“I am either the worst parent in the world or the best parent in the world” is what I texted friend after friend last Thursday as my Lyft chugged toward JFK airport.
The passenger next to me was far less angst-ridden. Owing to her powers of persuasion, my nine-year-old daughter and I were about to fly across the ocean to see her hero.
I have held strong for a good while in the face of my kid’s determination to get me to invest my savings in the Tay-conomy. I love Taylor Swift’s music as much as pretty much any 40-something mom – and I love her new album more than pretty much any critic – but why do we need to behold the artist in the flesh when there’s YouTube and Spotify and the concert movie that’s streaming on Disney+? If the Eras tour T-shirts and sweatshirts are the sought-after talismans of modern girlhood, there’s always eBay.
As part of my ploy to inspire my daughter to shake off her obsession, last summer I organized a huge group mother-daughter outing to the concert movie. Twenty-odd of us loaded up on Sour Patch Kids and concession-stand rosé and danced and sang along inches away from the screen. It was the best night ever.
But the Taylor cries continued. It didn’t help that word kept circulating about other kids disappearing from school for overnight trips to Los Angeles and Miami and Madrid. I told my daughter that paying more than a thousand dollars to attend a concert goes against my core beliefs. When I was her age, my mother took me to klezmer concerts at Jewish festivals that were accessible by the 2 train.
But kids these days! My daughter found tickets that cost a fraction of the average going rate in the US, and made a spiffy PowerPoint presentation. My husband and I frowned. We sighed. And then … we caved. Maybe this would buy us another year without succumbing to her desperate requests for a dog?
Trekking across the world to see a megastar up close is crazy. It’s also the new normal. Thanks in part to the price-gouging practices of Live Nation, which owns Ticketmaster and holds an alleged monopoly on the entire US live music industry, finding affordable tickets even for B-list stars at the arena in my neighborhood is a pipe dream. I grew up hoarding cassette tapes of The Bangles and Cyndi Lauper. I remember the way my parents howled the night I told them I thought we should hire Madonna to perform at my 10th birthday party. But who’s laughing now? Maybe the fat cats at Live Event.
There are two modes to being a parent in the US today: deprive or capitulate. Either way you go, you’re bound to feel rotten and guilty and stupid. According to a recent survey, almost half of parents who take their young children to Disney World go into debt. And then there is the issue of moral debt. Is it so unreasonable that I do not wish to inculcate in my children the belief that a night of live music should come with a four-figure price tag? (Merrick Garland would be proud; he recently sued Live Nation Entertainment for monopolistic practices, which Live Nation denies.)
Which brings us to last week, when I held my nose and sprang for two standing tickets at Murrayfield stadium, a couple of very indirect flights to Edinburgh (at least now I can say I’ve been to Germany and Sweden!), and lined up housing at the home of a friend’s mother who lives on the outskirts of town (this being the Taylor economy, hotel rates were double what they normally are). Within a very frantic day, everything was sorted. A mothering high and low point.
A way more impressive feat: at the show, my daughter managed to worm her way through the crowd and secure a spot in the front row. She waved and waved at her idol like one of those animatronic cats in the windows of beauty salons. And at one point I was fairly sure Taylor waved back to her. After the show – which was as spectacular as everyone says, and during which the crowd danced so hard it registered as seismic activity – a security detail approached my daughter and proffered Taylor’s guitar pick. She just about died. So did I. Maybe I’d been a Swift Scrooge all along.
The following day I posted an Instagram story of my daughter astride the shoulders of the kind Scottish lady who offered to help the kid get an even better view of the Folklore set. The image generated a flood of messages from other moms I know. “About to sell my soul to go in New Orleans.” “Dear lord, we’re going to Vienna.” “My failure to pull off anything like this has made me feel incredibly guilty.”
Was Eras in Edinburgh the best night of my daughter’s life? Without a doubt. Am I the best or worst parent in the world? Yes and yes. Would I ever do something like that again? No. Which I fear means my dog-mom days aren’t a long ways away.
Lauren Mechling is the co-author, with Rachel Dodes, of The Memo: A Novel
