Oopheliaaaa

Ophelia — The Lumineers

I have always loved this song. I am always listening to music and at some point Ophelia became part of our house. My daughter has taken this up too and we cannot get a break from music. She completely absorbed Ophelia without even trying. I have heard her a couple of times while she is busy doing her thing in another room, singing to herself. Oooooopheliaaaaaa. Na ma na ma na na na. She fills in the words she doesn't know with sounds. I always listen to her, amused that she has made the song hers.

This morning, I called her twice so we could change her diaper and as is toddler style, she didn't come. I decided to change strategy and picked up my phone, put the song on loud, and waited for it to do what I couldn't.

I heard her feet running as fast as they could take her, rushing to the bedroom. The moment she came in, she started dancing, tapping her feet, mouth already open, not looking at me or anything else. The only word she was singing from that song was oooopheliaaa and the rest was gibberish, but that was enough for her.

I was already in the song too because I also can't help myself. I was lying on the bed singing "you've been on my mind girl since the flood," snapping and moving, completely forgetting about the diaper. For me, the song is not about the literary Ophelia or fame as the Lumineers intended it, but it's about the sensation that lands straight in my body when I hear it. My feet and hands tap and clap before I decide anything, and by the time I have started asking questions, I am already downstream singing.

All in all, we both fell into the song together, tapping and smiling at each other while the baby sat there looking at us, laughing. As I watched her inside the song dancing, I thought about how both she and the baby were feeling, if I was feeling completely one with the song.

In my psychology classes, I was taught that children are a blank slate, that we arrive empty and the world writes on us. Maybe that part is true because I had played this song a handful of times and my child had absorbed it and made it her own, but I could not stop thinking about who was in there taking it in. Was there an observer behind her eyes already? Was she watching herself feel the music the way I was watching myself feel it? I guess we will never find out because she cannot tell me. The baby was also sitting there watching the two of us lose ourselves, laughing at what she saw. What was funny to her? It couldn't be the song surely because she is too young for that. Was it our faces or movements? Did she register it as joy or was she astonished by joy itself? She can't speak to tell me and her laughter was probably the most mysterious thing in the room. We were three people sitting in the same room with the same song and none of us were reachable to each other.

Heaven help the fool who falls in love.

I think that line for me is about this. The basic fact that I love people whose insides I will never see. I made them and know their laugh better than I know my own but I still do not know what it's like to be them.

I am sad that my daughter will grow up one day, probably read Hamlet and meet the other Ophelia who couldn't survive the weight of everyone else's story. She will probably layer new meaning onto the word she already loves, and something will shift. I hope she keeps the fondness of it. But we are not there yet. Right now I will just enjoy her spins and my baby's laughter and try to raise them the best I can.