“How Noname Helped Me Make Sense of My Relationship With My Mother” is written by a Jewish female who describes her strained relationship with her mother. The author explains how the author being a gay female is a problem for her mother who expects her to “marry a good Jewish man.” She uses different verses from Noname’s songs to show how she came to understand her mother in parts during her lifetime. In the song “Hold Me Up”, Noname says, “Daddy pays the bills, but mama holds me up/Daddy pays the bills, when that ain’t good enough.” The author believes the second verse means that although your mother holds you up sometimes that is not good enough. She goes on to describe how she feels that her mother has been emotionally unavailable to her. There are things her mother is proud of her for like her outspoken nature and resolve but then she is just as quick to tell her that she wants her to be in a heterosexual relationship. The mother asks her “how will you survive?” She goes on to say that there is no solution to these differences, “there is only acceptance.” The author then talks about the song “Bye Bye Baby” in which abortion is a self less act for the mother who is letting her baby go so it can be at a better place. The author can say that she wishes she was never born but that would be “childish” instead, she wants to say that her mother would have thought about this before she decided to become a parent. She wishes her mother had thought about how much impact her mother’s actions and words had on her and if she knew how she made her daughter feel. She concludes by saying that one day she wishes to grow closer to her mother and can find each other.

Personally, I’m not much of a song listener. I haven’t really found a song that I can relate to very personally. However there are definitely songs that have shown me a different perspective or evoke feelings for things I’ve not gone through. For example, I could be listening to a song about heartbreak due to a partner cheating on them. Although I have never been in a relationship myself, I can feel the lyrics or the music of the song and get a sense of what the lyricist or singer might have gone through. Another example is wedding songs. Last year I went to Pakistan to attend seven different weddings of my cousins. Pakistani weddings are generally very loud with all kinds of music and events so now whenever I listen to the songs that were played in the weddings I remember the time I spent in Pakistan with all my cousins and how much fun we had.