So What’s the Song Got to Do with It?

4 July 2010

“You Had Sex and a Baby Came Out”….. I know.  What on earth was I thinking? Well, how it works for us songwriters is we get a great line and it goes from there.

If you landed here, you’ve probably seen the video on YouTube (and if you haven’t, it’s right here). You may be wondering what could drive an otherwise normal, healthy adult woman to do such a thing, especially something involving that much work!

Well, when you get a great line…..

Seriously, I’ve been passionate about this issue of parents and kids for years, and it began to really boil over about a year ago. I’ve been both a healer and a teacher for thirteen years, and in the past year the amount of adult women who’ve had “supposed to” parenting as the dominant issue causing them to seek healing has skyrocketed. At one point, the bulk of my healing practice was almost exclusively depression directly caused by “supposed to” parenting.

I’ve also worked on (or known) a few men whose marriages were destroyed by this issue, so I have seen and heard it all from the women, the men and the kids.  Many of my adult clients were themselves not wanted by their parents as children, so they were dealing with it from all sides!

Let’s get real about this in economic terms for a second….. This is such a big issue in our culture that I have been able to make a living off of treating just this ONE issue for two years. So many people are effected at such deep levels by this issue that my whole business was sustained by it, even during the worst economic disaster of the last seventy years!

Although I have treated clients for other issues during that time, the amount of clients that had all of their issues or problems in life essentially sourced from the wreckage of “supposed to” parenting is truly devastating to witness. From the treatment side,  it’s so predictable that I know to ask about it right up front to save the client time and money.

It also became a personal mission during a performance I did in March.  If you’ve read the About page, you know about my brain damage (if not, what are you waiting for?  Go read and come back.)  I wrote a Dr. Suess themed hip-hop-pop song for the annual Read Across America day and was the choir director for a kid’s choir at a local elementary school.  We performed it at their big annual performance for all the moms and dads.  Great fun and I had a blast working with the kids.  It was a personal victory for me as it was the first song I’d written in two years (longest I’d ever gone without composing something) and my first musical performance since Easter Sunday, 2008 (longest I’d ever gone without performing).

During the month I worked with the kids and some of the parents on rehearsals for the performance, I was really struck by some of the annoyingly arrogant and stupid things said to me or in front of me by other adults. Mind you, it was never the school teachers who said the stuff.  It was the mothers who were the worst!

In the years that I taught music, I worked with about 1000 kids. Most parents have only ever dealt with their kids. Since I made my living working with kids during that time, if I wasn’t great with kids, I wouldn’t have a roof over my head or food on my table.  The parents could be awful, mean and completely incompetent with their kids and they couldn’t be fired! Most of these women had only ever spent time around their own kids.  Their work at the school as volunteers had them spending most of their time with the adults.  They actually had very little true experience with kids, yet they felt they were experts.

Wrong!  I saw how they treated their kids, how they spoke to them when correcting them and how the kids related to each other. One of these mothers even admitted she didn’t like children and preferred spending time around adults!

“Then why have kids, idiot!”  Popping a baby out does not in any way mean that a woman is:
    1.    Good with kids
    2.    Has any maternal “instinct” at all
    3.    Is able to or interested in nurturing
    4.    Has any ability to have a healthy relationship with a child
    5.    Has any training or study whatsoever in child development, understanding of age-appropriate behavior in children or what healthy child development looks like.

What I learned in that experience is that even the most idiotic and inappropriate adult behavior will pass as good parenting if enough adults club up together about it. Some of these women had almost no relationship with their children beyond criticism, correction and sometimes out-right meanness to enforce their dominance.  What most of these women tried to pass off as correction was nothing but control. They needed to enforce control because they had no emotional intimacy or connection with their children as human beings equal to them.

Two days later, the last line of the chorus, “You had sex// and a baby came OOOUUUTTT” popped in my head, music and all.  That was all I needed! Three weeks, and many train rides later, I had fifteen pages of lyrics. It took about thirty-five re-writes to get it down to the version in the recording (look for the extra lyrics on the YouTube channel in the supplemental videos).  I knew I had something great.  What I didn’t know was that it would be life-altering.