It started out like a song

Weezer, the White Stripes and pop-cultural time loops.

Earlier this month I went to see Weezer play the Blue Album in its entirety with my 15-year-old and her dad. Watching my kid scream her head off to “Buddy Holly,” a song I remember singing the night it hit No. 1 on the pop chart on Q102, sitting in my childhood room listening to my alarm clock FM radio, was a surreal time warp.

It also made me think about this piece I wrote a few years back but never found a home for. I wanted to share it today.

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It started out like a song.

The first time I started to imagine the outlines of my kid I was in the passenger seat, singing along to the White Stripes with the man I would marry, but I didn’t know that yet.

I hadn’t known before that moment that I wanted children, but suddenly I could see a child, mine, ours. Back to school. Brand new shoes. Books and pens.

She was a girl, always a girl, and I saw her from the ground up. Her shoes, patent leather, were sketched in first, then her backpack and a dress that looked very much like the white one I wore on my own first day of school.

Before he and I were even engaged, walking aimlessly at the twenty-four-hour Wal-Mart, we read through an entire book of baby names and decided on a girl name, Juliana Scarlett. We never decided on a boy name, but we kept that girl name for years, even after we married, even after we started trying for a baby.

We didn’t end up naming her Juliana. I sometimes wonder what her life would have looked like if we had. How if I’d gotten pregnant earlier, when we still agreed on baby names, we may have had a different baby altogether. A different marriage. A different family.

Our daughter didn’t wear the white dress I imagined on the first day of kindergarten, or the shoes. Not much about our family looked like what I once imagined. She wore a Hello Kitty dress her stepmom picked out, because the first day fell on their week with her.

The elementary years were my favorite to parent. We read chapter books together, learned to roller skate. I got to watch her face as she listened to Iggie Pop’s “The Passenger” for the first time. When the la la la las kicked in, it was like magic.

Jack White sings about how we don’t notice any time pass, and it’s true. We didn’t notice anything. In no time at all, my elementary schooler was in middle school. During the first pandemic summer, there was nothing safe to do, she and I started taking evening drives. We navigated crowded downtown streets and cruised lazy state routes lined with rolling green hills. She got to pick the music as long as I could name the topic of conversation.

We agreed on most things, but not everything. I tried to push certain points and she bristled. “You always try to get me to think what you think,” she said. “Why do you do that?”

I could see we were approaching a new stage in our relationship, the part where she was trying to figure out who she was without me. I stopped thinking as much about the girl in the white dress, the one we would have named Juliana. I didn’t want anything other than the sprawling, messy, beautiful life I ended up with.

That summer I was the one driving and my eleven-year-old daughter was the passenger, playing DJ.

She pulled up the White Stripes.

She said, “Have you heard this before?”