I am perched on a chair in the middle of a library; a low-slung, mid-century building nestled among streets of Victorian terraces. I’m perched on a chair and I watch the other women walk in, with babies strapped to their chests or wrapped around their hips, with toddlers being led by the hand. Different shades of weariness painted across their faces. This is the first time I have come to this gathering and I feel new; my baby feels preposterously small in comparison to these other children. I don’t yet know that this will be the first time of many, that it will become a mainstay of my week.
Bold spring light pushes through the windows above the bookshelves. A tall woman who looks like she could be in a storybook begins something called The Welcome Song, and when it is my turn to introduce my son I sing his name back at her, almost accidentally. I am newly self-conscious - of my socks, of my presence here, of my mothering. I jiggle my son around to nursery rhymes I haven’t accessed in decades but nevertheless haven’t gone anywhere. We walk home again. It fills a yawning hour.
When I was thinking about having a baby I thought about the kind of mother I would be. I’d spent a good while speaking to other women - mostly strangers - about their lives for a book I was writing, and mothering sometimes cropped up inside those conversations. One explained that she had renovated houses while her children were small; “I wasn’t one of those parents who did the ‘let’s rattle this and sing along with that’”, she told me. I held onto this; I could have a baby and maintain my adulthood, I wouldn’t have to do the baby classes.
In hindsight, I think much of this was fear. But some of it was the ingrained snobbery and societal misogyny that motherhood suffers from more broadly. Mine, perhaps, was amplified by a career as a music journalist. I’d stood on the side of Glastonbury’s largest stages, I’d interviewed rock stars on tour buses, I’d been made to wait by Dolly Parton and danced with Lady Gaga at a secret gig in the early hours of the morning.
I’d also left that job and stopped listening to music, but that was something I was still coming to terms with, that something that was such an enormous part of my life - had been, for years - could evaporate almost invisibly. And yet, even from a place of relative silence - I’d not made a birthing playlist; I rarely played music at home; I shied away, rather than hankered, for the new - singing nursery rhymes in public felt something of a descent from the life I’d hoped to live.
I’m not sure what drove me to join that first class that Tuesday morning. For the first few weeks of my son’s life I was determined to return to the trappings of how I lived before him; I took pride in how I’d bundle him along with me to things or snatch an hour to join my friends at the Lido. I didn’t yet know how to wear my identity as a mother, so I kept trying my pre-mothering identity on for size even as it struggled to fit my changing life. I suspect that the wakeful hours and newborn novelty transformed into something more humdrum. The two of us spent more time alone, at home, and the library’s Wriggle & Rhyme class offered a point of difference.
We returned to the library on Tuesday mornings. I chatted to the other mums at the beginning and the end, we grabbed coffee and did laps around the park in those hazy, commitment-free acquaintances that never ask for anything but deliver so much. I started to be bold enough to put song requests in when they were asked for in the final few minutes. I watched my too-small baby grow into one who could sit and gurgle, then crawl, then run around looking at books rather than joining in with the songs. I watched other women’s babies do the same. This way, weeks, then months, then seasons passed.
And all the while, I sang. I sang The Wheels on the Bus and Zoom, Zoom, Zoom and Hickery Dickery Dock and Hop Little Bunnies. I sang them in a community of women that I entered as an outsider and grew into. Other tired women, other matrescent women, other singing women who probably, once, thought themselves unlikely to ever attend a Wriggle & Rhyme class. We were mostly around the same age; perhaps I’d shared dance floors and gig venues with them, unwittingly, during our pre-motherhood years. We marched up and down imaginary hills like the Grand Old Duke of York. We nodded our heads and shook our feet like the Dingle Dangle Scarecrow.
Somewhere among it all I shed a skin I’d grown out of. In these little rhyming songs with their demonstrative dance moves I found a delight and a freedom I couldn’t have thought possible. I found a poignant potency in the fact we came together each week to shake off any seriousness. To simply be there, singing and dancing, with our children.
Nearly a year had passed when we had to stop going regularly; I had found some childcare, and it took place on Tuesdays. No longer the too-small baby, my child had grown into a little boy who would sing his own songs at nursery. I see some of the Wriggle & Rhyme mums in the park these days, or sometimes as a name that pops up on my phone.
But those Tuesday mornings have left a legacy in the dialogue I have with my son. We sing when he is bored on buses (and he is often bored on buses) or restless on the train. We sing when he is getting dressed and at the end of the day. We wind bobbins up, we wake up bunnies, we see what’s on Old MacDonald’s Farm. Now I catch him teaching his bears to do the same thing. By stealth, I have started to listen to music again; not just The 50 Greatest Nursery Rhymes album, but the folk music of Hannah Read, Pulp’s Different Class and a lot of 1970s disco. I put it on and I watch him tune into it, in the process letting my ear catch anew. We play, we dance, we listen. Our house is filled with it all, this old-new noise.
Hark: How Women Listen by Alice Vincent is available now.
Words by Alice Vincent.
Photography by India Hobson.
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