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Thank God My Daughter Gets to Grow Up With Billie Eilish and Lizzo
I want their fearlessness to lodge itself in her bones
I love Billie Eilish. I love that she showed up to the Grammys dressed like a quarantine patient from space and left with a wagonful of trophies.
I love Lizzo. I love that her voice seems to explode out of whatever insufficient terrestrial device is recording it and expand out into the farthest reaches of the universe. I love that she plays the flute.
I also love these women because of the future woman I have growing up in my home. My daughter, almost nine, is just starting to watch the adult world for signs of the kind of person she might want to be. Her choices when getting dressed or commandeering the family Spotify account are more deliberate now, small but declarative statements about how she sees herself and how she wishes to be seen.
Lizzo and Eilish are part of her cultural vocabulary. She can toss her hair and check her nails on command and asks Alexa to play “Bury A Friend” when she gets home from school. At a time when you can summon the song you want to hear by speaking its name to the air, my daughter seems to take the confidence of this music as her birthright.
