In April 2009, the number one song in the US was Lady Gaga’s Poker Face. By all accounts, that should be the last pop hit I enjoyed. That month I had my first baby.
By some unspoken rule, when you push a baby out of your hooha, whatever interest you have in popular music shrivels up, passes through the umbilical cord and exits your body with the baby. After that, as a parent, you begin a slow slide backwards through the years until you wake up one day in a nursing home watching 50 year old Friends reruns, still singing along with the Rembrandts.
My husband is a firm believer in “setting a good example” and “broadening musical horizons” for our kids. This does not include popular music. He switches the radio to the classical station and the whole family is asleep before we leave the driveway.
He says, “Moms aren’t allowed to like the same music as their kids.” He isn’t a Belieber, doesn’t know who Demi Lovato is, and certainly doesn’t have a side in the Kanye vs. TayTay battle. God forbid I actually sing along to a current song in public. The horror!
During those hours force-spent listening to moonlight sonatas, I’ve had a lot of time to think about this topic and have come to a conclusion: Fuck.That.Noise.
I challenged my husband to name me one good reason why this 39 year old woman can’t think that The Weekend is amazing or own copies of all of Justin Bieber’s #1 hits.
He suggested that I should sit up in the parental ivory tower and cast my judgement on the latest round of celebrity misbehavior. I mean, it’s fine if I want to watch every season of Real Housewives of Who The Hell Cares, but if some kid musician acts up, I’m supposed to paint a grimace on my face and ban their music from our iTunes account.
The thing is, one of my clearest childhood memories is riding around in the car with my mom and my sister. My mom would load our Wham! cassette into the tape deck, roll down the front windows and turn the volume way, way up. Right there in the middle of the Bible belt, my mom didn’t care if George Michael wore too much eye shadow and spent more time looking at men than women. She didn’t turn her nose up at his latest pop hit or clutch her Bible to her chest and make us sing kumbaya. She knew that those songs on that cassette made her and her girls want to sing at the top of their lungs and so she played them any damn time she wanted.
I remember being 10 years old, riding around thinking that I had the coolest mom in the whole world. There was plenty of time in the future for the teen years to carve a chasm between us. In that moment of time, there was no gap. We were there, loving the exact same thing, together.
Now I’m the mom. I control the radio. I turn it way the hell up and unlock the window controls. My girls sing, giggle and shout for me to take the long way home. I drive my mom car with my mom hair and my mom jeans, listening to songs sung by people twenty years younger than me, and I don’t care if the kid at the red light next to me catches me singing along.
When I listen to pop songs on the radio, inside I’m drifting back to my own tween and teen years. I’m reliving the times with my mom when we were both cool.
Now I find myself reaching out to my daughters and bringing them with me into that same moment when we sing pop songs and laugh when we forget the words, that magic moment when I am the cool mom.
This Mama is not ashamed to be a Belieber.
