If you told me a year ago that a 26-year-old singer would help me redefine my identity as a middle-aged mom, I’d have thrown my neck cream at you. It all happened unexpectedly. One morning, the kids in school, I sat at my laptop drinking in the stillness of my house. In between my go-to singer-songwriters who stroked my low-grade depression as a result of nine years of parenting, there Chappell Roan appeared. Before her, the last thing you’d hear me say is “touch me, baby”—I’m touched out. I’d prefer everyone to leave me alone. And yet, after I somehow manifested Roan on Spotify, she pleaded these words in the voice of a wise, soulful old songbird, and I couldn’t help but sing along.
My life at 43, with two young kids, is vastly different than it was in my 20s. Ask any mom if she’s the same person she was just out of college, and she will surely pause to longingly remember the freedom and fireworks of those days. As one friend, who just had her third child, recently told me: “Getting into a Toyota Sienna is like getting into a hot nightclub.” In other words, our kinks have gone from making out in bars to weighted blankets and seltzer. Yet as I hungrily continued listening to Roan’s debut album, The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess, I was reminded that beneath the extra padding around my midsection, the spider veins, the stiff hip, the pure exhaustion, the whiplash of hormonal shifts, that 20-something version of myself was still there. Even more startling was Roan’s ability to reflect my current reality back to me, allowing me to see that these two different versions of myself could live in tandem.
When I asked Maggie Downs, who is 48 and the mother of a 10-year-old, why she loves Roan so much, she brought up the balancing act that all mothers perform—taking care of others while also trying to nurture ourselves and remember who we are. “Chappell’s music/personae suggest that many roles can coexist. This doesn’t have to be a balancing act at all; we can contain multitudes,” says Downs. As Roan sings about stretching herself across four states, from small-town Missouri to Los Angeles, in her song “California,” moms are stretching themselves across their households—one hand brushing hair, one hand typing on a laptop to build her career, one foot pushing dirty laundry closer to the hamper, the other foot wiping up a booger-like residue left on the floor from a child’s slime kit. And rising from the ashes of our exhaustion from childrearing (and carrying the mental load for our partners) is a raging yearning for empowerment. As the climbing strings at the start of “Femininomenon” surrender to what sounds like the beating of all of our hearts, Roan asks us if we know what we want and need. And does it happen? “No!” A chorus of female voices ring out. And then the beat drops, the cowbells clang, we stop folding the laundry, and we dance out our frustration.
Somehow, Roan has already embraced the lessons most of us don’t learn until our 40s or 50s. When she refused to make a video for “Good Luck, Babe” due to exhaustion from touring, tired perimenopausal and menopausal moms everywhere shouted amen to saying no. There was also her social media plea for fans to respect her space when she’s out in public, one that infuriated the people who insisted a loss of autonomy and privacy is part of her job as a celebrity. Similar expectations are cast on mothers, except instead of icons we are martyrs: Our bodies, our time and energy, belong to our families. We chose to be mothers, and so we have no right to complain about being touched out or needing more alone time.
