All Too Well

“I walked through the door with you.

The air was cold.

But something about it felt like home somehow.”

– Taylor Swift, “All Too Well”

I walk through the door of Target, awkwardly balancing a carseat over my right arm. The November air outside is so cold the heat inside hits me with an intense suffocation.  Two months after delivering my first baby and my hormones still struggle with balance. I wonder if balance is something I will ever achieve. 

I fling down my jacket zipper and gently place the car seat into the nearest cart, praying it isn’t one with a squeaky wheel. Attempting simultaneous speed and careful movement, I race down the aisles. Caroline is asleep but I’m not sure for how much longer. My heart races at the possibility of getting trapped in a store with a screaming baby. Family and friends coo at her sweet disposition, but still I find myself in a constant wide-eyed gaze anticipating her next melt down, or my own. 

My frantic rush is only made worse by the fact that I can not find the damn baby aisle. This is not my regular Target store and the layout baffles me. Why is it that every store is designed differently? And why is it that I never noticed how annoying this is until I had a baby? Goodness, I’m so easily flustered these days. The smallest things irritate me–temperatures, sounds, getting lost. There was once a time in my life when I could more easily shrug off minor nuisances and unexpected changes. I’d like to be my old self again. Finding her, though, proves about as easy as finding diapers in this maze of a store. 

Just when I think I’m lost, the twang of a guitar and whiny sounds of a country music singer blaring over the speakers alert me I must be passing through the electronics section. I turn to see a bouncy Taylor Swift following me across every television screen like a creepy hallway in a haunted house. Apparently her new album Red is out. I roll my eyes. I couldn't care less. 

Taylor Swift hit her fandom just as I became a grownup. While she sang cute songs about boys and breakups for her teenage fans, the soundtrack of my twenties was more the edgy no-nonsense vibe of Lady GaGa. I was independently driven in my career, a happily married woman. I just could not relate to Swift’s whiny love songs, even more so now that I am a mother. The only thing that makes this new mom’s heart race is getting through the store without waking her ticking time bomb in a car seat. 

Glaring at the reverberating screens, I mumble under my breath, I swear, Taylor, if you wake up my baby I’ll give you some trouble to whine about. I peek under the car seat cover to check if the music has startled her awake. The pink knitted bunny cap has slipped down over her eyes but the rhythm of her chest moving up and down tells me she is asleep. My heart clenches, the reaction of a love that still surprises me. I never knew a mother’s love could feel so much like a first crush. Oxytocin lulls me to stay, but it never lasts long. The familiar panic of responsibility returns. Quickly, yet carefully, I push my cart past the aisle until the music fades into the background. 

***

“Everyone buckled?” I look in the rearview mirror at Caroline, now eight, her five year old brother Elliott, and their two year old brother Leo. 

“Yep,” they all answer back cheerily. By the excitement in their voice you’d think we were going somewhere exciting instead of fifteen minutes down the road to pick up our groceries. With the realities of a pandemic shrinking our world over the last 10 months, it’s the little things that bring us joy. I’m just excited someone is bringing my groceries to the car. What a time to be alive. 

“Mom, can you put on Taylor Swift?” Elliott asks. I smile, pleased to know I have appropriately brainwashed him into listening to music I love. I pull up my favorite Taylor Swift playlist, a mix of both of her latest albums Folklore and Evermore, and set it to shuffle. 

It took nearly a decade, but Taylor finally listened to my request for relevant music with the release of not one but two albums in 2020. In a year when creating felt impossible, Taylor proved to be one who thrives under pressure. Or maybe it was boredom. Either way, this Taylor matched my mood perfectly. 

Both Folklore and Evermore capture songs for storytellers like myself. Shifting away from the clawing love songs, this music is moody and whimsical, the lyrics reflective and nostalgic. You can tell she’s been through some shit. And she’s happy now. It’s easier to sing about grief when you’re on the other side. With proof of a decade of parenting singing in the car as we drive uptown, I can relate. We are still in the middle of a pandemic, life is weird, and still hard, and yet I feel at peace. The ebbs and flows of parenting don’t shock me like they once did. 

Gray November, I’ve been down since July. 

