Please, Please Let Me Get What I Want

Good times for a change

See, the luck that I've had

Can a good man

turn bad

Bertram doesn’t sleep well. Still.

I hate to say it, but I’ve given up on sleep training, on naps, on spending ridiculous amounts of time coaxing him to sleep. Some people are just craptastic sleepers. I’m one of those people, and I passed that trait to young Master Bertram. Lately, I just fire up the old lap top and invite Bert to get comfy and watch old music videos with me. The rule is, “No Dora. No Thomas. Mommy picks what we watch.” Somehow, he rolls with this. Good, quiet videos include

David Sylvan’s Orpheus
The Cure Caterpillar Girl
Grace Jones Slave to the Rhythm (quite possibly best video of all time)
Xymox (aka Clan of Xymox) Moscovet Mosquito
The Smiths There Is A Light That Never Goes Out

I’ve found that after three or four of these videos, young Master B is on his way to Snoresville. Almost four years of struggle only to realize I only had to turn to the power of 1980s music. Have I ever mentioned just how much MTV I watched? Gosh, no I haven’t?

My own parental units will attest that, as a teenager, I spent countless hours glued to MTV. It annoys me that I can’t remember what I did two weeks ago, but I can recall Robert Smith and Porl Thompson huddled together in falling wardrobe in Close to Me. Parental Unit #2 spent his own teenage years in Hawaii, mostly free from mainstream pop culture. He can’t indulge me.

So it is these past nights, my son lays on my lap while I play Youtube video clips of Morrissey, Gene Loves Jezebel, the Cure, and Siouxsie & the Banshees. Dark, gloomy music full of lost and unrequited love, of hopes quirky and sad, solitude and suffering. This music was the soundtrack to my teenage years, when I stayed up until 2 or 3am, writing in a journal about boys who didn’t notice me. I also wrote a crazy amount of fiction then, short stories, poems. I imagined myself an ARTIST.

I’m 37. I would like to believe that I’m an adult, but traces of that teenage storm and drang remain in me, a twinge of what I did not accomplish as a writer, as an artist, as a creative person. Yet, when I look at these photos of my children, I think, for once, I got exactly what I wanted.

Take that Morrissey.