The Lifespan of a Lullaby
The lullaby I most often requested from my mother was the alphabet song. I associate the song, even its most cheerful versions, and even now, with a feeling of drifting in darkness and a letting go of consciousness natural as opening a hand. Falling asleep is what we hope dying will feel like, though we fear it will not. When we hear or sing a lullaby we are in a small way preparing for the passage from life to death. The irony is that the roles of the lullaby, singer and sleeper, will, we hope, be reversed later in life, when the child will be responsible for easing the journey of the parent. A lullaby is the human experience condensed into a few minutes: the parent-child bond, our need to both protect and depend on others, and our need for a ceremony and an art — the song — to declare and honor the moment and the relationship, to give the evening meaning.
In my family’s mostly unspoken division of childcare, I became more-or-less in charge of lullabies.
My first daughter has always been extremely sensitive to sound. Noise enters her brain in a way it does not enter my brain. On the day of her birth, a nurse informed us with professional confidence that she was “a screamer.” As an infant, the merest mewl of a siren halfway across the middle-of-the-night city would snap her awake into hysterics. Our efforts to introduce her to modestly noisy public spaces — Target, the grocery store, the museum cafeteria — ended not only in tears but also in uncontainable thrashing, and retreat. We were amazed by parents who could settle a fussy infant with a bottle and few breaths of tender shushing.
Perversely, at times the only thing that could convince my daughter to sleep was obliterating white noise. I passed many dawns exhausted, watching my finally quiet infant daughter rock in her swing beside the roaring vacuum cleaner.
As months passed and she woke to the world, the vacuum cleaner became less and less effective. Soon enough, the only thing that calmed her enough to nap was putting her into a sling and running in circles around the house, singing at the top of my lungs. The song that worked best was “Go Down, Moses.” I don’t why the song popped into my mouth, but it did, and it worked because it was a song that fit into the deep part of my voice, and the first verse and chorus — the only lyrics I knew — could be repeated over and over and over without losing their force.
Sometimes I would be singing and realize my daughter’s screaming had stopped, and had been stopped, and her eyes were closed. When I paused to breathe and wonder at the peace in her face, she would immediately start to stir.
Over the years, as my daughter grew up and became better able to manage everyday noise (she brought headphones to school to muffle the chaos of hallways), the songs I sang to help her to sleep became more an attempt to share with her a few moments of restful listening than an attempt to drown out the rest of the world. The lullaby she requested most often was the hymn “It Is Well with My Soul.” Again, I can’t pinpoint the moment or the reason why I first sang the song — I’m not religious and never encountered the song myself in my own childhood. It was like the song sang itself through me. The song was, I discovered, composed by a man who had lost his children in a disaster at sea. The mystery of how that experience gave rise to the song’s defiant joy was a match for the mystery of the necessity of the daily passage from light to dark, presence to absence:
When peace like a river, attendeth my way,
When sorrows like sea billows roll
Whatever my lot, thou hast taught me to say
It is well, it is well, with my soul
I have sung “It is Well with My Soul” to my daughter hundreds of times, though now, as she is on the verge of her tween years, I sing the song much more rarely. She no longer physically needs a lullaby to pass from wakefulness to sleep. This is of course how it should be. It has also become clear that her infant disposition to be terrorized by a distant siren and her childhood disposition to be overwhelmed by a crowded hallway is not a lack; it is an excess of alertness that has become a meaningful part of how she experiences and understands the world. Her sensitivity is not a defect but a part of her, and it has become clear that her sensitivity is not limited to noise but extends to language, to color, and to music.
There are still occasions — perhaps if she’s sick, or if her head is too full of the complexities of a new book, or of the world she moves in where I can’t follow — when she asks for a song. (Or at least there are still occasions when she is willing to humor me by listening.) If I haven’t yet sung my last lullaby to her in her childhood, I will very soon, and when I sing the song I will not recognize the particular gravity of the ceremony. It will be like the end of any other ordinary day.
