When I drive Scarlett to school, she always likes to put on Spotify and listen to songs. When doing so, she always makes it a point to sign out of my account because typically what’s playing is either a podcast or nursery rhymes for Marina. These do not go along with her vibe.
The other day, when I got into the car my phone automatically hooked up and was playing one of my audio episodes of the blog I’ve been recording. I was listening to them to make sure I didn’t have any errors in the first few episodes. The one that happened to come on is my post I wrote years ago about finding out about the menstrual cup. It’s aptly called – ‘put a cup in your vagina.’ As soon as she heard my voice read out the title, she looked at the screen to see what was playing. In typical teenager fashion, she rolled her eyes and screamed “oh my God, Mom! What the heck?!”
I apologized. That’s probably a lot to the ears before the sun is even up. She grabs my phone off the holder and transitions over to one of her Spotify playlists. She chose the list she titled “songs I want scratched into my brain” – which are songs she just feels. Scar’s gone through many names for this playlist. Once it was called “songs I want injected into me” but then she changed when she learned that was somewhat of a drug reference. Then, a time before that, the playlist was called “cloud 9” which she also then changed because apparently that’s also a drug reference. What the hell, people.
Anyways, playlist is on, and we drive. At some point, she must switch over to another playlist – called “school bangers.” These are songs she listens to at school, I suppose. They aren’t bad. 10 or so minutes later, she gets out of the car to go to school. I drive away and leave the playlist on because I was driving and didn’t feel like messing with my phone. I wasn’t paying attention to what was playing really until a few minutes later I started hearing the word pu**y being said over and over again. What the what?
It. Just. Kept. Getting. Worse. Pu**ies on plates, pu**ies on faces, the pu**y fairy is on her way over – OH MY GOD. How can we go from Taylor Swift’s Invisible String to THIS? How is THIS a song my 13-year-old daughter likes to vibe out to while at school. WTF is she doing?!
When I got to a stopping point, I sent her a text, screenshotting the song, and asking her WHY THE HELL this song was on her playlist. Seconds later she responds and asks why, and what does the song say? She must’ve then proceeded to look up the lyrics on her phone. Immediately, she texts me back in all caps (to display her mortification, I guess) that the song was auto added on there and she hadn’t even listened to it yet. Well thank God for small miracles because this song was horrible and definitely inappropriate for her. For anyone really. Dear God.
Afterwards, I’m driving on, a much more mellow song is playing now with no genitals being mentioned. It was then that the irony of the morning hit me.
Both of us were mentally scarred that morning by vaginas and dinnerware.