Phoebe Snow "A Mother's Song"

DH and I have a few TV shows we watch, and fewer still that we will record. Well, I love Sunday Morning, so we record and then after church we drink coffee and watch the stories about life, politics, art, music and bet on whether the nature scene will include birds or not (it usually does!).

Well, today there was a story about Phoebe Snow of "Poetry Man" song fame, but oh, that song is not what defines her. The interview with this songstress was poignant and real. She told her story of her daughter who suffered afixiation at birth, and lived until she was 31 with her Phoebe. Phoebe's grief was apparent and so what the strength and joy of telling her daughter's story. I was grateful she told it. She talks about how hard it was to sing after her daughter died, and the tears that were already welling in my eyes at last let go. Her friend Linda Ronstadt told her that she had to sing about Valerie. In Phoebe's performances, she now dedicates a song she originally wrote for her mother, and now sings for her daughter. I immediately went on iTunes to download below is a youtube vid if you would like to listen.

The lyrics that most resonate for me are "Everything good I am you taught me. Everything good I am." It's not that I started out as an unloving person, but Caitlin made me love in ways I didn't know I could. This growth of understanding and actively loving in deeper and more profound ways is typical of parents with living children, I know. But, my experiences is that another dimension is experienced when too soon that love must be expressed through grief. One struggles to express love to a child no longer living. You hug the air, stare at the moon and try to pull it to you, and wonder at how the world continues when all has ended for you. Then you struggle to love in this new strange world, and something bursts open in you--an echo of the first time you saw your child only louder than the first sounds of love in your heart, a bit of a reverse echo, if you will. And this something makes you love others more, love nature more, love struggle more. The possibilities for loving overwhelm you that sometimes you are rendered inert and other times you write, paint, and, as Phoebe shares with us---sing.

The song's title is "You're my Girl," and the album she describes as a "love letter to my daughter."




Here's another link to her story if you are interested.
Interview with WOW The Women on the Web