I’ve spent a significant amount of the last few months singing the same lyrics over and over while rocking back and forth. Sometimes, I feel like I’ve lost my mind. I haven’t; I’ve simply had a baby and this phase won’t last forever.
n the lottery of motherhood, I got a child who needs a lot of support and movement to get to sleep. She’s already growing out of it but in those first three months or so, the same three lullabies were on repeat 15 hours a day. When the public health nurse came, she gave me a book from the HSE which said babies of Aurora’s age needed 15 hours sleep a day.
I am hardwired to fixate on data, take things literally, and to defer to experts. This meant I spent most of the first three months of motherhood stressed to my gills when her sleep fell under the threshold. It also meant I sang my way through lengthy contact naps in a bid to reach the HSE guideline. My daughter knows what she likes and what she doesn’t. If our playlist were on vinyl, the record would be gouged deep from overuse.
There’s one Spotify playlist called ‘Lullaby Baby’ that is actually quite relaxing to listen to. Most children’s music is tinny and offensively upbeat. This album doesn’t have any of that pitchy ‘melody with bells on’ garbage. The composition and vocals are sweet; the chord progressions are satisfying, so we play the same 20 minutes of music all day and all night.
I find myself, in the rare moments I have free time now, singing the songs to myself. It was only this week, however, that I managed to step out of the fugue and listen to what I was singing. The lyrics to some children’s lullabies are ridiculous. Have you ever noticed?
I read an interesting study of children at Great Ormond Street Hospital. It scientifically proved what parents have known for centuries — that lullabies really do help to soothe children. The results showed that the sick children experienced lower heart rates, less anxiety and reduced perception of pain after they had lullabies sung to them. They read stories to the same group of kids and they showed lower benefits. So it’s not just the attention from adults — it’s the singing that achieves the results.
Fascinating as all that was, it didn’t explain why the lyrics to these lullabies can range from creepy to nonsensical. Let’s take Hush Little Baby. It starts off with a mother offering to buy her baby a mockingbird if they’re quiet. There’s no response from the baby cited in the song, but we can assume that the child doesn’t ‘hush’ because the bargaining goes on. If the mockingbird doesn’t sing, then the mother proposes a diamond ring might do the job.
The song extends with more than six offerings from this mother as though she were a citizen in ancient Greece trying to appease an angry god. She offers several animals; a billy goat, a cart and bull, a dog named Rover, then a horse and cart (in case the cart is attractive but the animal pulling it is not).
On reflection, I can see that this is a desperate mother offering her crying baby anything and everything in the world to just stop crying.
I wonder why the offerings are so wildly inappropriate as gifts for a child, though? Who gives a child a diamond ring? It’s a choking hazard! A looking-glass? Glass? For a child? What are you going to say to the overworked emergency room doctor in the children’s hospital when you present them with your bleeding baby? “Oh, I thought giving them a mirror would keep them quiet.”
What’s a baby going to do with a horse and cart? Or a billy goat? What’s with all the livestock? Has this mother never heard of a rattle? Or a soother?
The internet is rife with lullabies in other languages that are closer to horrifying on the spectrum of inappropriate lyrics. They speak of monsters and ghosts that commit a host of horrors to distressed babies.
Closer to home, in Scotland, there are no scary creatures to steal babies. Over there, according to the Highland Fairy Lullaby, your mother’s just going to put you down and lose you!
The stress of early parenthood is well illustrated in these lullabies. The begging, the desperation, the exhaustion. Let’s just hope babies can’t interpret language until after they sleep through the night.
