Song of the Day....

Ever have that day when you wake up, or you're in the shower, and there's already a song running through your head? If you're lucky, it's not the theme from "Sanford & Son", or "the Girl from Ipanema", as having either of these songs stuck in your head is guaranteed to turn you into a foamy-mouthed lunatic by lunch time.

When I could classify myself as part of the working world, I relied upon this daily soundtrack to dictate the tone and mood of my day. For months, I drove to work listening to Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young's "Suite Judy Blue Eyes" just for the bounce-in-your-seat ending, "doo doo doo doo do, doo doo, doo doo doo do, etc."

I even learned to time it so that the song was just coming to an end as I pulled into the parking lot of the school. You can NOT have a bad day when that is the last piece of music you've heard. A kid threw a desk at me once on a "Suite Judy Blue Eyes" morning. I ducked, picked the desk up, set it upright in a new place in the room and made the kid stand for the rest of class. "Whatever, sucker!!! You can't rain on my day!!! doo doo doo doo do, doo doo, doo doo doo do!"

As a teenager, I remember spending hours copying poignant and poetic lyrics from my favorite songs into my journals and verbally bleeding my angst onto the page. Doesn't every teenager do that? As a teacher, it is hard for me to know how to deal with the teenage angst I see expressed in my middle schoolers' writings. On the one hand, I know that 99% of it is self-imposed and pretty ludicrous to begin with. On the other hand, I was the exact same way.

Point being, music has always spoken to me in some way, whether it was to cheer me through the first years of teaching or to validate the "all in my head anyway" misery of being an adolescent. In recent years, though, I have listened to more NPR in the car on the way to work than music, and I've grown all "fat and happy" in my life, and have lost the need to connect to music the way I used to. Until I got pregnant....

There is one song I consider to be the soundtrack to this pregnancy. I tried to write this entry several weeks ago, when I was in the hospital and anticipating the dangerously premature birth of my son. I couldn't get through the writing of it and deleted it before I even posted it. Now I think I can deal...

The song is called "Fix You" by Cold Play and it seems to have followed me throughout my pregnancy, forcing me to listen to it and understand it as a parent's promise to his/her child.

Fix you
When you try your best but you don’t succeed,

When you get what you want but not what you need,

When you feel so tired but you can’t sleep

Stuck in reverse.

And the tears come streaming down your face,

When you lose something you can’t replace.

When you love someone but it goes to waste,

Could it be worse?
Lights will guide you home,

And ignite your bones

And I will try to fix you.

And high up above or down below

When you’re too in love to let it go,

But if you never try, you’ll never know

Just what you’re worth.
Lights will guide you home,

And ignite your bones

And I will try to fix you.

Tears stream down your face

When you lose something you cannot replace.

Tears stream down your face

And i…

Tears stream down your face

I promise you I will learn from my mistakes.

Tears stream down your face

And i…
Lights will guide you home,

And ignite your bones

And I will try to fix you.

The first time I remember hearing the song during my pregnancy was on my birthday. I was seven and a half weeks pregnant, and I started bleeding. As I drove myself, crying and praying to the doctor's office, this song came on the radio. I remember singing it to try to calm myself, realizing as I went that this could be me--I could at that moment have been losing something I could not replace. I changed the station--it was on another channel. I couldn't stop listening to it and there seemed to be a reason why the universe wouldn't make it go away.

After the reassurance of an ultrasound showed me for the first time my baby's heart beating (what better birthday present could a parent ask for?) and the bleeding stopped, I heard the song again. It ceased to be about ME losing something I couldn't replace, and became more about my child and my hopes and anxieties for him.

This song may be a love song from one partner to another; who knows? I didn't write it. But to me, it epitomizes a parent's loving angst--doesn't every parent want to "fix" whatever is hurting their child? Whether it is the pain of teething, or that first heartbreak, or losing the big game, or dealing with death for the first time-- a parent's primary urge is to prevent pain and suffering for their child, to fix it and make it go away. Or protect them from ever feeling it all together, which I know is impossible. And as first time parents, husband and I spend hours contemplating the ways in which we might "mess it up", but all we can do is promise to do our best and learn from our mistakes...

I have heard this song a million times since that first scare; through the second scare, the cerclage, the hospitalization and all of it. It still makes me cry big, sobby tears. But now they aren't tears of fear; they are simply because I am overcome by the awesome realization that from now on, I will always be someone's home.