Tiny Teeny Bopper

“Wait, Mom!  Keep that!  It’s Katie Perry.”  I’m flipping through the dial, trying to find some holiday music on the radio.

Or at least anything that has nothing to do with guns.  This hasn’t been easy the past couple weeks.

“Cause baby, you’re a fiah-work!” Sophie warbles from the back seat.  “Come on let your col-ors burn,”

“It’s “come on let your colors burst,’” I say.  Just trying to be helpful, of course. 

“Nuh-huh.  I’m right and you’re wrong!” Sophie says in a drawly, sing-songy mean girl voice. 

Does puberty start at five now?  But I’ve been feeding her hormone free milk!

Another day she comes home from school singing,

“We are NEVER EVER EVER GETTING BACK TOGETHER,” with all the angst and indignation of a jilted teenager. 

“What is up with that?”  I ask. 

“Oh, it’s just something my friends and I were singing on the playground.”  She proceeds to repeats the refrain about 316 times. 

Much to my surprise, we later hear this song on the radio.  It’s Taylor Swift, and—no offense to Ms. Swift, but it is awful, particularly the spoken parts of the song: 

Huh, he calls me up and he’s like, I still love you.  And I’m like, I’m just, I mean this is exhausting.  You know?  We are never getting back together, like ever.

Is this even English?  I mean, I recognize each individual word, but what happened to the syntax?  Maybe if Taylor was being ironic, I could stand it. 

But something tells me Ms. Swift is dead serious. 

And Sophie LOVES it, with all the fervor of a tiny teeny bopper.  This new passion is hard to fathom.  She made the switch from Baby Beluga to Lady Gaga so suddenly.   One week my 6 CD changer was full of Music Together, the next week Sophie told me, “I don’t want to listen to that.  Turn on some traffic music.” 

“Traffic music” is Sophie’s term for “radio.”  I haven’t had the heart to correct her.  It’s a sign that she’s still my little girl.  I know I don’t have much longer before she drops this like she dropped Raffi. 

 “Turn on some traffic music, please.”  There is only so much adolescent behavior one can take from a five-year-old.

“Turn on some traffic music, please,” she replies in my intonation.  Mocking me?  “I want to hear “Call Me Maybe.’”

Sophie gets frustrated with me when I can’t immediately locate her favorite songs.  She doesn’t seem to get that I do not control the traffic music.  That somewhere, in a station far far away, a computer is carefully selecting, playing, and replaying songs with the aim of cultivating her addiction—playing the song just often enough to prevent her from touching that dial, while ensuring that the lyrics take up 40% of her brain space. 

DJs are cultivating her taste.  Which, in my humble opinion, leaves something to be desired.  Not that Sophie doesn’t have her preferences.  She does.  After all there has to be some innate inclinations, something inscribed upon her genes that the environment coaxes out into the open.  Like me, she seems to have an affinity for mellifluous chick music.  But my chicks are Susanna McCorkle, Helen Merrill, and Billie Holiday, and hers have dollar signs instead of letters in their names. 

That’s right.  Still not out of her princess dresses, Sophia quotes Ke$ha while playing Legos…

“stockings ripped all up the side….”

The next line, if one is keeping current, is “looking sick and sexified.  I jump in, “looking slick and Sophified!”  I shout. 

“Stop it mom.” Sophie says, “that’s not how it goes!”  But she doesn’t sing the next line.  I have successfully diverted her.  This time. 

Am I going to have to resort to Kidz Bop?  I had always been somewhat put off by the genre—a bunch of kids singing sanitized versions of the latest pop songs.  I remember my sister telling me a story that before her son could speak, he would run up to the television and point at the stars of Kidz Bop and grunt, preverbally expressing his desire to rock out to his very own Kidz Bop album.  I figured it must have some strange juju to do that, hypnotizing toddlers through the screen and convincing them they want to live La Vida Loca  (Kidz Bop 1, Circa 2002). 

I cringe at the thought of having to listen to it.  Their saccharine, overly exuberant voices transforming the barely tolerable into the detestable.  I’ve spent too many years paying my dues, listening to Music Together.  It’s high time this girl gets some exposure to what’s out there. 

So, when I come to something that I like.  I make her listen.   Or I play my own albums, despite her protests.  Last week, she sat through four tracks of the Police.  After dinner one night, Kevin and I force fed her Graceland for dessert.  And recently, I instituted a rule that when cruising the dial we always stop for the Beatles. 

Though she puts up a fight, I find that the same principle Top 40 stations operate on, works for other stuff too:  repetition breeds appreciation. 

The proof is in the singing.  Soon after we began the mandatory taste-making sessions, Sophie sprang from her bath and dripping, she danced around in front of the full length bathroom singing a line from one of my favorite Police songs (about, ahem, a student-teacher romance), “Don’t stand!  Don’t stand so!  Don’t stand so close to me!” 

Yes, perhaps still inappropriate.  But the influence is purely mine.  

You Be Me, and I'll Be You

Kevin, my bearded husband, is curled up in Sophia’s toddler bed, thumb in mouth. Sophie is carefully tucking her pink blanket around him and nestling Snakey Pie in the crook of his arm.

“Here’s your Snakey Pie, baby.” She tells him. “It’s time for you to go to sleep now.”

“Okay, Mama,” Kevin says, “good night.”

“No,” Sophie says, slightly annoyed, “you’re me. You’re supposed to say, ‘But what if I have to go to the bathroom?’”

Kevin plays along. “But what if I have to go to the bathroom?” he whines.