The haunting words of the song “Evermore” play through the speakers. I recall then a podcast to which I recently listened that analyzed this song. I always assumed the lyrics were about another relationship gone wrong. Apparently, though, the words tell of her battle with mental health during ongoing media controversies. It took me by surprise that the song wasn’t really about love at all. And yet, you could listen to it that way and still relate. This was a breakthrough moment for me. Maybe not every love song is about a lover. Maybe, like poetry, there is more than one way to listen to a song. 

After that day, I started listening to Taylor’s music with a new perspective. When she sang about a crush, I thought of the creative goals and dreams that allure me. Her words about moving on from a relationship became about me moving on from the person I once was into the person I am becoming. 

Or, like today, with “Evermore,” as I listen to her struggles with her career through the gray days of November, I think of my own past gray Novembers, different yet still relatable. I think about how many times I wondered if the pain of motherhood would be for evermore. I know now, with time and counseling and growth, that it won’t be. 

I’m thinking of this as I look out my car window. The city in winter always looks barren cold, but I can’t help but notice the first fall of snow glistening as it falls. I smile and steal a look at my children, almost missing the red light. The playlist shuffles to the next song.

I’m doing good, I’m on some new shit.

They are the first words of the first album of Taylor’s to which I ever listened, really listened, and started to appreciate. Taylor has grown over the years–in her music, her career, in love. I have, too. I love this new era of hers, but I wonder about the music of her past I once dismissed. 

Is there a love story for me in those songs, too?

***

Months later, on a Friday morning in November, I’m in the kitchen peanut buttering waffles and filling cereal bowls, carrying on with the usual morning routine, when I remember–it’s “Red Day.”

Nine years after it’s first release, Taylor Swift re-rerecorded her album Red, this time as Red, Taylor’s Version. It is one of many albums she is releasing under her new record label in order to take back ownership of her music. This is a power move but also a smart one. Not only is she reinvigorating her fans to her old music, she is bringing along a new era of fans like me who missed her pre-pandemic years as an artist. 

For months since she teased the album’s release, I watched as excitement of this day grew. While longtime fans reminisced over their favorite songs, I wondered how the music might hit me. This was a breakup album, a disordered mix of all of the emotions that accompany a love come and gone. Would I enjoy the music as much as I had her most recent two albums?

Curious, I play the music on our speakers while cleaning up the breakfast dishes. The music fills my kitchen with light before the sun does. I dance and sway with the sounds that feel more rich and emotional than I would expect a typical country album to sound. When we reach the chorus of “Red” I hear notes of familiarity. I’ve heard this before. I was there–a mom, wandering the aisles of Target, frantic, seemingly okay, but also not fine at all. I remember it, all too well.

Listening to Taylor sing her old words in a new stage of life, I wonder if she relates to the words the way I do today, less desperate and more nostalgic, wise, perhaps. I was quick to write her off in those early days. Somehow her music about loss and anger and joy and love got lost in translation while I fumbled through new motherhood. Now looking back, I wish I had paid better attention. I could have used another soul reminding me it was okay to feel chaotic and unbalanced and still so in love. There was no boy causing that flurry of emotions, but there was a baby. A sweet baby, in a pink bunny cap, a cap I still keep in a drawer because I can’t get rid of it just yet. 

That same baby, now nine, wanders into the kitchen with her empty cereal bowl to ask “Mom, can you put on ‘All Too Well’. Someone at school told me it was 10 minutes long. Can you believe that?”

So I do. The song is new to both of us, but also familiar, like home somehow, as if I’ve been singing the words all along. Together we dance around the kitchen in the refrigerator light, listening to a new kind of love song, not in a hurry to move on from the music at all.

Image created by @phoenixfeatherscalligraphy for C+C, 2022

This post was written as part of a blog hop with Exhale—an online community of women pursuing creativity alongside motherhood, led by the writing team behind Coffee + Crumbs. Click here to read the next post in this series "Contrast.”
PS. For more words and wonderings from my corner, be sure to sign up for my Raise & Shine Letter! There’s always a good story or two, probably something about Taylor Swift, and lots of artfully curated GIFs.