Songs We Sing in the Car

Emily McNally

I have been playing a lot of very loud, angry rock music lately in an effort to exorcise my demons. Much the way I did when I was young. Most of it is by women. I play PJ Harvey, Neko Case, and Sharon Van Etten, praying their rage can lead me through mine to some peace. I cannot stop playing Olivia Rodrigo’s “Brutal.” Even after she has a whole new album, it’s that song I return to again and again. The feeling that your whole existence may be devoured by petty obsessions with likability and the twisted perceptions of outsiders feel terrifyingly immediate to me. I play it while I cook dinner, walk the dog, or drive my kids around in the car from one commitment to another, feeling the bass line thrum in my belly, wondering how I have matured so little past these ancient concerns though I am nearly three times her age. My teens roll their eyes. Grow up, old woman.

I’ve started going through menopause just as my twin daughters are beginning to experience their first maniacal waves of hormones. My husband is sometimes left staring into an empty room after one of our girls has just raged or sobbed out of it in response to his casual suggestion about shifting a backpack or turning off the TV. I feel sorry for him as he looks at me eyes wide, arms hanging in humble confusion. Hormones, I explain, they’re a bitch. Meanwhile, I’m subjected to hot flashes so insane I’m left stripping off clothing, sweat pooling at my hairline leading to a cresting anxiety rushing through my ears like waves of a black ocean seeking to suck me under. Sometimes, especially while driving, I experience a crystallized rage so intense I honest to god think I should pull the car over in case I’m on the brink of an aneurysm. Can rage cause an aneurysm? 

I’m struck over and over again by how the media in various forms keeps telling me this is a time where I can enjoy my accumulated wisdom and the glow of my many accomplishments. This false narrative just increases my alienation. I don’t in any way feel like I’m settling into a new comfort with myself. I’m still an anxiety-fueled tortured artist. I have large billowing dreams I choose to believe I can still accomplish with industry and creativity. They are, to be sure, the sails that snap around me, sending me along currents that lead to fresh discovery, but just as often, maybe more often lately, they twist around me, hindering my gait, dragging me down in their weight.

I see a whisper of a similar struggle in other women my age. We’ve been very good for a very long time. We’ve dedicated ourselves to marriages, raising children, working to support ourselves and our families in various ways and with varying degrees of satisfaction. Because we’ve been here so long, seen and managed so much bullshit, and sacrificed a great deal to the well-being of others, we’re starting to ask some hard questions about what must be jettisoned for us to function as full people. We’ve started to wonder how we can resurrect some critical aspect of ourselves left for dead, and when we’ll find the courage to confront the constraints we’re no longer willing to live within. A friend tells me she’s looking for a new job, but her face flushes when she says it and I can tell there’s an uncomfortable story on the other side of her silence. Another is going back to school to become a therapist after a long stretch as a stay-at-home mom. Another has just started her first novel after giving up writing for years in service to her successful career in technology. I feel the rush of their longing for something more, something else, and I sense the enormous effort it takes to stop the tide of events for long enough to allow their dissatisfaction to surface into action. I have such love for their tired faces and sleepless nights, the ruffles in their composure and the lines on their faces. We’re supposed to be at our most secure, all major decisions made, all passions mellowed with time. I don’t think I’m alone in feeling the exact opposite—my ambitions are ratcheting up around me, urging me to push through the world’s narrow expectations of me to find my own vision for what I want my life to look like and who I want to turn out to be before I die.

Like middle age, adolescence makes identity slippery. The veil is lifted as those initial hormones filter in, revealing the web of half-truths and evasions that restricted them to childhood. There are the expected challenges, like trying to figure out how to match up your appearance to who you feel you are on the inside. One of my daughters favors jeans, sweaters and pretty dresses, while the other wears black t-shirts featuring anime characters, or a favorite band. One of them pulls long hours performing and working backstage in theaters. The other is a dedicated and ambitious student, who is learning to manage her perfectionism with grace. These initial sprouts in their growing identities point to deeper fault lines. Who do they want to become? How are they going to get there? Will they find a path forward to satisfy their ambitions? They hover on the precipice of their worlds cracking open to a new independence where life is both more expansive and more complicated. My old reassurances that they are beautiful, resourceful and brave, that they will figure it all out in time are no longer sufficient to soothe. They’re starting to realize how much they are going to have to navigate on their own and how quickly adulthood is bearing down on them. I treat both of them with different kinds of musical medicine. For my serious student, I turn to singer songwriters who’ve comforted me, like Janelle Monae, Joni Mitchell and Liz Phair. For my edgy rocker, I revisit my alternative loves from the 90s, like Hole, Dinosaur Jr., Sonic Youth and Pavement. I am no longer a young woman, not yet an old one. They are no longer children, not yet women. Knitting their present with my past through music, gives us a place to hang out together in our respective in-between times, doubting, questioning and, occasionally, raging. 

