I’ve spent every day for three years now with my son. I don’t care who you are, if your child is your pride and joy and your only reason for living in this world, or if you’re one of those mothers who can’t stand the sight of her own children, that is a heck of a long time to be around someone. But I love him so much that it makes the whole joined-at-the-hip thing pretty tolerable. In fact, his little idiosyncrasies have grown on me. Most of my complaints, if I would call them ‘complaints’, are the usual mommy grumbles: He won’t eat his vegetables, he doesn’t listen to me all of the time, he throws fits when he doesn’t get his way. You know, the normal day to day stuff of raising any preschooler. He provides me with more entertainment than annoyances, usually. I don’t mind that he wants to put the Barney DVD on repeat and watch the thing half a dozen times. And sure, he loves to listen to the same song in the car five times in a row. He sings one song so much that I’ve woken up from a deep sleep singing it. He even knows what number the song is on the CD player, “Play number 8 mama.” I admit, there are times that I do get a little sick of the song but all in all, I appreciate his consistency. The kid knows what he likes.
My son, as you probably know by now, is a bit more precocious than the average boy. He sings. He dances. He brings his own microphone to our church worship service. He loves to bang out rhythms on coffee cans, buckets, the backs of chairs; anything that could be a make-shift drum. Needless to say he loves music and probably has more rhythm than most other white toddlers that I know. The next Justin Bieber? Maybe. He knows more song lyrics than my husband does, but that’s not saying much. My husband unintentionally figured out one of my biggest pet peeves a long time ago and since then, anytime we are in the car it seems like he goes out of his way to do the third worst thing a person can do to irritate the heck out of me. Honestly, I don’t know if he can help it, because he has a pretty terrible memory for someone who designs databases for a living. My rule is, and always has been, this: if I don’t know the correct song lyrics, I won’t sing along. Sometimes I think my husband goes out of his way to sing incorrect lyrics and in doing so, inflicts a torture on my ears similar to that of listening to Christina Aguilera sing the National Anthem. Because he doesn’t just sing the wrong lyrics, no, he sings them at the top of his lungs. He sings over what I’m singing which are usually the correct lyrics. He won’t stop until I call him out on it, which I do every time this happens and believe me, it’s quite often. “It’s not ‘Above the fruit and grain.’ It’s ‘Above the fruited plain.’” I mean, come on, “America
Don’t judge me. We all have our limits. I can’t tell you how much this thing bothers me. I’m weird like that. Curse at me. Call me ugly. Give me dirty looks. I can handle it. But whatever you do, don’t sing the wrong lyrics.
My son has picked up this terrible habit. Like I said, I can stand a lot of his little quirks but this, I just don’t know. His childish vocabulary and a lingering mush mouth make for some interesting song lyric interpretations. I try my best to get his attention and gently correct his mistakes, but it’s just more fun for him to mess up the lyrics, just like his dada. For instance, a song that we sing at church that goes, “For the King has carried the cross, He is risen from the grave,” sounds like “For the key was carried to gob, he is ridden from the gay.” Yeah, it’s all kinds of wrong.
For being as uptight as I clearly am on this subject, I'm not fundamentally opposed to the hilarious misheard song lyric every now and then. A woman I used to work with swore that the lyrics to “How Will I Know” by Whitney Houston were “I’m asking you cause you know about feet stink.” She’s the same person I got into a week long argument over whether Wham’s “Careless Whisper” was “Guilty feet have got no rhythm” or “These two feet have got no rhythm.” I won, by the way, because the lyrics are totally “Guilty feet have got no rhythm.” I take song lyrics seriously, which is why I posted large signs all over her desk that said “GUILTY FEET.” She was still finding them a month later. I’m also not above mishearing certain lyrics myself. I’ve had my own slip ups but I’m pretty resourceful when it comes to finding out the actual words to any given song. And once again I have to apologize, because all of my song references are, of course, from my favorite decade. My top misheard lyrics include the Petshop Boys, “In a Western Town with denim walls, the Eastern boys and Western girls,” and Paul Young’s, “Every Time you go away…you take a piece of meat with you,” and mine and everyone else’s favorite Manfred Mann tune, “Wrapped up like a douche another rumor in the night.” These are funny misheard song lyrics that I will only sing out loud to be ironic. Only for a short time did I believe these to be the actual words to the songs. For about a second, I thought that the opening line to Billy Ocean’s “Caribbean Queen” went, “She Dutched by me and blamed it on James,” (Actual lyrics: “She touched by me in painted on jeans.”) or that the chorus to Toto’s “Africa” went, “I Dutched the rains down in Africa.” (Heck, I don’t even know what the actual lyrics are to “Africa ” and I’m pretty sure nobody else does either.) Was it possible that sometime in my youth I thought that the Netherlands
(I invite you now to take a few minutes to look up those two songs on YouTube. Listen. It really does sound like "Dutched." Go ahead. I'll wait.)
Ask my husband, I’m a bit OCD when it comes to lyrics. That, thank the Lord, might be the only thing I’m obsessive compulsive about. It’s because I believe that the writers of these songs took great pains to write them. I would hate for someone to call my website “Confessions of a Staid Gnome Mom.” Call me crazy for respecting the original intent of the written and sung word. I know not all song lyrics are poetry and more often than not, the actual song lyrics don’t make much more sense than the made up ones. Surely Jimi Hendrix did not mean to infer that he dabbled in the love that dare not speak its name when he penned one of his most famous songs. Thousands of people all over the world have gotten it wrong for decades now because they didn’t have mothers who were obsessive about correct song lyrics. But my son will be different, my son will know. Someday I’ll explain everything to him. I’ll teach him the things that really matter in life. And hopefully he will go on to tell others, or at least his someday-wife, “No honey, it’s ‘Excuse me while I kiss the sky.’”
Then my work will not have been in vain.
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