The day the music died
On "birth playlists," approaching motherhood as a point beyond which I haven't fantasized, and the role of music in middle-age
I am now mere weeks from my due date, which means I am immersed in preparations for the process of expelling this little being from my body and into the world on her own. One of the best parts of pregnancy — which has otherwise remained rather horrendous for most of the last 37 weeks — has been working with my midwives and doula, who have empowered me to consider not only my preferences for the birth itself, but the kind of atmosphere I want in my birthing room. This latter invitation came as a surprise, as I assumed a hospital birth was a hospital birth—it never occurred to me that I wouldn’t have to give birth in a brightly lit room and recuperate under thin, strangely-scent hospital bedding. Apparently, however, I am welcome to bring my own pillows, blankets, tea lights, fan, and towels.
While I find these invitations to make myself as comfortable as possible extremely reassuring, I’ve been grappling with one recommendation since it was first suggested to me a few months ago and subsequently reiterated by a series of doulas and new moms and blogs—the recommendation to make a “birth playlist.” Apparently many women find it helpful to have different genres and moods at the ready for different stages of labor—some calming, some energizing. Some moms apparently find it helpful to listen to heavy metal during the most difficult parts of labor, or want to experience their baby crowning while listening to a favorite uplifting or meaningful song.
Despite having spent much of the last 20 years soundtracking my life with my ears plugged up by headphones, the idea of a “birth playlist” gives me pause. I don’t think I want to listen to music in labor? I can’t imagine any playlist that wouldn’t make me feel like I was treating my birth like a Soulcycle class (which I imagine is precisely the appeal for some people, while I happen to hate Soulcycle). But what is most surprising to me is not that other people rely on music to get through labor, just as we rely on music to get through exercise or a boring workday, but my own unfamiliar absence of desire for music during an experience that could range from excruciating to transcendent. Listening to music was one of the first ways I learned to self-soothe, and I’ve been bringing music with me everywhere since that meant carrying a heavy lime-green Discman that skipped when I walked too fast.
That is, until I got pregnant, and lost my appetite for music along with so many other habits and flavors that had previously given my life meaning and texture. In pregnancy, I suddenly stopped craving time spent walking alone with music in my ears, stopped feeding off of the rush of new music, and ceased to find comfort in familiar favorites. This abrupt rupture with my previously constant companion has led me to wonder whether this is just part of getting older. After all, it is well-documented that waning interest in new music—as well as spending less time listening to music—is a not uncommon phenomenon in middle age. But even if my new listening habits track a larger trend, they beg the question what function music has long been fulfilling for me that I no longer need it to fill.
As a teenager, leaving the house with music “for a walk” was not only a way to escape the house before I was old enough to drive, but a way to escape my adolescent circumstances. I could daydream about being elsewhere—Balmoral with Prince William, as long-time readers know—or running into my high school crush on the streets of New York, at some future date when I was stylish and unblemished. Listening to music—to my own mix CDs, carefully curated for this purpose—set the scene and the mood. (One such mix, I hilariously titled something to the effect of “It is grey and snowing in London and my heart is broken.”) Music could trigger the joy, the excitement, and the sorrow that I imagined feeling during these romantic daydreams. In fact, the music is what allowed me to actually feel those feelings, to go higher and lower and escape the constant state of bittersweet torture that accompanied my lived experience of unrequited crushes. After the film adaptation of The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants came out in 2005, I lived on Natasha Bedingfield’s “Unwritten” as if it were life-sustaining glucose, and allowed the hope for the future that it imbued in me to propel me through the monotony of middle high school.
Eventually, the near future arrived, and with it came an early MP3 player, not too different from an iPod shuffle, that couldn’t fit more than a couple of hundred songs. This device, which required me to constantly delete music to make room for new songs, provided the soundtrack for my first love. Then there were a series of iPods—a red iPod mini, a full-size iPod, a few iPod shuffles before the inevitable transition to the Spotify app on my iPhone allowing me to to carry around every song in the world at all times—all filled with playlists designed to capture particular moods or stimulate emotional catharsis, depending on what was going on in my life.
Music allowed me to spend hours wandering in the refuge of my imagination; I developed the practice of walking with headphones across my relatively small college campus and it soon became a habit I could not break. Music was everything. It came with me to New York after college, where on the first delicately perfect spring evenings, I would walk home from work instead of taking the subway, along Central Park West or over the Brooklyn Bridge, to extend my time alone in my head between headphones, lost in romantic fantasies. In law school, where I felt miserably stifled in my day-to-day, my headphones on walks to and from school transported me to LA, where my heart lived, and to New York, where I longed to be. (“Missing Bergen Street Walks Home” and “Grumpy in Cambridge” were two of my most listened-to playlists during this era.) Music allowed me to marinate myself in nostalgia and yearning, emotional states that I for some reason found preferable to the absolute malaise of law school. When my heart was badly broken, music created space for the extremity of my emotions, space that I couldn’t find elsewhere in my daily life. Music ensured I could plunge myself into its depths, to fully feel and process.
Later, in LA, I walked less. My musical tastes were different in the car. But I ran, and during the few months when I had a crush—on my now-husband—listening to music gave me permission to let my longing fully permeate me, and allowed me to name it as desire. It was not until I was grounded and secure in love, basking in co-habitation, that I found myself drifting towards podcasts, not sure where I wanted music to pull me. In fact, I didn’t really need or want to be pulled anywhere anymore. I entered what I think of as my Khruangbin era, a phase of listening to mood-boosting instrumental-heavy music that made me feel like I was in a hip restaurant.
It’s clear to me now that, even before pregnancy, my relationship with music was changing - I no longer needed it as a tool for escaping, or for processing emotions that were bigger than me. I no longer craved the journey to emotional highs and lows that music had long provided me. For maybe the first time, life was enough. But it is all the more surprising that, in the depths of my pregnant misery, I have had no appetite for escape via music. Perhaps it just feels futile. Escape—be it to a hip restaurant, an Italian vacation, or a reverie of our wedding—feels impossible. I haven’t allowed myself to drift backwards with longing; the future feels unimaginable. Even in my currently better headspace, I’m struggling to allow myself the freedom to fantasize—the freedom to fantasize about freedom, feeling good in my body. Perhaps I’m struggling to imagine what story lays ahead in my future beyond motherhood.
The prospect of having no appetite or use for music in this next stage of life—beyond trying to shush my child with Baby Beluga and Encanto—is a depressing one. I fear it signals a lack of investment in my own pleasure or future. But I also recognize it as a byproduct of a level of contentment I have never before experienced. Perhaps, like my parents, I will spend the next few decades returning to the same artists and albums over and over again, allowing them to bring me back to a time where emotions were felt in their extremes and the long road of life before me was unknown.
After so many years of plugging up my ears to allow myself to drift inward, I find myself imagining I’ll crave silence in labor. The inner seat of power I hope to reach seems more accessible via silence than with music. I have more often used music to pull myself out of an experience than root myself in it. But perhaps it just feels as impossible to know what kind of music I would want to hear as it is to imagine what a contraction will feel like. Standing at a precipice, with motherhood stretching out before me, I have no idea what genre will feel appropriate for labor, let alone the next chapter of parenting. These are not stories we usually see represented, let alone soundtracked. How do you score something you have never experienced?