My daughters ask me what I was like when I was their age. I tell them stories of how I loved to be out on wheels—skates or my bike—riding through my neighborhood looking for adventure. I tell them how much I loved my dance classes and how they taught me discipline and gave me a place to shine. I tell them I liked lots of different kinds of people and had friends from many different groups at my highly conventional, socially stratified school. I tell them I was a middling student, good in English and Social Studies while almost flunking Geometry and Chemistry. I tell them my school reports were much more scattershot than theirs, and notes about my lateness and chattiness and distractibility were frequent. I tell them how, even then, I loved to listen to angry women- Pat Benatar and Tina Turner being particular favorites. They like this vision of me. They appreciate, I think, that I have no rarified image of being a teenage girl that they have to live up to. I admit to them freely that I was not as emotionally intelligent or responsible as they are. The self I construct for them is made up of true things, the facts I present are not lies, but I’m coming up hard against the hollowness of the picture. It’s almost as if in seeing their solid adolescent forms take shape in front of me, the sand sculpture I’ve created of my own young self is falling apart. 

When a male gaze lingers on their emerging curves for a moment too long,

I avoid telling my them about how the actor in a production of Funny Girl in which I was a chorus girl, cornered me in a dressing room, his sweaty hand traveling up under my skirt along my white tights before a stage manager came in and sent him away, or how she lectured me about keeping men at arm’s length, and that I rode home on the bus that night shaking with shock and shame. 

When they tell me about a friend dealing with anxiety and depression, and their own struggle to know how to support, I don’t tell them how I was once driven home by a stoned college student who talked to me at length about his suicidal ideation and how I would be haunted for years with a gray dread of culpability.

But in the thin membrane that exists between mothers and daughters they’ve absorbed insights I can’t entirely conceal. They know—and will sometimes state baldly to my face—that I’m over-protective of them because I was under-protected. In the ether of our intimacy I can feel the way they sense the valleys of pain I desperately want them to bridge, pits of worthlessness I pray they can skip over.

Sometimes this concentrated knowing is overwhelming. We get edgy and irritable with one another. Sometimes the only cure is really loud music. I play them Robyn and Prince. They play me Billie Eilish and Chappel Roan. We dance and head bang our way through our outrage and collective identity crisis.

They won’t be me and they won’t make my mistakes, but this does nothing to limit all the other forms of suffering that can’t be avoided. Griefs and losses, disappointments and falterings, heartbreaks and devastations are open doors we all have to walk through, no matter how clever or good or brave we become. It’s unhelpful to tell myself stories about what could be behind those doors. I try to stop myself from picturing the worst of what could happen to them. But the reality of all I will not be able to protect them from wraps its cold fingers around my heart leaving me breathless with dread.

These gathering pressures force me to see not the gentrified version of my young self I present to my girls or the polite, sane woman I strive to be now, but the frustrated, hemmed in core. The elemental self who has always longed to be more, find more. She is still thrashing around inside me, reminding me I’ve never cared about anything so much as freedom, as living life fully as myself in all of my rawly emotional, unhinged glory. Even as my old pain is thrust in my face, my old wildness is also there, a roiling resistance to being consoled by conventional comforts animates me, pushing me forward, making a peaceful slide into old age feel entirely unlikely. I find myself grateful for rock and roll, and for Olivia, in particular—the pissed off, inconsolable daughter of my heart—for giving me a soundtrack to my angst that I can share with my teens, because it is still, and maybe always will be, brutal out here.