“You have your potty and your toilet paper right here.” She instructs in a voice that sounds eerily like my own. “Now say, ‘Remember to turn on the hall light and crack the door,’” she directs.

“Remember to turn on the hall light and crack the door,” Kevin parrots.

“I will, baby. Don’t worry.” Sophie climbs on top of her art table and flips the light switch. “Good night, baby.”

“Good night, Mama.” Kevin replies.

“And now,” says Sophie, as she slips out the door, “I will sing the good-night song entirely as a duck. Quack quack quaaaaaak. Quack quack quaaaaaak,” she sings to the tune of “Lullaby and Goodnight,” her voice fading as she walks away.

A few seconds later she is back in the room, turning on the light, and saying cheerfully, “Time to get up, baby!”

She could play this game for hours. Being me. Controlling her. Who is really a him.

She is at once internalizing me: my rules, my boundaries, my affections and expressing a need to feel autonomous, to gain some control over herself. Through play, she works out her conflicted emotions about who’s in charge. She can at once recognize me as the one that holds the power and identify with me, enjoying some of that power herself. I believe this kind of play is essential for building self control.

It happens a lot now…three to four is the age for it. We can be in the car, driving, when Sophie says quite plainly:

“You be me, and I’ll be you.”

“Okay.” I say. “What should I do?”

“Turn on my music. I’ll start to sing with it. Then you tell me not to.” This is something she does to me, all the time. It’s really annoying. If I’m forced to listen to Music Together for several hours, why can’t I at least be allowed to sing with it?

I turn on her CD and she begins to sing with it, “Oranges, Lemons say the bells of St. Clemens….”

I know my part well. “NO!” I interrupt, “this is NOT singing music. This is LISTENING music.”

“Sophia,” Sophia says to me, “if you can’t be quiet, I am going to turn off your music and put on traffic music.” That’s what she calls anything that I listen to on the radio. NPR. XPN. Actual traffic.

“Noooooooooooo! I don’t want traffic music. I want MY music!”

“Then BE QUIET and LET ME SING!” she resumes singing with the music.

I let her sing, because I love the sound of her sweet little voice. “No mommy,” she tells me, annoyed, “You’re supposed to tell me to stop.”

“But I don’t want you to stop. I like listening to you sing.”

She starts to turn red, “But that’s not the way it goes!” I guess she has internalized my control-freakiness as well.

“I don’t think I want to be you, anymore.” I tell her. I don’t. I don’t like this game of being mean to her, so that she can boss me around. It’s not a dynamic I’m enjoying now, or when the roles are reversed and we are ourselves.

“But I want to be YOU!” Sophie cries.

I know, Sophie. I know.

Committing to Memory

There are the memories I have that I can’t help having. They’ve stuck in my brain, though I’d sooner forget many of them: Being watched by my neighbor (who sat in a tree) as I peed surreptitiously next to my wading pool. Vying with a classmate for the lead role of a sickly giraffe in the school play with the line, “By dose is all stubbed up,” (only to really get sick and lose the part). Getting dumped on a dark highway by the straight-edge, skate-punk boy to whom I lost my virginity (“Remember Melissa,” he had the audacity to say, “there are alternatives to water towers and razor blades.”)

And then there are the moments that I consciously commit to memory. The scenes I rehearse in my mind until they are locked in the folds of my gray matter. They capture something about a person, a time, an experience that is defining. They are the moments worth writing about, worth airing on an empty day. They have the power to evoke a smile or a tear when it has felt impossible to conjure either.

I do this with all people who are dear to me. I do this with Sophia.

When Sophia was first born, Kevin and I played Dreamland, a compilation of world lullabies, over and over. We all found it soothing. Poignant. The first song off the album is Naima, written by West African singer Angelique Kidjo for her daughter. It is achingly beautiful—I wish I could play it here—it captures the gratitude, relief, and deep pain I felt in those first weeks after Sophie was born. After I healed, when I finally could, I picked Sophia up and danced her around the room to that song, tears streaming down my face. Now, hearing the music unlocks the memory. It is almost too much to bear, so I rarely turn it on. A few notes and I am right back in my living room, twirling across the industrial beige carpet, Sophia light and warm in my arms, her head against my shoulder and the overwhelming joy that I had my baby at last.

Two years later, a second, musical memory is forever etched in my mind. Sophia and I take a Music Together, a parent-child class that is founded upon the belief that all children are musical and all children can achieve basic musical competence. We thoroughly enjoy it. The teacher exudes a particular calm that has a powerful effect on Sophie; she is exuberant (yet well behaved) from the minute we walk in the room. There is one song, Bound for Glory that Sophia routinely requests. It is an old spiritual, made new by a rhythmic chugging, evocative of a train. The teacher distributes bands of jingle bells to the kids and Sophie dons them like bracelets all the way up to her armpits. As soon as she hears the music, she is up, chugging along the perimeter of the room with a look of determination and no awareness of what anyone else is doing. There is a complete lack of self-consciousness, total immersion in the music. The teacher starts the class in place, eventually following Sophia who is already off on her invisible track, bound for glory. I love watching her so focused and full of energy; I am reluctant to start moving around the room myself. The other day, I had to conceal my tears as I followed in her path, hoping a little of that confidence might rub off onto me.

So much of my past is fuzzy; I know the memories I have are each salient for a reason, but few are positive. These memories, these special times with Sophia, I will not lose. I have guaranteed their survival by writing about them.

This, I will remember.