The blues is what it's all about

There must be many ways of defining the blues as a musical genre, but it seems to me that one way would be in terms of asymmetrical knowledge. That is, blues singers typically don't know enough, or know more than they want to. Think of B.B. King, for example, in 'Three O'Clock Blues':

Now here it is three o'clock in the mornin'
And I can't even close my eyes
It's three o'clock in the mornin', baby
I can't even close my eyes
Well, you know I can't find my baby
And I can't be satisfied.

Where is she? An all-night whisky joint? Another man's bed? B.B. doesn't know - and that's precisely the problem. On the other hand, Albert King sometimes mourns the state of knowing too much. In 'Get Out of My Life,' for instance, he says goodbye to his woman because he knows exactly how she feels:

Get out of my life, woman; you don't love me no more
I said, get out of my life, woman; you don't love me no more

Given such problems - staying on good terms with a woman is hard, in the world of the blues - it's not very surprising that there aren't many blues songs about parenthood. Blind Willie McTell and Robert Johnson are generally more worried about a delivery from romantic suffering than they are about the delivery room. Nonetheless, I would argue that at least in one sense - in the sense of an asymmetrical knowledge - there's a way in which blues songs echo parenthood rather usefully.

Here's what I mean. A few months ago, Cleo began to complain rather consistently about an aching stomach. We had no idea what it could be: was she simply hungry? No; at times she was momentarily doubled over in pain. A food allergy of some sort? No, it didn't seem so: she's always eaten dairy, and when we eliminated that and glutens from her diet as an experiment, nothing improved. Miralax and an X-ray were no better. She continued to tell us, once or twice a day, that her stomach really hurt; some days, her teachers told us that she had been unable to nap, as a result.

It was, I found, the not knowing that was hardest. We were letting her down, we felt, as parents - and yet, of course, neither we nor the pediatrician could get inside her. Was it really a serious pain? What was causing it? We simply didn't know. And then, finally, we started giving her probiotic pills in the morning. Cleo's been on a number of antibiotics in her little life - Lyme disease; ear infections - and it seems that they may simply have worn down her digestive tract. After a good week of probiotics, her complaints more or less dried up. And now it's rare that she mentions any discomfort at all.

There are still, though, things that we don't understand. Yesterday, I found myself momentarily stunned by the tendons in her ankles. How did her body know how to grow, to evolve, in that way? I know, I know: nearly every body obeys such a basic organic logic. And yet that sense of being wholly exterior to her - a mere observer, rather than somehow responsible for her - felt both amazing and crushing.

So, then. Middle-class parenthood is not the terrain of classic bluesmen. But the two may not be wholly irreconcilable. After all, with the change of a mere word or two, B.B. King's jeremiad, above, could be made into a suitable anthem for new parents:

Now here it is three o'clock in the mornin'
And I can't even close my eyes
It's three o'clock in the mornin', baby
I can't even close my eyes
Well, you know I hear my baby
And I can't be satisfied.

What's wrong? Who knows? And so we sing the blues.