1989 Again

OId bangers and new beginnings

Eight years ago, I took my 12-year-old niece to see Taylor Swift’s 1989 tour at a massive football stadium. I was six months pregnant with my first child and abuzz with possibility. I was on the cusp of something—in my “thinking you look cute in maternity jeggings and having no idea what’s coming next” era. We stayed overnight at a nearby hotel, and it felt like a bonafide slumber party. What my sister remembers most is that, on the way to the hotel before the concert, I went through the Starbucks drive-thru and somehow charmed them into giving me free cake pops. What I remember most is that I felt so small, up there in the nosebleeds with an almost-bird’s-eye view of a woman on the way to becoming the world’s biggest pop star and her 50,000 fans (and Julia Roberts and Joan Baez, who puzzlingly ran out onto the catwalk with her to hug and wave mid-concert). 

Yesterday, as you probably already knew, the re-recorded Taylor’s Version of 1989 was released. The story of her re-records, though it is possible that there is another side to it, is the stuff of legend. Man takes girl’s trust and talent and sells it to another man. Girl doubles down on her own power being greater than theirs, and turns out to be more than right. Maybe it really is all about money, but I don’t have the energy to be jaded about something like this. I’ll just take it as a delicious feminist revenge story, complete with a soundtrack.

This album is fucking fun. It is her funnest. Even the somewhat darker songs—All You Had to Do Was Stay, Wildest Dreams—are filled with stardust, are the kind of dirges you might scream into the mirror with a hairbrush microphone, not hide under the covers sobbing to. As on the other re-recordings, Taylor tries hard to capture the more youthful voice with which she originally sang these songs. But there’s no getting around the fact that she has evolved, that her range has widened, that she is capable of more depth vocally. The finished effect is like looking at a cross section of a glacier—a timeline of her evolution. It’s the way we truly grow—not by shape-shifting but by layering on. 

When I saw Taylor perform these songs live, I was, in my current mind, unfathomably naive. I would go on to have an empowering, relatively smooth birth and a destabilizing, detached, and debilitating few years as a new mother. As is so beautifully described in Amanda Montei’s Touched Out, I hadn’t given active consent to taking on the role of mother. The love I had for my niece was so clear, so uncomplicated. But my son had done something to me, had people expect something from me. I remember other mothers talking about how anxious they were for their firstborn’s safety, how they couldn’t let them out of their sight. I felt, when other people held my child, that he would probably fare better with them. It took me a long, long time, and another pregnancy and birth and rebirth, to regain my agency and get —I can’t help myself—out of the woods. 

I often wish I could record over those years. What would I give to speak to myself with the understanding I now have? To return to my marriage and ask of it the questions I now know it needed to answer? To go on a stupid walk with my son in the carrier, or push his stroller to the coffeeshop, and not be crawling in my own skin.

Next week I leave my family for ten days— the longest stretch yet. And I noticed something different about it. My children are five and seven and I feel so purely that I will miss them. It’s not shame at leaving or at not feeling bad enough for leaving, which I often felt in the past. It’s just loving someone, knowing you are different people, but feeling comfortable about the fact that they rely on you, and kind of wildly, finally, enjoying the shit out of them.

Loving my children in my way, accepting myself as the mother I am, that is my revenge. 

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Also, this:

• New season of British Baking show is an absolute delight and the only TV I can watch these days. The new host, Alison Hammond, is a blast (if you watch her interview with Harrison Ford and Ryan Gosling, you will fall in love). It’s also rad to see Tasha Stones, who describes herself as “deaf af” compete this year. Watching her speak and sign simultaneously is very cool, and I maybe have a crush on her interpreter. This good-luck video of people who seem to know her at the Deaf Children’s Society is a real treat. First disabled baking show winner??? Yes please.