Who I Might Have Been

On becoming, still - and an accidental ode to the music of Maggie Rogers.

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There’s something otherworldly about this sun-soaked corner of the blue couch in our local Aussie coffeeshop, an easy jaunt betwixt home and the kids’ tutorial. They’ve got good food, great coffee, and generally enjoyable music, though sometimes between it and the people inside, it errs a little on loud. Though I’ve regrettably left my headphones on the nightstand, I still feel drawn to come today, and so I do.

I’ve learned, over time, to listen to those leanings.

My laptop is dead thanks to its prolific use during school, so I plug in — the only available outlet tucked into the children’s nook — and get cozy for just enough time to clear my head.

Maggie Rogers’ “Alaska” comes on over the static thrum of a number of nearby conversations, the soft voice of the pigtailed Cinderella beside me, and the gurgle of a onesied koala on his mother’s shoulder even closer.

I time travel to the days where the score of my life were these very sounds, and hours alone at a coffeeshop were a distant memory and a longed-for luxury.

Just yesterday, I tried to remember what it felt like to hold the whole weight of our oldest in my arms. Now her head sits just below my chin when she asks if I need a hug in a moment of my overwhelm, wrapping her arms tight around my middle. She cleans her mirror and sink without me asking, arranges the accoutrements of tweenhood in a spinning carousel.

God, I hope she smiles in that mirror.

She takes ownership of herself, becoming a version of a girl I never was.

I’ve watched the video of Pharrell sitting in the studio with Maggie listening to this same of song of hers for the first time, so many times, I know it by heart.

I can see it now: his eyebrows perched high just a few beats into the song, the disbelief when he glances at the camera and says “crazy”. The way she stares at his shoes the whole time but can’t help taking a few nervous glances his direction. Her awkward laughter and her rhythmic embodiment of the song eventually bleeding into him, first his legs and then his head keeping the beat, too. Her astonishment, when the song and the applause finish, and he has “zero, zero notes” for her.

He only has this to say:

“You’re doing your own thing. It’s singular. It’s like when Wu-Tang Clan came out, like no one could really judge it, you either liked it or you didn't, but you couldn’t compare it to anything else. And that is such a special quality and all of us possess that ability, but you have to be willing to seek. And you have to be willing to be real frank in your music. And frank in your choices.

Most of the time people will say ‘okay, I’m going to make this kind of song,’ so it ends up sounding like something we’ve heard before. Your whole story, I can hear it in the music…

You just have to be willing to use elements that are not necessarily popular.”

She hadn’t made music for two and a half years up until a couple months before this. Unsure, anymore, of who she was as an artist, she was just beginning to come alive, again, to her musical voice. She wrote the song in 15 minutes, eight days before this NYU masterclass. The video of their moment went viral, the trajectory of her life as an artist changed, entirely.

But let us not forget it was built in the seemingly fallow season where she learned to marry who she had been — growing up playing folk music on the banjo — to her transformative experiences with dance music while studying abroad in Europe. And then just, you know, showing up, being brave — trying.

Sometimes I’m haunted by the could-have-beens of my story.

I once recorded an original song in a small studio at the top of an office building on Music Row. Oddly, I remember the elevator ride more than recording. I was sixteen, riding all the way here from Virginia in the passenger seat of my mom’s seafoam green minivan, my red guitar in the back.

Finally, though, I felt behind the wheel of my own life; every trip to this city came with the choir of sirens calling, something more, something else. It made no sense, but I knew it was where I belonged.

It’s been so long I have no idea where that one-song demo actually is; perhaps I’ll spend my afternoon trying to unearth it. Whether I’ll be brave enough to listen is another story. There’ll be no camera rolling, but if there was, I might cringe into it rather than be rendered speechless.

I hope, though, I can be proud I was brave enough to believe and to try another way. Something I’d not really seen done in my world, before.

My dreams may have carried me here, but others were birthed in their stead.

I’ve never felt particularly exceptional at the things I’ve wanted to do with my life. Music. Photography. Motherhood. Writing. I’ve been fine enough to take the next steps, to wing it, to throw some spaghetti on the wall and for some of it to stick, some of the time. No matter how much I hate to admit it, a part of my heart has ached for acclaim. Sometimes that very ache itself has kept me from leaning into the work of creating, afraid of selling out and becoming someone I don’t recognize anymore.

For years, now, I’ve been coming full circle, but a funny kind of version like our boys’ singing the “self-referential” and “infinitely iterative children’s song” The Song That Doesn’t End (which we recently, perhaps regrettably, introduced them to) on our way to drop-off this morning. In this song, the lyrics never change but the inflection, tone, volume, pace — all of it can be altered with every round, growing sillier or more solemn and slow in seconds.

As I return to some place I recognize within myself, our children are, in fact, writing songs and stories of their own. In some way, this newness in what is familiar, this round and round we go, is representative of the work in reparenting oneself, particularly while parenting an oldest daughter whom I sometimes see glimmers of myself within. There are moments when, while mucking about in the kitchen, I hear her playing guitar through the ceiling above me and am struck dumb with wonder.

What if, in all this, I’m becoming the truest version of who I thought I might have been.

While I’ve been wandering in words here, Maggie’s “Light On” plays. This song, which I also love, is her reflection on the challenges and hopes of maintaining connection to her audience and sense of artistry in the wake of sudden success.

I’m tickled by the irony that though our culture upholds the golden egg of virality (spellcheck’s telling me it’s not a word, but I promise it is) — and statistically I’ll never experience it, myself — as a mother of three kids, I know the power of viruses. They’re just another day in life with children who still haven’t learned to keep their hands out of their mouths and away from their faces.

Cells, like the TikToks and Reels of today or the YouTube videos of yore, they catch and spread, mimicking and replicating, only there’s nothing validating or astonishing about being waylaid by the stomach bug (as we most recently have been), Covid (as we were just a few weeks before that), or the flu (which we have, knock on wood, avoided thus far, this season).

But here we are again and will be, in the future.

This slow and steady showing up, being brave, trying — I tell myself — is enough.

What I do with my life, it’s caught, even if only within the walls of our home.

For a moment, here on the blue couch, I close my eyes and imagine that I’m singing along with Maggie, not to an audience of many, but to that girl in me who was and is and is still becoming:

“If you keep reaching out
Then I'll keep coming back
But if you're gone for good
Then I'm okay with that
If you leave the light on
Then I'll leave the light on
(Light on, light on, light on)

And I am finding out
There's just no other way
And I'm still dancing
At the end of the day
If you leave the light on
Then I'll leave the light on”

Thank you — as always — for leaving the light on, in your own way, by being here.