Mike recommends "Total Eclipse of the Heart" by Bonnie Tyler
My kids had just finished dinner, and I started singing "Total Eclipse of the Heart." Dinnertime is stressful when you've got three kids under 5: Some of them won't eat anything and the rest want to eat everything—and, regardless, will slide off the dining room bench every four seconds and doing a lap around the apartment. After that extended exercise in cat-herding, we're ready to put them in their PJs and zone out while they watch a cartoon before bed.
But, there around the dining room table, we were talking about eye color, and so I started out, low and quiet: "Turn around…" The kids were confused but delighted, and as I went on (and as the song almost demands), I picked up speed and energy, standing up and grabbing one of the twins from their seat, singing and spinning around as I hit the chorus. She giggled, delighted. I could feel it, feel the times I'd sung it at karaoke, deep into the night and into my cups, feel the energy, so I let it break through the depressive haze I've been in for the last 6 months and into something like joy. I grabbed another kid, and another, dancing around the room, everyone clapping and cheering, even though they'd never heard the song before, even though I was far off-key. I raised my first and raised a small child to the sky. They grabbed my face and screamed with delight.
The song was on my mind because I'd just finished Fleishman Is in Trouble, the TV series. It ends with a pretty heavy episode; one character rejects his ex-wife's breakdown, another rejects Judaism, and they all go stare into a literal void. So as the credits roll, we get a little palate cleanser: Lizzie Caplan, at the exercise class her character reluctantly attended earlier in the series, doing a silly dance routine to Bonnie Tyler's "Total Eclipse of the Heart." And it works, emotionally; instead of leaving the series crushed by the weight of the compromises we all must make as we age—and the many ways in which we fail our children—we get a light little moment, one of the sparks of joy that can occur unexpectedly as we move through these quotidian spaces, these loci of our adaptations to, as Jami Attenberg put it, "the sinking ship that is my flesh."
Have I failed my children? Objectively, no, but I feel that way sometimes anyway. Of course, judging by everything from popular culture to internet parenting boards, these feelings of parental inadequacy are universal. But I haven't failed to make time for my kids, like the Fleishman parents—hoo boy, do I make time for my kids. And I'm not worried about their safety or their future, like folks on the parenting boards always seem to be. My feeling is: my wife and I are two mostly healthy adults with stable, professional jobs who aren't actively foisting traumas on our kids; things may not go perfectly for them, but they'll be generally all right in the long run, or as all right as the random luck of the world will allow them to be. All I can do is raise them the best way I know how and cross my fingers. So what is it?
Since they've been born, I honestly hadn't felt too much of the anxiety that often rode side-saddle with the chronic depression I've had for 25 years or so. But around last fall, I felt an acute depression descend like a storm front, settling in and sitting there, driving episodes of brain fog, sluggishness, and bed-taking. I could navigate it relatively easily in my professional life. But with my kids, I don't want to just check off the right boxes. I don't want to be sad dad, either sitting like a slug in the corner who they know to just leave alone (which is nonsense, of course—my kids will never leave me alone), or else having my own toddler-style freakout at an uncooperative coffee grinder. They're so happy, so full of energy; they walk around being delighted. I took the twins in their stroller through a new neighborhood, and at every store front, they pointed and demanded to know what it was, then shouted "Yes!" when I told them it was a coffee shop or a disused bank. Their world is a wonder. You don't want to be a black cloud in the midst of all that. You want to be what I was when I sang to them: someone who could participate in their delight, and who could build upon it, unify it, make it a force in its own right. I had become anxious, in other words, that my anxiety would spoil their happiness; I was worried that they'd end up like me.
So when I sang Bonnie Tyler to them, it was an unexpected obtrusion in the storm system, a ray of light breaking through. When I thought about it afterwards, I realized that it must have been the music itself that allowed me to escape that miasma, not just the song itself but what it meant to me, summoning a feeling from the past. After all, smell is an incredibly effective way of evoking a sense-memory, bringing you back to some past place and time. Sounds could do the same. They certainly have for me: the right blog-house track transports me to the A train running uptown to 175th street in 2003, listening to a particular mix of MP3s on a CD-R.
Maybe, then, that's what music is: a tether to a past emotion. When we're young, we create and stockpile reservoirs of joy, ones we can draw on not only for ourselves but for our loved ones when we're older and enmeshed with those compromises and quotidian adaptations to age. The right song may not always bring us back to a particular moment, but it can bring us back to a particular feeling, when we walked around being delighted, less encumbered, less soaked in the fear and the thought-patterns you wish you could discard but can never be fully rid of. (Ones, too, that may come from your own parents; ones you may be putting on your own children, unbidden. You do everything you can about that, and then can do nothing more.) A song is a unique sound, an identifier that maintains its association with the rush of hearing it even when that rush is long past. You rise up out of your darkness and seize on a melody to put you in sync with your glowing child, the one you helped create and then soothed to sleep a thousand times. You reach back into the past for the best version of yourself and, for a few minutes, give it to your children as a gift, a boon, a guide. Here is how I am, here is how I wish I could be, here is a light for you. Turn around.
Mike Barthel is a music critic and media researcher, with bylines in The Atlantic, GQ, and The Awl. His work has been covered in The New York Times, Boston Globe, NPR, ABC News, and the CBC. He currently works as a survey researcher in Washington, D.C. and can be found on Twitter @michaelbarthel.
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