If you would have told me a year ago that a 26-year-old singer would help me redefine my identity as a middle-aged mother, I would have smeared cream on my neck. It all happened unexpectedly. One morning, while the kids were at school, I was drinking wine sitting in front of my laptop in the silence of my home. Chappel Rowan emerged from among my favorite singer-songwriters who soothed my mild depression during nine years of raising children. The last words you heard me say in her presence were “touch me, baby” – I was moved. I wished everyone would just leave me alone. However, when I somehow came across Roan on Spotify, and she said these words in the voice of a wise, soulful old songwriter, I couldn’t stop myself from singing along with her.
My life, at 43 with two young children, is so different than it was at 20. Ask any mom if she’s still the same person she was in college, and she’ll surely pause and remember the freedom and fireworks of those days. A friend who recently gave birth to her third child told me, “Getting into a Toyota Sienna is like entering a hot nightclub.” Yet as I continued to listen to Roan’s debut album, The Rise and Fall of a Midwestern Princess, I remembered the spider-webbed veins, stiff hips, and pure exhaustion beneath the extra padding in my belly, the hormonal changes that still haunted me in my 20s. Even more amazing was Roan’s ability to reflect my current reality back to me, allowing me to see that these two different versions of me can coexist.
When I asked Maggie Downs, 48, the mother of a 10-year-old, why she loved Rowan so much, she pointed to the balancing act all mothers engage in — caring for others while also working on nurturing ourselves and remembering who we are. “The music/characters of Chappelle show that many characters can live together. It doesn’t have to be a balancing act at all; it’s a balancing act. We can accommodate a lot of people,” Downs said. While Rowan sings about crossing four states from small-town Missouri to Los Angeles in her song “California,” mothers are also spreading themselves thin within their families — combing their hair with one hand, typing on a computer with a notebook with the other. That’s how she makes her career: one foot pushing dirty laundry closer to the basket, the other wiping up the booger-like residue left on the floor by her child’s slime kit. Rising above the exhaustion of raising children (and bearing the mental burden of a partner) is a deep desire for empowerment. As the soaring strings at the beginning of “Femininomenon” surrender to the beating of our hearts, Ron asks us if we know what we want and need. Will it happen? “No!” screams a female voice. Then the beat subsides, the cowbell rings, and we stop folding the laundry and express our frustration in dance.
Somehow, Ron has learned the lesson that most of us don’t learn until we’re 40 or 50. When she refused to make a video for “Good Luck, Babe” because she was exhausted from touring, exhausted perimenopausal and menopausal moms everywhere shouted “amen” in disapproval. She took to social media to urge fans to respect her space when she appears in public, which angered those who insist that losing autonomy and privacy is part of her job as a celebrity. Similar expectations are made of mothers, except that we are not role models but martyrs: our bodies, our time and energy belong to our families. We choose to be mothers, so we have no right to complain about being touched or needing more alone time.
In a recent interview with The Guardian’s Kate Solomon, Ron spoke about the severe depression that came with sudden fame. “Ron seemed to get everything she wanted, and the burden of it all crushed her,” Solomon wrote. What mother, especially one struggling with postpartum depression, couldn’t say the same? Most of Ron’s interviews reminded me of my own struggle to get everything I wanted: two beautiful daughters. With a five and nine-year-old, the last time I was able to leave the house without thinking about the welfare of others was ten years ago. I appreciate when Ron sets boundaries with her fans and focuses on herself.
In a 2017 mini-documentary posted on YouTube, Ron said of her music, “To be honest, what I really want is for people to feel something when they listen to it.” The ’80s synth sounds also revive the world’s weary, overwhelmed middle-aged mothers. “The gift of Chappel is that she can be there and open up a moment in time and allow us to go back and experience all the different dimensions of it — grief, sex, joy, fear, all the complexities.” 41·H (Abby H.) recently told me she is the mother of an 8-year-old and a 5-year-old. It can be hard to find these emotions in the midst of motherhood and aging, but Ron’s music has a way of bringing them straight to the surface.
She reminds us of the thrill and angst of youth. I’ve never been a member of the passenger seat club described in “Leisure” (I honestly don’t understand how she managed it – feet up on the dash?), but as all middle-aged mothers have been in your 20s, the world is shimmering, shiny and dramatic. Ron helped us reconnect with all that. As Kira Durant, 42, mother of a two-year-old and an eight-year-old, told me: “After having two kids, my pelvic floor is damaged and there are only two people on the planet I can fuck.
