Kristen here, wife of Ian The Producer. Obviously this is a guest post, as I normally write my own Substack known as the Upside Downs. My blog is about how we’re doing our best to naturally parent Betsy, our little Down Syndrome baby. She is ten months old and an absolute delight. She beautifully ties our family together, as we each have a teenager from our previous marriages. Anyway, once I got a good ways into writing this post, I realised it would probably be a better entry here, so let’s go!
If my two girls are a large part of my purpose in this life, another large part is music. Pretty much anything anyone says or anything at all that happens will remind me of at least one song. I know thousands by heart, and I’ve always said that music runs in my veins, so that if you were to cut me open, you wouldn’t get blood, you’d get a song. I love associating people and events with specific songs, making both the song and the connected thing more special to me. Music is a major part of the lives of every member of our family, even baby Betsy. Ian and I get to DJ karaoke every week for a local pizza place (and at any other opportunity we get), and she of course gets dragged along for that. Karaoke at this particular spot is, in fact, how Ian and I met in the first place. Other than Betsy, I am the only member of our family who doesn’t play any instruments. But we consider her our DJ in training.
When I share my blog posts on my Instagram account, I like to add a song to my pictures that goes along with the topic. For example, the one about Betsy’s MicKey button (her feeding tube), I had a picture of her in a Minnie Mouse onesie and I picked the Mickey Mouse Club march to go with it. For the most recent one, the Good Parts, the obvious choice for me was The Good Part by AJR. Those were easy.
The one I had a hard time with was Why I Hate Hospitals, which was about her heart surgery. I wanted something heart-related, and songs about the heart are not exactly hard to come by, but I still felt stumped. When making the post, I went to search music and typed in the word “heart,” and nothing came up that was anything close to what I wanted. So I just shared a photo with a good caption and moved on. Within minutes I realized what I should have done, and rectified the issue when I created a piece for my Stories.
Ever heard a song for the first time, from an artist you’ve never heart of, and it immediately hits you like a freight train cos it’s just so good? That was me the first time I ever heard Judah and the Lion, with their breakout song Take It All Back, in 2017. I was already a fan about two seconds into the song, immediately surprised to hear a mandolin on an alt rock station. I’ve followed them ever since, and even got to see them live in July of that year, along with Jimmy Eat World and Incubus, and they were absolutely wonderful. Anyway, they have a new album coming out soon, so back toward the end of June, they kept teasing snippets of their new song, Heart Medicine. It had just been released around the same time I published the blog about Betsy’s heart surgery. A few minutes after I shared links to the blog post on Instagram (unable to think of a good heart song), I ran across another reel of theirs while scrolling, once again promoting Heart Medicine, and I had a facepalm moment. This song had been on my radar for at least a week already, so why hadn’t I thought of it sooner? I opened YouTube to listen to the song in its entirety, and loved it. Frontman Judah Akers wrote this song for the lady in his life, about how their love for each other had been helping his heart heal after a painful divorce. While the literal meaning of the song has little to do with an infant recovering from heart surgery, the theme of a broken heart being repaired, healing, and becoming stronger than ever certainly does. I immediately adopted this as an unofficial Betsy Anthem. It also made an excellent soundtrack for that Instagram post. Have a listen if you like:
The heart is a muscle, both literally and metaphorically. It grows and gains strength from exercise, which causes little tears that heal. Heartbreak leads to growth as long as you keep working that muscle, and don’t let it atrophy. Having this little girl in our lives has brought about healing we didn’t know we needed, and softened our hearts in places they’d been hardened. She went through more in the first seven months of her life than most people go through in seven years. Watching her grow and thrive, growing stronger and more capable every day, has truly been Heart Medicine for us.
Thank you Kristen for sharing this heartwarming story reminds me of a song Randy my husband is writing and producing, he calls Love Muscle.