It’s strange how certain songs can come to mean different things at different times of our lives. The line “child with a child pretending” from “Little Green” is on Joni Mitchell’s Blue, an album I played obsessively when it first came out in 1971. Even though it was released around the time of my divorce, it was only decades later that I heard “Little Green” with my heart as well as my ears. The lyrics refer to the baby Mitchell gave up for adoption, but it could apply equally to my first pregnancy when I was 18, a baby giving birth to a baby. Not only was I unprepared for motherhood, but I was also completely clueless about caring for a baby with severe Down Syndrome. There were no happy endings for Joni or for me, and both of our children were lost in different ways.

My marriage was a highway strewn with broken glass, and after ten years of walking barefoot on that glass, I became a single mother of three little kids.

I felt abandoned--broke, uneducated, unwanted. I failed to understand that my husband and I had been children playing house with badly written scripts, but “Little Green” was not the song that moved me then. At that time, I was still stuck in a teenage dream of love, yearning to be rescued, swept off my feet, taken care of. When the 50th anniversary of Blue rolled around this year, I began listening to it in full again, and that’s when the poignant line from “Little Green” suddenly stood out as if it were printed on the air in neon and flashing lights. It helped me begin to forgive myself, to forgive my husband, to look at my past through the far end of a telescope and gain some perspective on what happened to my marriage. Of course, becoming a mother too young wasn’t the only reason it failed, but I was able to find the younger me in that song, in that line, in a completely new way. And the soundtrack of my life started playing a different tune.

Nikki Hardin is a writer of stories, musings, and memories. Her poetry has been published in Riverteeth Journal. She was the founder and publisher of skirt!, a monthly women’s magazine in Charleston, South Carolina. You can reach her at nikki@thedailynikki.com.