Songs of Life
“Each person who ever was or is or will be has a song. It isn’t a song that anybody else wrote. It has its own melody, it has its own words. Very few people get to sing their song. Most of us fear that we cannot do it justice with our voices, or that our words are too foolish or too honest, or too odd. So people live their song instead.”
― Neil Gaiman, Anansi Boys
Often I find myself humming a strange tune. It’s always the same one and probably has been since I was a child. It’s a melody that comes from inside of me and has words that change depending on the mood I’m in. Sometimes it’s fast, more often it’s slow. Sometimes it buoys me up and other times it reaffirms my melancholy. But the melody… it is inside of me. It IS me.
Forgive my introspection. But for the past few months, I’ve noticed another melody, quietly interweaving with my own. And it comes from another part of me. The part of me inside of my beautiful baby boy. I don’t know when I first became aware of it. He’s been humming to himself a lot, usually when he’s very tired and wants to go to sleep. To the casual observer, it is just a gentle hum with no particular rhythm or cadence. But there is something magnetic about it.
It calls to a part of me that seems to have been sleeping for a very long time. Sleeping… or maybe something that wasn’t even there before. Not until he came along. Maybe as I birthed him, he in return birthed a new me. The mother. The protector. The keeper of the words.
I hear his song in his breath as he nuzzles close to my cheek, comforting himself against my body, breathing me in as I hold him tight. I hear his song in his laughter when he gazes at something and beams with the sunshine of an uncomplicated life. I hear his song when he cries, tears shining in his big blue eyes, looking at me and begging me to give him the words that will mollify him and make him whole again.
His heart is my heart. His joys are my joys and his sorrows are my sorrows. My soul is no longer mine, but belongs to him, completely and utterly…
Some day, not too long from now, his words will come. He won’t immediately look to me for the lyrics but will make up his own to fill the void. But when he stumbles and the words don’t come, I will be there to sing life back into his soul and mine.
For now, I take solace in his precious melody. The one that pairs so well with mine and gives our music a new vibrancy.
Sing it out
Boy you’ve got to see what tomorrow brings
Sing it out
Girl you’ve got to be what tomorrow needs
For every time that they want to count you out
Use your voice every single time you open up your mouth
Sing it for the boys
Sing it for the girls
Every time that you lose it sing it for the world
Sing it from the heart
Sing it till you’re nuts
Sing it out for the ones that’ll hate your guts
Sing it for the deaf
Sing it for the blind
Sing about everyone that you left behind
Sing it for the world
Sing it for the world
-My Chemical Romance, Sing
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