“When I grow up,
I will eat sweets every day on the way to work,
And I will go to bed late every night.”
— When I Grow Up from Matilda the Musical (lyrics by Tim Minchin)
One of the most profound, achingly beautiful moments in my life happened without warning on a weekday evening in our home in Dublin.
It involved my daughter, M, who was about eight years old and an only-child at the time; my wife MF; and my best friend, D, who was over from London for a night.
We’d finished dinner, and M and D went up to the front room together while MF and I cleaned up. We had an inkling our daughter might sing some songs and play some instruments together with D.
M loved singing and creating plays. Our front room was more often than not a location for one of her “shows”, often involving a washing line hung across the room with laundry and a teddy pegged to it. When her friends came over for a playdate or sleepover, M would hand them the latest piece she’d written with their character’s lines highlighted. They were always on board with this and all of them would spend hours running the scenes and recording them – even doing scenes out of sequence if rain meant they had to leave outdoor ones till later.
They could work like this for six or seven hours a day, and I’d often remark that if adults were doing this they’d call it hard work! M and her friends laughed throughout and called it playing.
After her friends left for home, M would go through all the footage and edit it together, overlaying different music and titles till the movie – and its “trailer” – was complete. Hundreds of these clips and movies are still preciously stored across my old and new devices.
M got much of her love for musicals from her mother, MF, who’d been steeped in musical theatre during much of her early life in California – as a theatre usher from the age of 11, as a theatre student in university and then as a stage manager for some years, until she found another calling.
Luckily M could sing in key and on pitch from an early age. It made it easier to bare all the musicals being sung in our home – songs from Oliver!, Annie, and The Sound of Music are forever seared into my brain.
M definitely didn’t get her love of musicals from me. I’d barely seen any of them before she was born. In fact, early fatherhood put me on something of a Damascene conversion – from general dislike of musicals to an appreciation of many and a love of some.
Musicals apart, I wasn’t entirely removed from the arts. I’d written some kids novels amongst other pieces; and I’d always sing when tucking M into bed at night – my own eclectic mix of sleep-inducing songs: Homeward Bound and April Come She Will by Simon & Garfunkel; and others, like Leaving On a Jet Plane. Over the years, the odd “musical” song would seep into the repertoire, such as Edelveiss (Sound of Music) or I’d Do Anything (Oliver!).
D was very happy to go up to the front room with M and sing on this particular evening. M’s godfather, he was (and is) an actor, singer and musician who’s appeared in many plays and musicals. Based in the UK for many years, he’d come stay with us whenever he visited Dublin. He and M had a special bond. He’d sung to her as a toddler and, once M began really singing and playing the piano, they’d devise songs together on his visits, and entertain us with duets.
D and I had known each other since the age of eight. We went to school together and he had a litany of embarrassing stories about me that M loved to hear however much I protested. Like the time I tried to round a bend near his house on my racing bike with “no hands” – having come down a very steep hill at high speed – and ended up crashing into the curb, flying over the handlebars, to the baffled amusement of passersby. Or the time we dressed up in girls’ school uniforms from a nearby convent and went into the school during their class time.
As we cleaned the kitchen, MF and I could make out indistinct voices and sounds that might be the piano emanating from the living room on the other side of our narrow house.
M had taken to Matilda the Musical in recent months, and I guessed it might get an airing this evening since D had been involved in Matilda’s devising. He was one of a handful of actor-singers who workshopped it with composer, Tim Minchin, and other creatives as they refined the piece for the stage.
***
Having tended to some work emails, I emerged from my office into the hall, adjoining the front room. MF was standing there, stock-still. The door to the front room was open a crack and, out here, amplified by the wooden floorboards, the sound of voices and piano carried clear and true.
When I Grow Up was the song from Matilda that M had been singing most in recent weeks. She was singing it now, accompanied by D on piano.
But they weren’t singing the song through. It was very far from a stage-perfect performance – seemingly stuck on one verse, with D halting the proceedings again and again with small directions – “Try going high on that note”; “See what happens if you put the pause there”. Frequently running the same direction over and over, till M got it.
He was talking to her with a similar tone and approach he might use with an adult. And she was responding in kind – seeming to appreciate the seriousness of the endeavour, an intensity to her effort, having to be brave in a way I hadn’t seen before, trying as hard as she could to take each direction on board.
This wasn’t the eight-year old who liked making cushion forts or leaping from couch to chair to avoid the lava. As if the very process with D was maturing her. Could she be growing up a little bit – quite literally – this very evening as she sang the song!?
Direction… Piano. Sing. Halt.
Direction… Piano. Sing. Halt.
Each new start was punctuated with a singular piano note and a pause. Then they were off together – piano and voice interweaving.
The singing, the halting, the punctuation, the direction – all served to make me think of a painter in the midst of sketching. Not painting the grand masterpiece, but tracing the outline in pencil, erasing this, adding charcoal to that. Raw. Rough. Untempered.
