I Wasn’t Really Punk Rock Until I Became a Mother
originally written for Vol. 1 Brooklyn's three minute stories read at Pitchfork Music Festival in 2012
An earlier version of this essay was handwritten in a journal for Vol.1 Brooklyn’s Greatest Three Minute Stories: DIY/Punk Rock, for a reading at Pitchfork Music Festival in 2012. In 2017, it was published in the Nasty Women Northwest Arkansas Zine edited by Helen Maringer. Since the revision, many aspects of my life have changed, including the death of my child’s father in 2022. I’ve decided to post mostly in tact, with no major editing. There are sloppy sentences, maybe even typos. I’d rather post this than continue to hold onto it longer and delay another day of not posting on my Substack. So here you go, dears. Let’s revel in this messy splendor.
In attempt to do more of this type of writing, which is my FAVORITE, I’m going to use this space more towards that endeavor. I’d also like to revive the “Albums Of Our Lives” series on personal essays about albums that I used to edit at The Rumpus.
I’ve always considered myself DIY. I absolutely love making things from just what I can find lying around. I love the innovation that comes from limitation. Yet, and maybe this is a really uncool thing to admit, I never got into punk rock in my youth. My first musical obsessions were – beyond Mozart, Bach and Debussy from my classical music upbringing – Paula Abdul, Whitney Houston, Ella Fitzgerald and the Beach Boys.
My sister was the punk rock kid – though honestly for her it started with grunge – which hit with a vengeance, even in Arkansas. She donned the dark plaid flannel, Doc Martens, choker black necklace and raisin rough lipstick. Younger by two years, she’d just started seventh grade and already snuck out to college parties, smoked cigarettes and listened to Nirvana, Pearl Jam, which later turned to Butthole Surfers, Tool, the Sex Pistols, etc. Above all she was obsessed with Courtney Love. She mocked me when I got into my cumberbund and bowtie for show choir – cue Wilson Phillips medley complete with awkward dance moves. She sometimes doodled me with lots of pimples speckling my face and mocked me aloud: “Katy’s primping, Katy’s primping.”
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When I lived in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, my now (dead) ex-husband wanted to start a poetry journal he named Cannibal. He planned to Xerox it on 8 ½ by 11 paper and staple it down the side in the long tradition of zines. I’d read about hand-sewing and screen printing, owned Crafting Handmade books and Silk Screen Printing Techniques, a Dover Thrift Edition, both from the Dickson Street Bookshop where I worked all through college and grad school, so I convinced him to take it up a notch.
I made up a stitch for the perfect binding, made a rudimentary screen print block out modpodge draw the print on, squeegee on teh floor of our third floor walk-up railroad apartment that ended up infested with bedbugs and up against Newtown Creek, site of a massive oil spill in the 1950s that was never cleaned up. We made every single aspect of the magazine – other than the solicited writing – at home. DIY, indeed. Punk rock, I dunno.
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I’ve been reading Clarice Lispector and a quote emblazoned in my brain is this: “I am improvising and the beauty of what I’m improvising is a fugue.” Her “novel” Agua Viva reads more like a confessional on fire that seems written in one stretch like Jack Kerouac and his amphetamine fueled scrolls, in a fit of passion and raw flaming energy – but figure? Improvising?
I think of figure masters Bach, Scarlatti, those true geniuses of musical form wrapping phrase into phrase, weaving furies into form – isn’t that punk rock? Or carefully honed through a lifetime of furious study of form. Definitely it’s DIY. No doubt.
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The first violin I ever played was made with a ruler and a fruit roll-up box. I was six, enrolled in Suzuki. DIY or maybe that’s really bougie? Yet we lived in married student housing in Madison, Wisconsin – my dad a manager of Budget Bicycle Shop while my mom went to grad school for speech pathology, sometimes working two other jobs on top of that while raising me and my sister. There wasn’t ever much money.
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Let’s talk about the way DIY has been co-opted into meaninglessness via the Etsyfication of making things with our hands, the way the word artisanal signifies nothing now that it’s been used in a McDonald’s ad. Artisanal has now been replaced by craft – the symbol of authenticity. There was a punk rock exhibit at the MET. Where do we go from here? Does it matter?
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I never felt punk rock – cue mom voice saying “you’ve always had expensive taste” – until I had a baby. Then and only then did I feel truly punk rock.
I was an avid breastfeeder with my baby and nursed until after two. When my baby wanted to eat, he ate. And he wanted to eat often. It didn’t matter where we were: whether at a restaurant while brunching on cardamom French toast or on the couch at home or maybe it was a bathroom stall at a big box store.
Sometimes we’d be nursing and I’d have to go to the bathroom. Like go really really badly. Sometimes I even had to take a dump. So I’d walk us into the bathroom, my baby suckling away, and I’d nurse while shitting. Tell me that’s not punk rock.
My breasts transformed from a rarified object no one was supposed to see into the way I fed my baby. I didn’t really care who saw my nipples anymore.
I fit in non-mom duties however I could. Everything became urgent as I navigated how to not only be a mom, but also a wife, a music journalist and a person who still had to make rent but now also daycare.
***
My baby’s six now, in first grade and I’m not married anymore. One time he woke in the middle of the night crying and feverish. I had no medicine. So we, the both of us, him crying and sleepy in pajamas, went to Walmart at 2 a.m. so I could buy some children’s Tylenol.
Sometimes I step in cat puke while walking to the kitchen to pour him a glass of milk. Sometimes I stay up past his bedtime to fold laundry, do dishes or squeeze in some time to write. Then I wake at 6 a.m. and pack his lunch and make oatmeal just the way he likes it – with honey, cinnamon and apples – and dress him and walk her to school and then rush to the radio station where I work. When you’re the only parent your child relies that you’re always on. There’s no stepping out with a friend for a drink, meeting for coffee or running a quick errand unless you want to bring your kid along.
And sometimes I clean up the mess of drawings and scraps of paper he’s cut out, the stuffed animals he’s brought out to share our pancake breakfast, the half-eaten yogurt when he’s left for a week with his daddy. Single parenting is absolutely punk rock.
Brought tears to my eyes. I know many can relate.
Katie, I was so excited to see you here. I nodded my head all the way through all the way through all the way through. You are a light on my feathers I’m so glad you’re here. Love, Rebecca.