Your Song

When my first son was a few weeks old, I started playing songs to dance around to while holding him. I couldn’t remember many nursery rhymes, so I’d just pick songs I liked. The particular evening I have in mind, for some reason I’d chosen to listen to “Your Song” by Sir Elton. It’s a great song, one I like immensely, but it didn’t hold any special meaning for me prior to this playing. I was holding my baby boy, looking at his face as I sang to him, and I started uncontrollably sobbing.

Our older son was born in June of 2016. He was enormous and beautiful and came 8 days late. In that week+ of extra cooking, I deep-cleaned the bathroom floor on all 4s, rarely slept because I was so uncomfortable and the size of a small rhinoceros, and tuned out nutritional advice from all corners, subsisting on hot chocolate from Starbucks and peanut butter. I was hanging on by a thread. He needed to come. 

But then, once he was real and in the world, I, like many new moms/parents, felt totally unprepared for the task set before me - to raise a human and keep him safe until he could be in the world on his own. The responsibility was overwhelming, crushing, choking almost. I was not ready and could not have prepared myself for that moment if I’d tried. I mean, I sort of tried. I’d read some books and blogs and asked some of my friends who’d already had babies some questions. But the level of uncertainty was unmatched in my previous life experiences. 

And he was a relatively easy baby! He slept fairly well, fed ok despite a tongue tie that we had clipped on the last day the pediatric ENT would agree to do it in-office without scheduling a surgery, and cried like a normal amount for a baby.

No, what made those first few months so difficult for me was ME. My brain was different, and I didn’t know what to do. I should have talked to my doctor, but I filled out the “Are You Depressed?” questionnaire at my check up and had passed, so I was ok, right? I just needed to get some rest. I needed some time to myself, maybe a haircut and color, perhaps a massage, and I’d be back to normal, back to myself. I needed more uninterrupted time with the baby, and I needed time away from him. I just needed to figure out what I needed. The fix would be simple. 

I didn’t realize how much I was flailing until one evening when maybe 4-week-old baby boy was crying crying crying. We’d been warned of the witching hour. We’d talked to our moms and doctors. We consulted trusted sources on the internet as well as less trusted mom blogs that made me feel worse about myself without fail. But he cried for hours in the evenings for a few weeks, the longest few weeks of my life. 

I’d taken to playing music and dancing with him, holding him and rocking and singing. Our apartment was a typical Chicago shape, with a big front room/kitchen and a long hallway leading to the bedrooms, one following the other. The front room had this long built-in counter, kind of like a desk, with cabinets above them. We never properly organized a home office, so this space was just cluttered with junk: a stapler, opened and unopened mail, catalogs, loose change, random papers, and an old Mac that served as the family computer. We’d been thinking this would be our forever home and could imagine a grownish version of this baby boy doing his homework here. This computer was the source of music for our evening cry-abatement concerts. 

That night, playing “Your Song,” the piano playing near-arpeggios backed by some guitar, orchestral strings, and in the second verse, a drum kit, the full but gentle voice of Elton John singing to my son while I rocked him and tried to sing along - it broke something in me. I’m assuming Sir Elton and his writing partner were intending romance for these lyrics, and never in a million years could I forget my boy’s eyes are blue and not green. But “I hope you don’t mind / I hope you don’t mind / that I put down in words / How wonderful life is / now you’re in the world,” could only have been written for a parent to sing to her child. 

Maybe there was an ounce of guilt that I felt my life was so much harder now that he was in the world, but I also felt that this baby was the most wonderful thing to have ever happened to me or anyone ever on the planet. There were chemicals coursing through my brain that magnified every emotion, and I couldn’t tell what was real and what was hormones. I was sad, I was elated, I was worried, I was content, I was terrified, I was happy. And it felt like whiplash, given how quickly I would move from one to the next. 

That song, those lyrics, spoke to me so directly, even though some of them are a little silly or at least had nothing to do with having a new baby. “Sat on the roof / and I kicked off the moss / well some of these verses / well they got me quite cross.” Moss on the roof is silly, for sure, but admitting to my boy I didn’t really know what I was doing, how to keep going with writing this song for him, or anything else having to do with parenting - that was a theme I could get behind. 

My brain eventually sorted out the new chemicals, but I’m brought back to that moment of love and fear and sadness every time I hear “Your Song.” I hear “It’s a little bit funny / this feeling inside,” and I’m back to feeling exhausted and overwhelmed but also more in love than I ever have been in my life. I can almost feel the weight of a tiny bundle of snuggles in my arms. I can almost hear the incessant cries of the terrifying tiny infant whose needs I was supposed to understand. Those initial piano notes tinkle away, and I have to buckle up for the ghost rollercoaster of emotions. 

It’s not exactly a happy memory, but it’s also not one I’d ever trade. My world is more wonderful with these boys in it. And it is a little bit funny, looking back on myself dancing and singing and crying, and my husband looking at me like, WHAT is happening right now. It’s sad I didn’t think to ask for help, but I was lucky to have a lot of support from my husband and from both of our families. So the song makes me cry, and it brings back all of these memories and contains the context of intervening years, of growth and trial by fire and the end of crying fits and start and finish of crying fits for a second kid. 

Someday these boys will mind this loud kind of love. They’ll be embarrassed to say they love me in front of their friends. I’ll still sneak in some hugs, and then I’ll cry over the song for different reasons. Regardless, Elton John will forever make me cry.