Often things were halted half way through a line; occasionally they made it through the whole verse.
When I grow up
I will eat sweets every day on the way to work
And I will stay up late every night.
***
M was an unexpected child. The pregnancy had been a shock, not because we weren’t ready for children, but because we thought we couldn’t have children. We were so sure of this that we’d started enquiring into adoption processes and had confided the news to close friends and family. After the initial joy, the pregnancy turned into an ongoing nightmare. Hypermesis gravidarum, they called it. There are different levels. MF had it bad, with extreme nausea 24/7 for almost four months. She couldn’t eat or drink and spent much of that time in and out of hospital on a drip. She ended up looking like a famine victim. And that glosses over the level of misery she had to endure.
For a healthy child to emerge from all that was a joy and a relief beyond words. Maybe that’s why I could put up with 500 renditions of Consider Yourself At Home (Oliver!) over the following years, and even come to love a long list of “musical” numbers.
D was well aware of our conception difficulties and of the traumatic pregnancy. He’d had his own near misses with fatherhood and, by this time, he was single and without kids of his own. It made him a wonderful, caring “godfather” to M.
It didn’t seem that long ago since he’d given up his lucrative job in the bank at the age of 20, and ditched it all to be an actor. After acting college, he’d managed to work in theatre more than any actor I know, but it was still a difficult life at times. Many shows had him on the road, being put up in mediocre digs, paid a pittance during rehearsals and not much more during the theatre run itself. It was hard to save to buy a house or even to buy a car. But he’d stuck with it and the theatre credits had begun to rack up, and D was getting more recognition and being offered bigger parts. He’d helped devise Matilda with Tim Minchin for God’s sake!
***
When I grow up
I will–
MF and I stood still as statues in the hall, hardly daring to breath. Almost conspiratorial. Listening. M singing. D accompanying.
I will eat sweets every day on the way to work
And I will–
With all the stopping and starting of piano and voice, time concertinaed.
And I will stay up late every night
I’d heard the lyrics before, could recite some of them in almost the right order(!), but now, at this unseen remove, those words spoke to me in a way they never had.
Our girl was growing up. It seemed only a short time since she’d been a baby, a few blinks since a toddler. How soon it would be till secondary school and the dreaded teens, and then big exams, and college. She really would be grown up before we knew it! Would she still be recognizable as the girl of this evening? Where would she live? What kind of job would she have?
But beyond the obvious, there was something piercing in the lyrics. The extreme juxtaposition of grown up and child. Innocence spotlighted. The simple innocence of the little girl thinking she’ll eat sweets on the way to work and go to bed late every night once she’s an adult. And the deeper innocence of not knowing that in the very process of growing up, she will change beyond anything she can understand and no longer be who she is today. That very innocence unknowingly wishing for its own passing. Innocent of its own innocence. Innocent of innocence’s beauty, of innocence’s own fragility, of its short, short life. Innocence pining for a future it will never share.
This, of course, is part of the joy and sadness of being a parent. Wanting your child to grow up, yet not wanting them to. Wishing they could move forward without needing you so much, yet wishing them to stay the same. Wanting these things which are even more implausible than the wants young Matilda sings for.
There was a moment – it lasted ten seconds, or maybe an eternity – when the world fell away and I was floating in voice and piano. I saw and heard everything – the beauty and sadness of this moment, sunshine and shadow – the sketch more perfect in its rawness than any grand painting; our little girl singing with such commitment to the song and its intent, her skill already developed through years of playing and practice, so far-removed from the baby who’d emerged from the nightmare of pregnancy; her first step, first words, first day of school; my best friend doing what he loves, finding ever-increasing success, his skills and his own perfection coming together in this sketch and in its sketching; my young daughter, the adult she’d become; innocence right here, now, so often conjured in writings and conversations and here it was, I could touch it, was swimming in it, its radiant beauty, the joy of now, and the deep deep sadness of its inevitable passing.
My eyes saw MF’s. She was here too. In this eternal moment.
And in that look – we couldn’t speak – we communicated more than we had in a year of conversations. All that we’d done to get M here.
She saw too the baby who’d emerged from her depleted body, those first steps, each moment that had taken our little girl to now. And the steps that would take her from now, from us, into the future – into those teens, into college, into the adulthood that’s so rightfully hers. The pull and the push; the beauty, the tragedy; the impossible wish for her to grow, yet not to grow; to go, yet not to go.
And in the depths of this moment was the recognition of perfection – a perfect, perfect moment – and the knowledge that it would die and be forever gone. And this knowledge heightened the beauty, the sense of the sublime, tinged as it was with shadow.
This moment would pass. The song would pass. Innocence would pass…
I would pass.
MF would pass.
D would pass.
And some day M would pass.
But now… Now we were alive. Alive in this perfect, perfect moment.
My best friend. My little girl. Her mother. Our little girl. Me – son, husband, father. All that we’ve done. All that we’ll do. An eternity of voice and piano.
