The Taylor Spith Bubble
My kids' innocent love of T. Swift is a larger commentary on how much they have yet to learn.
“Play Taylor Spith.”
I gently brake in our driveway and find the playlist on my phone; soon, we hear Taylor singing about getting older but never wiser.
It’s a Tuesday morning. Construction crews fix curbs in our neighborhood; work-from-homers take a break to walk their dogs. Kids on summer break thread through the road on their bikes. I readjust in my seat, shifting weight from one side to the other. In the rearview, I see both of my sons watching the houses pass by. My oldest stumbles through the song until he gets to the chorus he knows so confidently.
“It’s me. Mine. Mine’s the problem, it’s me.”
He came home from school one day in March and declared he loved her music. “Mama,” he said. “Do you know the song Antihero? By Taylor Spith?”
I did know that song, I told him. “Should we listen to it?” I asked.
For months, we listened to it. He and his brother listened to her sing about staring into the sun but not the mirror. I listened, waiting for questions that never came about what a “sexy baby” was. We listened and sang and danced to Antihero by Taylor Spith.
Eventually, they stepped out of their Antihero comfort zone, discovering albums upon albums by Taylor Spith. Nobody in our home escapes her earworms. My youngest can punctuate any “now we’ve got baaad blood” with the most enthusiastically staccatoed “HEY!” My oldest mumble-sings “...in your wiiiildest dreams” while he draws trains and cars. Her music envelopes them like a security blanket.
And yet, though they would both call themselves her biggest fans, they’re still in the tiniest of bubbles when it comes to Taylor Spith. They laugh when she says she can “make all the tables turn,” because why would you want to turn a table? Aren’t they heavy? “Now that’s bad blood,” my youngest says, when he sees my husband nursing a bloody nose. They giggle about “dressing up like hipsters.”
They think they know Taylor Spith, but they don’t. They soak up the lyrics, the melodies, the harmonies, but they see it all in monochrome instead of technicolor. They don’t know about friendship bracelets or Travis Kelce or the concept of how much money people pay to watch her perform. They don’t know who Romeo and Juliet really are, what cheer captains and bleachers look like. What it actually means for somebody to be so mean.
But they will. Their bubbles will grow, burst, reappear. Repeat. Someday, they’ll feel the heartbreak and confusion she sings to them about, the warmth of connection and the ache of loneliness. Their palette of human emotion and experience will be so rich and complicated that they’ll understand what it means to be “so casually cruel in the name of being honest.” Their depression will work the graveyard shift. They’ll say “Swift.”
And then I wonder what other bubbles they’re in, bubbles they’ll break out of someday and realize all they didn’t even know existed. Bubbles that protected them from discomfort; bubbles that contained and held. Bubbles that will one day burst and reveal the infinite world of wonders and evils and fears and truths.
For now, though, in the backseat of our car, amid patchy humming and mindless attempts at lyrics, they sit, eyes scanning all that rolls by their windows. And when we pull up to the parking lot at summer camp, I open each door for them to jump out, neither one exhausted in the slightest by rooting for the anti-hero.
The craziest weather.