In other words, I connected with my father through music when it was the only way.
By Saija Maki-Waller
Not much united me and my father on the 40 minute drive from Northfield to Hastings, but if anything did, it was music. I was 13 and headed out of town to his apartment, as I did every other weekend in those days. Every step down the driveway towards his car, the pit in my stomach grew deeper.
It was cold outside –late fall– and the car was warm but not comforting. It was too small and too low to the ground. It was a sedan, not made for road trips with rowdy kids. Not made for laughter or love. But that’s OK. I’d long mastered the role of an adult.
When my father left my mother, and subsequently his four daughters, he moved to Seattle. In the four years he was there, he joined myriads of other men who have neglected the job of father.
When compared to absence by death, “father absence due to divorce seemed particularly detrimental, and some evidence indicated that early, long term, and complete father absence was especially likely to be related negatively to intellectual competence.” In other words, the longer a father is absent, the more likely the child is to suffer.
But I am luckier than most. My father continued to support us financially and after some time, too long a time, he moved back to Minnesota. I was 9 when he left and 13 when he returned. I was a whole new person.
I climbed into my father’s black sedan.
I sat in the back. My twin sister, Halle, was in the front — she always got the front somehow — and we were on our way.
“How was school?” he’d ask. We’d say “pretty good,” and while that was true, it wasn’t the whole truth. We never tell him the whole truth.
He turned on the music. Music and movies are the two areas in which my father still holds parental authority and for that reason the conversation around the car stereo wasn’t a democracy. He played the album “Battle Born” by The Killers.
We were driving northeast out of town and “Runaways” came on. The line “I swore on the head of our unborn child / that I could take care of the three of us / but I got the tendency to slip when the nights get wild” played too loud. I think I understood what the lyrics meant to my dad.
We kept driving.
We got to the point where the road forks, and we keep left. My dad put on “I Hate it Here” by Wilco. Ironic. The line “What am I gonna do if you never come home?” echoed in my ears, and my eyes started to swell. I used to stare out the window to hide my face when I felt like crying. I did that then, but I still sang along. After a while I felt better.
Several academic studies have concluded that music therapy may help decrease levels of anxiety and help restore emotional balance to individuals. In other words, music helps troubled spirits.
I have always found solace in music and so has my father. It’s one of the few certainties I still know about him. On those drives, even though we didn’t talk much, I’m sure we found it together.
Corn. Soy. Cows. We kept driving and more songs came and went.
“Jesus, Etc.” by Wilco — “Don’t cry / you can rely on me, honey.”
“Still Fighting it” by Ben Folds — “You’re so much like me / I’m sorry.”
“Sunday Morning” by The Velvet Underground — “It’s just the wasted years so close behind.”
Outside there was nothing but fields. My sister shuffled in her seat. She stared out the window, singing.
This act of singing in the car, over the course of regular months, helped to heal my relationship with my dad, restoring temporary balance in my life. It didn’t erase everything that had happened, but it helped to create new and better memories.
Through this connection, I was more prepared for growing up. It has been proven that women with absentee fathers during adolescence have great difficulty forming lasting relationships with men. In other words, perhaps the music I shared with my father helped me escape this fate.
Within two years of moving back to Minnesota my father met and moved in with a new woman and her two young sons. Today, my dad spends his days fathering those two boys, ages 11 and 13.
I see him for the occasional holiday or brunch. I spent a long time hating him, reevaluating and then hating him again. I can only imagine the anger I will feel when one day I have kids of my own.
But I still listen to his music. I listen to it on my walk to class, when I’m doing homework and in the kitchen while I make dinner. Most nights before I fall asleep I put on the album “Trouble will Find Me” by The National. It starts off slow and steady like a heartbeat. Then the lyrics start: “I should live in salt for leaving you behind.”
It’s true, you know, that when choirs sing in unison their hearts actually beat to the same rhythm. In other words, I didn’t feel connected to my father then, but our hearts beat together, and that’s something.