Silenced By A Man

My baby shushed me and it hurt my feelings.

My soon-to-be-two-year-old and I have a disgustingly sweet bedtime ritual. Milk-fed, bath-bathed, and night-diapered, he sits on my lap in the Wayfair recliner we got for his nursery. With only the light from the hall to see each other by, we study each other’s faces. I do this because my psychoanalyst mother wrote her thesis on mother-infant mirroring. He does this because there’s a face looking at him so what the hell else is he going to do? First he’ll demand “HUG!” then “KISS!”. This boy loves to kiss. All day, every day. This kid plants more kisses than Gerry Turner aka The Golden Bachelor, IF THAT’S EVEN POSSIBLE. Anyway, once the baby has received a suitable amount of physical affection, he will lean against my chest and let me sing to him. My set list is what you might expect from a Basic Alt Bitch who came of age in the ‘90s: I’ve got some Tori Amos, some Belly, sometimes I throw in some Shakira ballads, hoping he’ll pick up a little Spanish by pop queen osmosis. But my closer is always a Native American folk song I learned when my eighth grade class took a field trip to New Mexico, because I may be putting the boy to sleep, but that doesn’t mean he can’t get woke.

The Golden Bachelor, at it again.

Recently, though, there’s been a hiccup in our halcyon nighttime routine. The other night, after the HUG! and the KISS! and the laying of the head on the chest, I began to sing Red River Valley. Gently, he lifted his promiscuous lips to my ear and whispered, “no.” Okay, fine. Not feeling the Great American Songbook tonight. I tried Tori Amos. “no no no no no.” Song after song was met with the same delicate derision. I thought he was just postponing the inevitable end to the evening, so I asked (threatened) “You want no song? You want to go straight to bed?” to which he responded “yes.” That hurt my feelings.

Singing and I have a long and complicated history, which some might find surprising, because while my voice is not bad, it’s not particularly good, either. Its quality does not justify singing Leaving On A Jet Plane to my sixty middle school classmates on more than one overnight field trip before we all went to bed. And it should never have led me to perform Bells For Her by Tori Amos (again with the Tori Amos!) at a junior high assembly while my music teacher played backup on the piano. In high school, I certainly had no business crooning an acapella rendition of Ani DiFranco’s Both Hands to 1,200 teenagers at what I’m pretty sure was a homecoming pep rally. And yet, these are all real things that I did. Why? Why on earth? Because it’s what I thought The People wanted, that’s why.

As an adolescent, I was not particularly confident. (In the words of patron saint Tori Amos “she’s been everybody else’s girl/maybe one day she’ll be her own.”) I did, however, have a kind of independent swagger. I believed that my willingness to be myself (because unfortunately, I’ve always found it impossible to be anyone else) commanded a certain respect. But as I’ve gotten older, I’ve often wondered, did it? Did it really? Or was everyone feeling vicarious humiliation as I earnestly sang from somewhere deep in my adolescent soul? Were my peers stifling laughter while in their heads they were thinking the same words my filthy whore of a baby was willing to say out loud: NONONONONO? There are people I’m still close to from my childhood who I could ask, but I’m afraid to hear the answer.

Even at my most clueless, I never thought I was the best singer. I just thought I had the kind of voice that some people might enjoy listening to. Nor did I feel like I was the prettiest, or the smartest, or the funniest, but I knew I was the right amount of those things for some people, which was justification enough to put myself out there. Because the reward for taking that risk was being seen, and as a kid, it felt incredible to be seen. As an adult, it also feels incredible to be seen, but it now feels shameful to want it. Shouldn’t it be enough that I know I exist? And if I’m going to insist others acknowledge it as well, shouldn’t I have something pretty fucking awesome to back it up? Somehow it no longer feels okay to be okay with being okay. If I’m not the best, better to not waste people’s time by demanding their attention.

Boy, did my baby trigger some serious shit. Not cool, baby! I CAN hear myself. I know I’m moving in the wrong developmental direction; I can see emotional maturity getting smaller in the rearview mirror. Help! I know that aging should beget self-acceptance, so why am I becoming more rigid, more self-critical, more reluctant to be myself? Well, for one thing, I’ve got an asshole slut of baby in my ear, determined to grind my self-esteem into a fine powder. But also, I feel on the cusp of something irreversible. As a woman in my forties, I’m approaching a time in my life where I’m supposed to both a) be at peace with who I am, and b) expect to disappear. Don’t take it from me, take it from The Golden Bachelor’s lovely Joan, age 60, who described upon her gut-wrenching departure, “as you get older, you become more invisible. People don’t see you anymore, like you’re not as significant as when you’re young.” Do older women/people arrive at a place of radical self-acceptance because they know ageism has rendered them unseeable? Can they dance like nobody’s watching because…uh…NOBODY’S FUCKING WATCHING? Because that seems like more of a tragedy than a marker of wisdom. Or (as I’m beginning to suspect) was no one ever watching to begin with? Maybe none of my classmates remember me singing Bells For Her in junior high because they were too busy contemplating their own humiliations to pay much attention to mine.

The Kween: Before & After

A few years ago, I ran into my high school choir director, who asked me if I was doing any singing. I shook my head with a knowing chuckle, to convey that I’d come to terms with my own lack of exceptionalism. He was disappointed. “You’ve got to have music in your life.” The thought had never occurred to me, to do something because the act of doing it gave me pleasure, rather than the response. She’s been everybody else’s girl/maybe one day she’ll be her own. Say what you will about the terrible work she’s had done to cling to her own fleeting physical beauty, Tori Amos still knows her shit.