Save it from the funny tricks of time
A love letter to the lyrics of Slipping Through My Fingers by Abba
An everyday moment passes between mother and daughter.
Schoolbag in hand, she leaves home in the early morning
Waving goodbye with an absent-minded smile
I watch her go with a surge of that well known sadness
And I have to sit down for a while
The feeling that I’m losing her forever
And without really entering her world
I’m glad whenever I can share her laughter
That funny little girl
The girl waves, unthinkingly. The mum has a premonition. Soon the girl will be gone. Soon it won’t be the goodbye that’s taken for granted, but her.
It’s a scary realisation, when you realise the essential unknowability of someone who is part you. Our consciousness, our interior lives, are ours alone. “Her world” is just that.
A place that already needs an invite.
You don’t hear many pop songs about parenting. About its vulnerability. About the confusing mix of contentment, frustration and fear. About a success metered in diminishing need. About trying to enjoy the now while balancing the scales of regret and fear.
It’s not something pop addresses that much. Pop rarely goes all in with Mum and Dad. Pop is the stroppy teenager. It says wouldn’t it be nice if we were older. It asks whatever happened to the teenage dream.
But maybe it should. Because while Slipping Through My Fingers is a story few pop fans could relate to, it resonates universally. It’s not She’s Leaving Home, the Beatles’ sad and brittle elegy for bereft and bitter parents, waking up to a world with new rules they don’t understand. While we feel sorry for them, we know they only have themselves to blame. Our sympathies lie with the teenage girl. Her escape is rebellious, but desperate.
This song is different. There is so much love, on both sides, and its impact is universal. We can all see ourselves in this relationship. I like to imagine that Mamma Mia started here — that someone asked, what would be the story of this Mum and this daughter? And look how big that became.
That’s not something most pop songs could do.
But then most pop isn’t Abba.
Sleep in our eyes, her and me at the breakfast table
Barely awake I let precious time go by
Then when she’s gone, there’s that odd melancholy feeling
And a sense of guilt I can’t deny
What happened to the wonderful adventures
The places I had planned for us to go
Well, some of that we did, but most we didn’t
And why, I just don’t know
Slipping Through My Fingers is from Abba’s last album, called The Visitors.
It’s an album so full of finality and loss it should come with a pair of curtains that close slowly as it ends. Characters in these songs are haunted by unwelcome visions: the last track is called Like An Angel Walking Through My Room, the title track features hallucinations induced by a nervous breakdown, and a lover realises she’s being lied to in One Of Us.
It’s as if the sense of something passing confers the power of second sight. Though Slipping Through My Fingers offers a warm moment amid the album’s icy collapse, its message is really not much different. It’s a mother’s momentary glimpse of an undeniable truth about her increasingly independent child. Like all parents she knows her job has been to nurture another person well enough that they don’t need her anymore. We all forget that sometimes, but occasionally parenting’s fatal flaw will flash before our eyes. We’ll realise we have “let precious time go by.”
Something we take for granted soon becomes a source of regret.
It’s the schoolbag that gets me. The breakfast table too. Those small emblems of everyday family life, contrasted with the huge emotions playing out beneath the surface: melancholy, guilt, loss, sadness.
It is tender song, full of love, and devastating.
Sometimes I wish that I could freeze the picture
And save it from the funny tricks of time
The future becomes the past so quickly we barely notice the present.
We are always susceptible to “the funny tricks of time”, as Abba call it, but children make us even more so. There’s so much to look back on, and so much hope and fear of what’s to come, and so much to think about right now. It’s often hard to stay in the moment.
Slipping Through My Fingers reminds us parenting is a test of presence over time. Of being over thinking. It demands patience but garners little gratitude. It is its own reward. A parent’s job, or at least their aim, is to bring their fullest attention to the moment in hand. It’s actually what our children want and need. More than that it’s the only thing we can really give them.
We can’t freeze the picture. But we can try to be fully present in it.
Slipping through my fingers all the time
I try to capture every minute
The feeling in it
Since moving to Bristol I have way more time with our children. They’re not as old as the teenager in this song, but the time still feels precious. I cycle home in fifteen minutes. We get to eat dinner together far more often than we used to. I can sit with them at the breakfast table, barely awake. The office is so near I can even sometimes wave them off as they’re carrying their schoolbags.
When we were planning our move from London, I pictured moments like this. I imagined it would feel like winning at life. But it’s not the kind of achievement that comes with flags and fireworks. No one’s going to high five you. You don’t get 360 appraisals or any on-the-spot feedback. The joy, as well the regret, is a slow-burn. Both are always there, underlying, flaring up now and then. You’re aware of each not as an event but as a process. It can be hard to know or feel like you’re doing well.
And children, like all of us, have an interior life. You can never really know what’s in their mind. Slipping Through My Fingers is the moment a mum realises that. It’s a brief flare-up of joy and regret. She knows the girl won’t see or remember the absent-minded wave, not with the same significance as she does. It feels like a tragedy, but really it’s liberating. It’s a reminder for all of us to simply be here now, wherever and whenever that is.
Slipping Through My Fingers sounds like a song of loss. But if we hear it well enough, it lets us admit our vulnerability. It asks us to find the courage to celebrate what we have.
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