It is 1989. My father walks into my room. I’m listening to the White Album he bought me a few weeks earlier, and he wants to join. We sit together on my bed, saying nothing, just listening. Helter Skelter, While My Guitar Gently Weeps, Happiness Is a Warm Gun, Savoy Truffle… just to name a few.
Once the record stops playing, I tell him I’ve found a new song and play it for him. He doesn’t like it. He knows the song, but says the lyrics are weird. He does agree the bassline is pretty good.
Now, my English isn’t perfect yet, so I had written down the lyrics as I understood them. And yes, they were a little weird. Still, I listened to that song every day and loved it.
A few days later, my friend Atilla comes over to say goodbye. He’s going to Turkey to get married, his parents want him to start his own family. That gets me thinking about kids, and I start to imagine what it would mean for me to have children later in life.
While pondering this, I’m again listening to that same song, and suddenly I understand the sentence:
“We only have timechildren.”
In my mind, it was John Lennon telling me: don’t waste your time having kids, you only live once. Do what you want to do.
Fast forward about ten years. I’m almost 26, in a beautiful relationship with Tamara and her daughter Soraya, who is four years old. I find myself explaining to a judge at city hall why I want to adopt Soraya, and I get a little nervous. Not because of the conversation with the judge, but because earlier that day, I’d had a talk with a colleague.
We were talking about that song, and he told me: “Dude, you totally misunderstood that sentence. ‘We only have time, children’ is an English saying, something like: enjoy your kids while they’re still young. It’s not about thinking your time is too valuable to have kids or anything.”
I can’t remember what the judge asked me. I just said yes to everything she said, and in the end I added: “I only have time-children.” She looked at me and shook her head. I smiled and said, “I’m okay. I love her.”
Although I realized I had totally gotten it wrong at a young age, I never had children of my own. And I still think it’s because I made that decision back then. Right or wrong, I don’t regret it. Now I’m married to luba, and she has two kids, who I love as if they were my own. So I’m in a good space.
Still, I often think about that 16-year-old boy and the feeling that led to one of the most important decisions of my life.
P.S. Curious what song I misheard so profoundly it helped me decide the shape of my life? Let’s just say Lennon was barking up the wrong tree.