"A Thousand Miles"
Making my way downtown
Walking fast
Faces pass
And I'm home bound
Staring blankly ahead
Just making my way
Making a way
Through the crowd
And I need you
And I miss you
And now I wonder....
If I could fall
Into the sky
Do you think time
Would pass me by
'Cause you know I'd walk
A thousand miles
If I could
Just see you
Tonight
It's always times like these
When I think of you
And I wonder
If you ever
Think of me
'Cause everything's so wrong
And I don't belong
Living in your
Precious memories
'Cause I need you
And I miss you
And now I wonder....
If I could fall
Into the sky
Do you think time
Would pass me by
'Cause you know I'd walk
A thousand miles
If I could
Just see you
Tonight
And I, I
Don't want to let you know
I, I
Drown in your memory
I, I
Don't want to let this go
I, I
Don't....
Making my way downtown
Walking fast
Faces pass
And I'm home bound
Staring blankly ahead
Just making my way
Making a way
Through the crowd
And I still need you
And I still miss you
And now I wonder....
If I could fall
Into the sky
Do you think time
Would pass us by
'Cause you know I'd walk
A thousand miles
If I could
Just see you...
If I could fall
Into the sky
Do you think time
Would pass me by
'Cause you know I'd walk
A thousand miles
If I could
Just see you
If I could
Just hold you
Tonight
Whenever I hear this song, I think of my Mister. The first time I ever heard this song was March 25th, 2002. Mike had just left my hospital room to go home and catch some rest after a very long few days of labor and subsequent stressful delivery of our first born, sunny side up son. My in-laws had left, my parents had left, it was a few hours before the first round of visitors came to see the new heir to the McFamily fortune (ha ha). I was all alone for the first time with my baby. And I was completely and totally shell shocked.
I couldn’t sleep (I got a massive adrenaline rush after each baby, rendering me unable to sleep at all for a few days after they were born without medication), so I was watching the hospital run TV channel, where they showed music videos. Frankly, I was surprised they even still made music videos since, as an avid watcher of Cribs and Pimp my Ride, I was under the assumption that since MTV never showed music videos anymore, than they were no longer being made.
Anyway, the music video for this song came on the hospital run channel. I’m a sucker for pop music with a full orchestra playing in between sub standard lyrics, so I was glued to the TV. While I found the whole traveling piano thing with the girl in braids staring intently into the camera while she zoomed at light speed through the continent, unaware that she was breaking the sound barrier from the comfort of her upright
In the months following his birth, the song would make me cry. There were a myriad of reasons why I would start crying when that song came on. And I cried a lot. I couldn’t help but cry as they played that song about 400,000 times a day in the summer of 2002. “A Thousand Miles” was Train’s “Drops of Jupiter”. The summer song that was great until the pop stations beat it to a miserable death and you no longer could stand to listen to it ever again. Until of course, you distanced yourself from it for a few years. I am just now able to hear the Goo Goo Dolls “Black Balloon” and not want to put my fist through the radio to put the song out of its pain. Sorry, side tracked there a bit. The crying that was incited by this piece of pop garbage was actually made worse by the terrible PPD I was silently suffering from. What should have been the happiest time in my life was actually the saddest. I can’t really describe the feelings I had to the general public without feeling as though there will be people that will never understand it. Suffice it to say, if you have been through PPD, you’ll know how I felt in 2002. And you’ll know how sad I felt every time I heard “A Thousand Miles”.
A few years passed and occasionally I would hear “A Thousand Miles” and think …the words are so completely irrelevant to the feelings I have for my son. I mean, it was a song about unrequited love, how could that be applicable to the unconditional love that my son and I share?
And then he hit 4. And suddenly, the words seemed apropos. This has been a rough year for my Mister and me. He is not the same kid he was a year ago. The innocence of babyhood was replaced by a sullenness that I can only describe as positively a sign of what I have ahead of me for his teenage years. He gets mad at me a lot. Mostly because I am a nag. I am not the fun parent at times. I make him brush his teeth twice a day. I make him take a bath everyday. I make him get dressed by himself. I take stuff away from him that he loves as punishment. I enforce rules that he doesn’t think he needs. He challenges me whenever he has the chance. Basically, I am no longer just his caretaker. I am his parent. And he hates me for it at times. And as you know, he is not afraid to tell me so. I feel like there really are a thousand miles between us at times. And there are times that I would give anything to go back to a time and place where there wasn’t this distance between us, where life was simpler. You know, when he was “little”.
I know it’s just going to get harder as he gets older. What I am getting now is just a preview. People always said to me “Little people, little problems. Big people, Big problems” and I blew it off. Foolish me. Remind me to go back 5 years and slap myself. As physically exhausting as it is to have a baby or toddler, what you lose in the physically exhausting category is more than made up by the fact that as they get older, it just gets more emotionally exhausting. The only consolation I have is that he is, at his core, a beautiful soul with a beautiful heart and a very strong sense of empathy and obligation towards his fellow man. That will get him through much of what life has to throw at him and me through the years that are sure to make me worry. It still sucks when he sasses me or says mean things to me or won’t hug me, but I know that I am doing the very best I can with him, so we’ll be alright in the long run. I'm am not a perfect parent. But he does have lots of love. Unconditionally. And I am sure he will sometimes find his way home to me if I just give him some space at times.
But my God, this parenting thing is really effing HARD.
