One of my habits1 is singing along to whatver music is playing in the car. Today I was belting out The Warning's2 When I'm Alone while driving my daughter to gymnastics. She's usually heads-down over her tablet in the car, so I have to make my own entertainment.
As the song wrapped up she asked me what the singer meant by the "hole in [her] soul".
These are the kinds of moments that make parenting a minefield, but also so worth it.
The song is about maintaining outward calm in the face of inner turmoil in a inescapable situation,3 but I don't think4 my seven year old really has a reference for that. So I tried to explain that in this case "soul" means how you're really feeling inside and told her somthing like "The whole song is about making the people around you think you're OK, while you're really, really sad on the inside". That seemed to satisfy her at first.
Then, after a few moments of quiet, she asked me "Why doesn't she just tell them?"
Stonkered for the second time in as many minutes. Alas, I suppose that she will understand some day.
1 Good? Bad? Fine when I'm alone but annoying otherwise?
2 I'll try to keep the pathetic fan-boying to a minimum here, but if have any interest in rock and don't know this band it's worth a little of your time to check them out. In addition to the song noted above consider Choke, Evolve, Disciple, or Hell you call a Dream as introducers.
3 Written by a homesick fifteen year-old and a better expression of that state of being than I've managed in more than fifty years of being at least a little messed up. Go figure.
4 Hard to know with absolute certainty: once you send them to school you don't know everything about what's going on in their life unless someone tells you. I feel pretty confident that either the child or a teacher would have clued us in but there is still room, however small, for doubt.
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