In the Beginning: The Sings

When Bink was newly born I started singing to her. There were the songs you might expect—lullabies and sweet old-fashioned songs like Daisy Bell and Clementine. I’d change up the lyrics, too, inserting our location, her name, little commentaries about the weather.  I also made up songs—a lot. I could tell you the words, sing you the tunes to the early ones. They are imprinted in my heart just like her birth story. There were odes to her bodily functions, her perfect pink head, her incessant need to nurse ‘round the clock for many, many months, and my overall delight with her newness.

Fast forward to today. Bink is an adult. For the majority of her mornings, she has awakened to my voice, singing. Until very recently, it was the actual me going into her room to sing the gentlest made-up song. Not long, not complicated, but different in some way each time. It’s still my song that awakens her, but a few months ago I found a wonderful clock that allows me to record a little song for each day of the week and program it to the time she needs to get up to accommodate her varied schedule.  This was the only success I’ve had in transitioning her to an alarm. It’s been freeing for me, but that’s not what I’ve come to the page to explain.

Bink has lived through about 11.740 mornings. Over all these years I’ve made up thousands of songettes, on the fly. I love to sing, she loves to hear it. It’s worked well to ease her into the day.

One afternoon she was in the next room, doing her usual vocalizing and singing. I began to hear snippets of song that felt eerily familiar. Words and tunes, not from a tape or CD, but the kind of thing that comes from my heart, my lips. I had goosebumps—the songs coming from her lips sounded very much like those I’d sung to her as an infant. Could it be? That was over 32 years ago! I listened for a while, then had to ask:

Me: Are you singing some of the songs I’ve made up for you?

Bink: Yes.

Me: They are from years ago, right?

Bink: Yes.

Me: Do you remember the songs I sang to you when you were a very little baby?

Bink: Yes.

When she waxes melodious, it’s usually in a period of lower anxiety, when the incessant waves are smoother on the seas of autism. Even then she rarely sings on command. I took a deep breath and inquired.

Me: Can you sing one for me?

Bink proceeded to sing a song I used to coo at her when she was a month or two old.  The tune, the words, were exact.  More goosebumps. Waves of surprise, delight, and nostalgia plucked at my mama heart and vibrated me to the core.

I’ve often been startled by my daughter’s memory for things she heard and saw decades ago. The fragments bubble up to the surface at random times. “Why so-and-so said such-and-such on the third Wednesday in June in 2003?” “Why the art puppets frightened me in old teacher Suzanne’s class?” (That was 1997.)  She can sing entire CDs in order with perfect pitch and often accented with the voice of the singer. Male and female, child and adult. Irish brogue, Hebrew shir, Harry Belafonte to Jewel, all come alive when she opens a mysterious file in her amazing brain and lets the music flow. Some of these collections are long gone from our home, no longer available for sale. That kind of musical recall still delights me after living with it all these years, but nothing compared to hearing her parrot the momma songs I conjured decades ago when she was so tiny and sweet and new.

 

—Melinda Coppola