I hope you have good taste in music

We take turns reading stories, my night one night, my wife’s night the next. On my wife’s night I end up holding the baby who needs to sleep before storytime ends, while my wife reads to the older daughter. I hold the baby sideways, her forehead in the crook of my elbow, my other elbow around her butt, fingers laced together under her ribcage.

We have a playlist on the computer, one just for the baby and me. I had one for my older daughter, before she decided she was too big to fall asleep while I held her and danced and sang. (This morning after an especially sleepless night she agreed to get part way to sleep this way, and she was out in about five minutes after I set her in her bed.) When the baby girl came along I asked my older if she wanted me to sing different songs to the baby and she said yes, sing none of her songs to the baby. So I don’t. It would now feel a bit like infidelity.

Our playlist consists of sad songs mostly because most of the songs I can sing are sad songs (except for the angry songs, many of which don’t work at bedtime). I wonder sometimes if this is a taste I want to pass on. In darker moments I suspect this taste is due to traits I don’t want to pass on, and my musical influence will stand or fall with how poorly or well I parent.

I have friends who don’t like sad angry music. I care about them but we have a disconnect, and it’s often (but sadly not always) because we had different kinds of childhoods. My kids won’t have childhoods like mine, I’m committed to this, and yet many of the adults I connect with most lived through that sort of childhood. “We are who we are in part because of how we’re raised,” I told a friend once. He likes to make dick jokes and to insult people for fun. We get aggressive together, it’s one of the things we have in common. “How we’re raised, that’s part of why we connect,” I said, “and so I wonder if by raising my kids how I want to raise them, will they become happy, well-adjusted adults who I wouldn’t relate to as an adult?” As if this is ever the point, do parents and children every really meet adult to adult? “Do you ever think about that?” He replied “I like to think raising our kids will be healing, so maybe we won’t end up those same adults.” Maybe I’ll stop liking all this sad angry music. I do like it less sometimes. My kids cured all questions along the lines of “what’s the point anyway?” The point is really clear. A big part of the point is asleep with her face burrowed into the crook of my elbow as I type this, her weight pushing my wrist into the edge of the desktop so my fingers tingle. Another big part of the point is brushing the teeth of the other big part in the next room over, and negotiating over how much more story reading there will be. With such clear stars to point my way I no longer relate to music about lacking a compass and a rudder; the truly bleak song sounds silly most of the time to me now.

Parenting, done well, is asymmetrical. Kids aren’t adults and are harmed when treated as such, and I think it never becomes a relationship of equals in the way that adults can relate to adults in friendships. At the same time, I can’t help thinking about when they’re adults, wondering what they will be like.

My older daughter says she will move out someday, when her baby sister is old enough to move with her, “when I’m as old as grandma,” she says, adding “we’ll move into a duplex right next to you so we can come over whenever we want.” She can’t imagine the future disconnects that will happen. I barely can. I love my kids like crazy and I am so excited to see who they will become, but…

Hunched forward, knees up high holding the weight my hands held before I sat, back aching and wrist tingling, I type this, slower than usual (I time myself, tracking words per minute - I suppose my kids didn’t cure every single doubt over meaning and meaninglessness, but they did shrink them to more manageable size - and this is going to bring down my average. I try to pretend I don’t care at all about that). Will I give my kids anything I’ve written? I wonder and really don’t know. Writing and music and so on are snapshots, and sometimes collages of many snapshots, from people who begin to disappear as soon as the writing finishes, at least if we remain dynamic. I am not who I was at 15, at 20, at 30. And by the time my kids might read anything that reflects the me I think of as me, I won’t be that person anymore, at least to some extent, and so what would reading that writing accomplish? Especially before they became old enough to understand that people change. I wonder too what I will tell my kids about my upbringing, and what my wife will say about her parents’ divorces. I understand now, and this took many angry years, that my parents are not today who they were when I was a kid (and they were nearly so), at least they are not fully those people. I know enough about my grandparents, and I’ve been an adult myself now for long enough, that I know they weren’t the saints I remember them being and yet if there are any remaining skeletons in family closets, I just don’t want to know and I’m glad I didn’t learn them at a time when it would have shaped my relationships with my grandparents. Should I do the same with my kids and their grandparents?

Girls, if you’re reading this… I don’t know how I feel about that, beyond what I hope is the obvious pride, and I both do and do not want to talk with you about this, and I hope you have good taste in music.