, that something I am used to. 

While not skilled in much that translates well to a real profession like nursing or teaching or accounting, I do cook and bake well. Not to mention, I have opinions about cake thanks to spending every other weekend in my twenties at a wedding. Cake baking also was a balm to 2020 as I experimented different piping tips and flavors for each family member’s quarantined birthday in an effort to make it all a little more fun.

I like baking cakes so, I make my own. It’s what just I do.

I also like that I have reached a point in life and in parenting where I not only know what I like and what I am good at, but also now have the perspective to know that no one is killing it in all things at all times. With both of these beliefs also comes the awareness to know and see that the part where one mom shines, be it her stylish clothes, workout routine, stunning living room or hand made cakes, is what she likes and is what she is good at. It’s a part of that woman’s heart.

I believe that of all the parts of women that are completely broken and changed in the radical transformation into motherhood, our hearts bear the biggest transformation. Our hearts are different because as a girl and into young adulthood, I felt it was important to hide my emotion and would work very hard to never cry, even when things were even clearly sad. Now, I cry often and easily. And, I feel a whole lot. 

But also, there are parts of our hearts that are still there. Before motherhood, I followed any and every interest from writing and art to gardening to fashion and into the kitchen. Now, I do what I can just like the many moms around me, to keep the pilot light of the things that fuel our passions on. For me, that looks like baking birthday cakes. 

And, then there are parts of our hearts that never make their way back to us. Instead, they walk around in the world in beautiful little humans who are going to school, are influenced by media on phones and attend prom. This is tough because, as their parents, we are so aware of darkness of the world and all its sharp edges; but, we send them out there anyways. It’s just what we do.

We send them out there because despite all our awareness of the bad, we know there is good out there too. This wild world, like the phones in our pocket, is a ‘both/and’ thing. It is so scary and yet also so beautiful. Both of these at the exact same time.

So maybe, for all that is hard, that is why there are also cute boys to dance with on Saturday nights at seventeen. And, if you are lucky, again at thirty three.

And, I think swiping my index finger across a spatula, sampling some Oreo speckled icing, really good cake, too.

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