Concert Mom
The stage lit up in a way I found overwhelming. The crowd cheered and I listened to the music and was moved but didn’t know why. Kids sang along, angrily, ecstatically, and I stood in their midst, tears streaming down my middle-aged face. I found myself once again in the sacred role of witness and testifier. Four years prior, the first concert not-of-my-choosing that I chose to attend with my daughter was some metal band. I don’t remember who but I remember the night vividly. It was a classic-to-the-point-of-cliché mother-daughter battle: she was 14 and NEEDED to see this band, would simply die if she did not. Her Catholic-school friends were supremely uninterested in seeing this band, so her reasonable, modest proposal was that she, at 14, attend a gritty concert in a gritty part of San Francisco, solo. I was not 14, and I would simply die if she went alone (I might actually have used the words “over my dead body”). Impasse. We were in the midst of therapy that is a luxuri