I Didn't Know What To Say
Sharon Van Etten: ‘Seventeen’ + Baby Stuff (aka No-Baby Stuff) + Appointment After Appointment + Rocking Out (In The Car, Alone)
Halfway through this life
I used to feel free
Or was it just a dream?
When I tell you the level of un-free I felt when I first heard this song. At 35, I had some of the usual trappings of early-midlife unfreedom. A legally bound partner, a mortgage, and the threat of death, give or take, should I stop paying it. A job with deadlines and a commute that some days both began and ended in the dark. But this all added up to a cozy sort of prison, a steam room in comparison to what was really penning me in.
For several years my husband and I had been trying to have a baby. By the time I heard “Seventeen,” we’d leveled up to the highly un-free world of assisted reproduction. I could scroll through my “portal” (s/o to my ART girlies) to confirm, but I am positive I went to the doctor 836 times that year. At 7 a.m., on my lunch break, on Sunday mornings, at very specific times that weren’t disclosed until the day prior and before which I couldn’t eat or drink anything. Once, a pigeon shat on me as I walked in. Sometimes my husband had to be there, but mostly it was just me taking the elevator to the twenty-fourth floor, pulling up my sleeves for the phlebotomist, putting my feet in the stirrups.
This office was run like a machine, so I’d usually only wait a couple minutes before someone called for Anne B. But the waiting room overlooked Lake Michigan on two sides, perfect for moody contemplation, and I was sure even the enormous spiders on the other side of those huge windows felt sorry for me as they went about building their webs and having zillions of baby spiders, no problem. I lost my mind a little and sometimes a lot. On one early-summer Saturday morning I walked to the farmer’s market, happened upon a circle of tots being led by a grizzled local troubadour in a chorus of “Baby Shark,” and burst into tears. No heirloom asparagus for me. I’m making it sound funny, but it was horrible, this desire that, month after month, year after year, I could not fulfill. It almost certainly won’t be the worst thing that ever happened to me, but for now that’s what it was.
I first heard “Seventeen” on the radio, which happened a lot when I was 17, but almost never anymore. I was alone, driving home from dinner with friends, true blues who I saw weekly, texted constantly, but generally did not talk to about the baby stuff (aka the no-baby stuff). I thought I was protecting them from my sadness, but I was also shielding myself from the insufficient reactions they’d have to it, the less-than-perfect things they’d say, or, maybe worse, their speechlessness. How could I blame them? I had no idea what to say, either.
I used to be free
I used to be seventeen
From the first listen, the song made me feel every inch of those two Van Ettens, the one who felt free and the one who knows she isn’t anymore. She sings and screams and yells like she’s been at it for a while. With my apologies to the teenagers for saying so, she rocks out. Halfway through this life. I used to feel free. Or was it just a dream? She’s talking to herself, asking questions, and my guts vibrated with recognition. Life used to be better, or at least not like this. You’ll crumble it up just to see / Afraid that you'll be just like me. I was unsure of many things but knew I wasn’t living a 17-year-old’s vision of the good life–mine or anyone else’s.
Listening to this song over and over, while I stared out of morning-dark train windows and walked to the hospital past people heading home from the night shift, felt like discovering there was a place where I could talk about what was happening, a conversation between me and myself and a promise that this part would end, too.
Five years on, I feel differently about most of this—feel, quite honestly, that it was nothing in the light of my daughter, a stubborn, three-year-old wonder of a person. I think it actually touches the limits of human freedom that I could become her parent. Living in a world with her in it is far better than anything I could have imagined, even as I was doing everything I could to make it happen. I think it’s a kind of medicine that everyone who needs it should have. I also feel it’s important to remember how terrible everything was for a while. How hard it was to talk about and how sad and messed up and alone I felt with it. How someone telling me then what I just wrote now would have made me furious.
Down beneath the ashes and the stone
Sure of what I've lived and have known
I see you so uncomfortably alone
I wish I could show you how much you've grown
I can’t, of course, but I can remember you just as you were. I can’t pick you up and hug you, tap a screen and show you your daughter’s face or play for you the perfect sound of her voice, but I can see you, and wish. ✹