Kami Steffenauer provides an in-depth analysis of motherhood in the Grammy-nominated album.
It’s safe to say that Taylor Swift is unavoidable these days. Not just because of her six Grammy nominations this year or her record-breaking Eras Tour that has taken the world by storm – literally causing seismic activity on multiple continents. Swift’s presence in popular culture has largely grown due to her growth as a person and artist, writing songs beyond the teenage heartbreak she was initially known for and growing into adult worries and concerns, from mental illness in “Forever Winter” to miscarriages in “Bigger Than The Whole Sky.” This latter song shocked fans and critics alike, not because of the ballad’s tragic beauty but because Swift penned a poem describing a miscarriage she likely experienced. As an artist who was introduced to the public as America’s sweetheart, it seemed almost unbelievable that Swift could conceive a child, even though she’d been writing songs about lovers for over a decade and had publicly mentioned her desire to have children. Yet in her newest album, The Tortured Poets Department (TTPD), and its double version TTPD: The Anthology, Swift expands her art surrounding motherhood, demonstrating the many forms motherhood can take for women in the United States today.
Swift’s earliest and most direct reference to motherhood in The Tortured Poets Department is found in the album’s sixth track, “But Daddy I Love Him.” During the chorus of the song detailing her love for someone whom her small town detests, she screams “I’m having his baby / No, I’m not / But you should see your faces.” The first listen of this line causes the listener’s jaw to drop, shocked by Swift’s declaration that initially sounds desperate and pleading, like a young daughter instead of a thirty-four-year-old woman. In the United States, pregnancy is often seen as a weakened state, labeled as a disability under our legal system, which pretends that pregnant people have little or no autonomy over their bodies whatsoever and need other people to ensure their wellbeing and sanity. However, Swift is utilizing her body’s reproductive capabilities as a bargaining chip, pretending to be pregnant in order to try and convince her family and friends that she really does love this boy and is willing to do anything to keep him, even if that means conceiving their child and putting her career on hold to give birth to it. This reclamation of women’s physical prowess harkens to pre-agricultural Europe, where creator deities were identified as female. Women were viewed as the strong, fertile ones as opposed to men, which arguably makes far more sense since women are the ones growing this child inside of them as opposed to simply donating sperm. Thus, Swift’s strategy of using pregnancy as justification for her own wants highlights the power and potential motherhood has both in her life and her community’s life.
But motherhood does not always play an empowering role in a woman’s life, as Swift shows in “loml.” Here she grieves a once-in-a-lifetime love, lamenting “You shit-talked me under the table / Talking rings and talking cradles… You’re the loss of my life.” Swift is not simply grieving the loss of her lover, future husband, and best friend but the man she thought would be the father of her children. The devastation of losing a romantic partner is great, yet the idea of losing her family plans and dreams of becoming a parent beside this person seems more agonizing, the core of what Swift is grieving throughout this ballad. She highlights the struggles many young women are currently facing in the United States, which is the fear of never finding someone to parent their children with. As a woman in my early twenties, I’ve spent countless nights discussing with friends our desires to be mothers, yet we are grappling with what it may mean to rear and raise children on our own without a partner due to the West’s exponentially growing gender gap. Swift gives voice to these fears, offering a space for women to feel safe and heard who want to be mothers but fear it may never happen.
In TTPD: The Anthology, Swift shifts her motherhood perspective once again to non-bioessential motherhood through examining communal and adoptive mothering. The penultimate track, co-written and produced with Aaron Dessner, is titled “Robin,” the name of one of Dessner’s daughters. Swift opens the gentle piano tune humming, “Long may your roar at your dinosaurs… You look ridiculous / And you have no idea.” A more mature echo of Speak Now’s “Never Grow Up,” “Robin,” tenderly looks upon Dessner’s daughter from a mother's perspective, begging her to stay brave and bizarre before the world takes her self-confidence and independence. Although Robin is not Swift’s direct daughter, she is the daughter of one of Swift’s long-time collaborators and dearest friends, causing Swift to feel a space of softness towards this child. As a result, she emphasizes the beauty and power behind mothering children who may not be blood-related to us but nonetheless hold a special place in our hearts.
Swift ends The Anthology with “The Manuscript,” a reflection on her magnum opus “All Too Well” and her journey of healing from a devastating relationship. Motherhood is inevitably tied to women’s youth, with family, friends, and doctors alike all bombarding women with constant threats that their biological clock will run out if they don’t get a move on, which Swift seems to allude to when she and her ex-lover “compared their licenses / He said ‘I’m not a donor but / I’d give you my heart if you needed it.’” According to the biological clock theory, this relationship fits the narrative that Swift must become a mother as soon as possible to ensure she can have children before it’s too late, indicating that the timing of motherhood may not be an autonomous decision for women but rather a fear-motivated choice to jump in before their body cannot carry a child anymore. Swift moves into the earliest stages of the relationship, recalling, “He said if the sex was half as good as the conversation was / Soon they’d be pushing strollers / But soon it was over.” Similar to “loml” connecting children to long-term commitment and family planning, here Swift is drawn to the idea of being together with this person permanently, the relationship solidified by the promise of motherhood. But this promise was broken, and afterward Swift “only ate kids’ cereal / And couldn’t sleep unless it was in her mother’s bed.” From being ready to have children of her own to needing her mom like she’s a young child again, Swift uses motherhood to call attention to the way this relationship and breakup wrecked her, causing her to have whiplash not just romantically but in regards to her dreams of mothering and her ability to mother, including mothering herself.
All is not lost, though, for the song continues on, describing her process of writing her masterpiece and making the short film nine years later: “And at last, she knew what the agony had been for.” Through conceiving, creating, and giving life to the song that has validated so many women’s experiences with emotional abuse and is still screamed by Swifties like gospel every night of the Eras Tour, Swift has utilized her mother power from an artistic lens to mother women of all ages, not just those younger than her. Birthing beauty from her pain, Swift’s The Tortured Poets Department shows us the multi-faceted experience of motherhood - power, devastation, communal bonding, and creation - and asks us all to embrace motherhood, however it may appear in our own lives.
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