Gossip, swearing and singing

I was not a ballet girl, nor a jazz girl, but a highland dancing girl, who did the Saturday competition round along with her classmates.  A lot of sewing took place in order to make those performances happen (the old-style kilt had many many separate pieces, all of which were subject to regulations; it has since been superseded by what we called the “summer uniform”).  The mothers who sewed were in demand from the other mothers (who also sewed, but not to the industry standard of that first elite tier, one of whom owned her own knitting machine on which she made tartan dancing socks).  So it was that, at the age of nine, I regularly travelled across town with my mother to the welcoming home of the other mother who cut and sewed my new kilt.  Everyone in that house was large, Irish-descended and friendly; even the outside guard dogs that stepped aside to let us in.

While the fittings took place, the other mother kept my mother updated on stories of the local dancing scene: the sorrowful divorces, the ungrateful children, the bitter fallings-out between teachers and their senior students.  For the first few sessions my mother was able to distract me by encouraging me to look at the black velvet and devotional paintings in the living room, or even turning a blind eye I while I wandered up to the master-bedroom to touch and thus undulate the water-bed that dominated that space.  However, after a while she must have decided that the flow of gossip could not be staunched, and introduced me by way of a quiet talk on the car-ride home to the east Christchurch equivalent of what’s said in Vegas, stays in Vegas.

I think of our dressmaker, may she rest in peace, in the times when the señor and I are talking in front of the harvestbaby of things we might not wish her to understand when her memory and language acquisition are fully firing.  It is not so much the content but the nuance and the vocabulary.  While not hard-bitten types, we do speak in a clipped post-ironic fashion, most days, since the black comedy must be snuck into my consciousness with even more stealth than when I was pregnant and intolerant of all social ill.  I am aware, suddenly, with our third family member lying there in all her unironic newness, of the desire not to heap her up with life’s ennui prematurely, even as I think about it prematurely.

Then there is the swearing.  We are trying to cut down.  The señor in his moments of greatest surprise or fury tends not to swear anyway, to the extent that when you hear him say “gosh”, you know that trouble’s a-comin’, and I am getting by on a system of euphemistic conversion.  For the latter I should thank Flight of the Conchords for the gift of “motherflipper” and “motherflippin’”.  I am slightly abashed by how often I now use these terms, or rather, how often I must have used the terms that they replaced.  It is too easy, however, to let things slide in front of one who has no spoken vocabulary, and for this I fear we will yet pay.

There is also the question of what to sing to a baby.  As the chief singer in the household, I am mixing up standards of all kinds, raiding both my juvenile and adult repertoires.  I rely on the baby’s lack of subtextual awareness to protect her from the murderous undertones of “No More Shall We Part” and to focus on the soothing held notes instead.  (What baby wouldn’t be comforted to know that “all the hatchets  have been buried now”?)  Likewise, her lack of knowledge of, or aversion to spiders makes “Incy Wincy Spider” a go-to, although it lacks the second and third verses I usually look for in a power ballad.  I sang “Summertime” several times one feeding, overriding the fact that it is winter and the harvestbaby’s daddy is not rich, for emphatic eye contact over “your ma is good-looking”.  She has also enjoyed listening to Wilco, Sarah Vaughan, the Flaming Lips and Bryan Ferry on the stereo and lots of Weezer in the car (although strictly speaking, I rate “enjoy” as “sleeps quietly through”).

Further iffiness resides in the general tradition in pop music lyrics of using “baby” to a large extent and “daddy” to a lesser to express what Ned Flanders would call “adult situations”; yet these are the songs to which I’m drawn by virtue of the language of family.  This has led to a new parental hobby: revising lyrics on the go.  We are yet to reach the marvellous zenith of “Help the Police“, but are on what we hope might be the right road with this rewriting of “I’m on Fire“:

Hey little girl, is your daddy home?
Did he go and leave you all alone?
Mmmm, no: he’s a good daddy.
Oh; he’s a good father.

Tell me now baby, is he good to you?
Yes [humming]
[humming]; he’s a good daddy.
Oh; he’s a good father.

We haven’t yet done much with the verse that begins “At night I wake up with the sheets soaking wet”, but if there was ever a case for poetic literalism, it is surely in that verse (the next line about the “freight train running through the middle of my head” less so, although one of the harvestbaby’s grandfathers is a shunting man).  With pop music built on its house of innuendo, we have either our work cut out for us or an exciting project ahead.  Transformation without lying, rather than censorship is surely the way forward, at least for that short window before the baby begins to exercise exclusive creative control over the music of the house.  Even then, there’s still this, in all its Carry On-style horror, in the face of which I am inclined to stay in the world of adult music for now:

Tagged as: baby