I Went to a Concert Alone to Find My Pre-Mom Self
Image by Don Rodriguez/Stocksy.
By Joy Netanya Thompson
I stood near the back of The Belasco in Los Angeles and looked up at the ornate, domed ceiling. The venue, built in the 1920s, felt haunted by the glamorous ghosts of old Hollywood. Like a ghost myself, I silently watched the knots of people talking and laughing as they waited for the opening band. My phone buzzed. I glanced at it to see a text from my husband, who was home putting our six year old to bed. After a quick reply, I stuffed it back into my belt bag. I was here to escape my normal life as a mother and, desperate for a break in routine, had dared to do something new: I was at a concert alone.
I’d spent months listening to my favorite band, Gang of Youths, alone in my car — often at top volume — before I started to fantasize about seeing them live, dancing in a sea of other fans. When I heard they’d be playing in LA, I wanted to buy a ticket immediately, but who would I go with? The friend who’d introduced me to the band had moved abroad; no one else I knew had heard of them. Although their music wasn’t my husband’s taste, he was willing to join me. But I didn’t want to dial down my enthusiasm by going with someone who felt lukewarm about the band. Did I dare go alone? The more I thought about it, the more I liked the idea. I only wanted to pay attention to the music and my own enjoyment of it. I wanted to dance with abandon, like I was 17.
Once I bought my ticket, the concert couldn’t come soon enough — it had been so long since I’d done something solely for my own pleasure. When my daughter started kindergarten a few months before, I suddenly realized how long I’d been revolving my life around her to the exclusion of my own desires. A simmering resentment showed up in alternating bouts of rage or numb resignation. My life, made up of endless to-do lists, had become utterly uninteresting. Where was the fun? Not fun like family dance parties in the kitchen, but fun like I felt as a teenager blasting music in a car full of friends and laughing until we cried.
At the Belasco, the energy shifted. The crowd started to surge toward the stage. I wove through clusters of people, moving from gap to gap until I stood three rows back. I sipped my gin and tonic and looked around. I’d been worried I would be the oldest person there, but to my relief, the crowd skewed 40-ish. I noticed a woman my age who seemed to be alone and we made eye contact a few times, the way I remember doing with cute guys in bars when I was single. I struck up a conversation; it turned out she was flying solo, too. We swapped TV recommendations and discovered we had the same first name, then laughed and took a selfie together to document the coincidence. When the band came out, we stood side by side, screaming and cheering. During the first song I felt a pull to look over at my new companion and smile or make some How great is this?! connection, but I realized the beauty of coming alone was the freedom from obligation. Without even glancing back at her, I moved through the crowd, closer to the center of the stage, until I was surrounded by strangers.
There was nothing to do but surrender to the experience the band was creating. My calves were sore from standing on my tiptoes all night, instinctively reaching up and forward, wanting to get closer to this music that made me feel more alive than most things had since my pregnancy began seven years before. The crowd moved and pulsed against me and I was not a mother and the pandemic was a bad dream and I danced like a fool, because nobody knew me and it was absolutely perfect.
After the show I floated, exhilarated, with the tide of other concertgoers down the street toward my car. The old self that had been begging to be let out was happy, but I could also sense a new self that had been born that night, one I couldn’t have imagined as a teenager attached to her friends. I’m a person who goes to concerts alone, I thought as I navigated toward the freeway that would take me back home, where my family slept soundly without me.
A few weeks after the concert I was en route to a friend’s dinner party. It was the perfect time to listen to the band and relive their show. I noticed they’d dropped a new song, and my skin prickled with resonance when I saw the title: “Shot in the Arm.” The phrase was a succinct description of my experience at their concert. For years I’d been ignoring the longing for something that would make me interested in my own life. I needed the strong stuff of pleasure, risk, and newness to course through my veins and remind me that I’m alive, that I exist apart and outside and above my roles as a wife and a mother.
As I listened to the song, I thought about the writing retreat I’d applied for that week. It felt like a scary, wild investment in myself, to fly across the country to work on a novel that might never be published. But one small risk can make you a different person. I knew that going to the concert alone had given me the courage to apply for the workshop.
I glanced at the San Gabriel Mountains on my right, jutting into the sky and looking black against the lavender dusk, the same mountains I’d traveled past hundreds of times since I was a teenager. Time and memory collapsed and all the selves I’d ever been hovered together, creating a multidimensional sensation, like a 2D character come to life. I was the teen feeling free and sexy, the grad student blowing off steam at a house party, the young professional wondering if she even wanted kids, the working mom trying to find balance. I thanked each of my selves and welcomed them. I welcomed, too, the future selves still unknown to me, who would teach me to be a mother and a writer and a wife and a risk-taker, all in one. As the road stretched on, a familiar lightness bloomed in my chest. What was this expansiveness tinged with hope, so similar to what I felt in those days when I was 17? The word was on the tip of my tongue. Oh yes. Possibility.