Stella Hervey Birrell is an emerging writer and poet living in East Lothian, Scotland. Her first novel, How Many Wrongs make a Mr Right?, was published in 2016 by Crooked Cat Books; she also won the Glasgow Women’s Library Bold Types poetry competition in 2017. Her short pieces and poems have appeared in various journals and anthologies including The Scottish Book Trust’s Nourish eBook and The Ropes and Frangipani journals.
The Book of Wonder
Ten years ago, I decided to write a song about step-parenting. About blending a family. Until then, I had followed a well-worn LP groove–verse: what I thought; chorus: of disapproval (from my husband’s ex-wife); an apology-and-retraction middle eight (from us, always from us); followed by a hasty resolution back into the major.
Step-parenting is an under-represented topic in creative work. Apart from in fairy tales, of course. None of which I found helpful, unless you use them as a handy ‘how not to treat your husband’s children’ guide. Don’t favour your biological children, especially when dividing household tasks. Don’t leave them in a forest. Don’t put a hit out on them.
But not ‘don’t write songs about them’. I hesitated. I knew the children well enough to know it was the last thing they would have wanted. Only, I couldn’t hear my own voice anymore. All of those slights, flights and fights–I wanted to place them in another world, blood-let them from my system, layer them over with music. With a song, I could tell the truth, and stay safe. A song doesn’t have to reflect the detail of what it means. I had stopped saying what I meant, over and over again, and I needed somewhere to put all of these penned-in thoughts.
Songwriting is something my husband and I do together. Me on words, him on music. He sat and strummed some chords, and when he started picking down an arpeggio, we knew we were getting closer.
I sang about the tension, the taut string of differences of opinion. I sang about the children, their astonishing imaginations, how they spoke with us. There were plenty of bad days. A step-parent has to gather up evidence for being a part of something piece by piece, like tiny white pebbles. Other times, everything drew together, the strings harmonising, and we were an entity, a collective. A family.
I sang a celebration: we had created a new, if fragile, unit. I wanted to Morse it out there. It was hard to blend this family. But we were trying. And there was love wrapped up in the music, as well as in the shared car journeys and muddy walks across freshly cut fields–like the time my husband’s daughter and my husband took some loose leaf poems I had stuffed into a tatty blue lever arch file and made them into a neat little book. They gave it to me for our second anniversary. Something I could hold. Proof. A road map through the years of tentative, distant, unspoken love.
Something I could write a song about.
For years, the lyrics remained distant–‘she’ instead of ‘me’–as if I were asking for a friend. I weaved in and out, liking the song, then hating it. It wasn’t changing much, but my feelings about it were directed by how I felt about the kids. Hadn’t seen them for a month? Defriended on Facebook? Oh, I hate that song. Recent visit, a good one? A phone conversation, instigated by the child who is now a teenager, and has chosen to call? This song rocks. It became part of our band’s repertoire, but I continued to avoid it. ‘It’s too quiet,’ I said. ‘It won’t work in that venue.’ This was when the children were around less: their own lives had taken over anything we had to offer. I continued to avoid putting the song into a set list. Eventually our bass player told me:
‘When you don’t like singing it, that’s when you should push on with it. Keep playing it. At some point, you’ll come to a new place with it. A better place.’
I started editing again, in rehearsal and on the rare occasions it was played: a word here, a phrase of music there. We arranged it for two, three, five, and then six, as our band grew to the exact same size as our blended family. Bass, keyboard, rhythm guitar, lead guitar, drums, me. Husband, son, daughter, two more children, me.
Then I realised it was time to hold the song, not keep it at arm’s length. Enough time had gone by. It was OK to sing, and feel, and–for God’s sake!–be myself. I stopped asking ‘for a friend’. It transformed from an alright song to a good song with three words: I, me and my.
Now, I am unpicking the connection between kids and song. The lyrics are historical: it’s about children, and I call them ‘children’ when I want to annoy them. They are nineteen and twenty. We don’t see a lot of each other, but that’s OK. They know where I am, and for the most part, they don’t need me.
In the right venue, the band and I play Book of Wonder. I open my mouth to sing it, and I genuinely think it is beautiful. It is beautiful in the muddled way my family is beautiful. It is one of the best things I have ever written, and it’s not a coincidence that I have redrafted it for ten years.
It’s not a coincidence that family lasts forever. Sometimes it takes that long. Sometimes it takes longer than forever, for everything to turn out alright.
Ten years ago, I wrote a song, while I tried to blend a family. I write it, blend it still.
You can find more of Stella’s work via her website and through her Twitter, @atinylife140.