Sophie and I are tucked into our side-by-side hotel beds, waiting for the midnight to arrive. Two things will happen at midnight: Taylor Swift’s new album will drop, and Sophie will turn 23.

Albums are not released anymore. Now they drop, like fat dollops of cookie dough onto a sheet pan, or a water balloons on rough pavement.

“It was really nice of Taylor to plan this for your birthday,” I say.

“Are you sure you don’t want me to use headphones?” Sophie asks, a little surprised that I am counting down with her. It’s a leisurely wait, but I don’t mind.

“Definitely,” I say. “I’ve never been part of a Taylor drop. I want the whole experience.” I really do. My girls live in Montreal and Toronto now. I miss their singing in the backseat of my car.

We pass the time until the drop by taking an online quiz: What Class of Dungeons & Dragons Character Are You?

It’s harder than it sounds. Sixty questions long, it feels more like a psych hospital admission questionnaire, something with which I am familiar.

“Would you say I’m resilient and able to bounce back after failure?” Sophie asks me.

“Are you kidding? You’re incredibly resilient,” I say. “I don’t know how you do what you do.”

She scowls slightly, the same worried baby face she’s had since she was an infant. She is overthinking this quiz, as am I. We are the best overthinkers in the business.

“Would you say I am willing to make deals with terrible people to complete important tasks?” I ask.

“Ooh, that’s a hard one. I try not to,” she says.

“Yeah, but I sort of have to, on a regular basis.”

“Ah, good point,” she says, laughing. She knows who I’m talking about. Real-life stepmothering is not for the weak, in a culture that borrows heavily from Disney myths. You can offer three-course nutritious meals, warm hellos, and unlimited help with homework, and still hear back from the other castle that you’re slipping the kids poison apples.

We tally our quiz results: Sophie is 95% paladin. She is pleased with this result. I am displeased to learn that I am 80% barbarian. I wanted very badly to be a bard.

“I was just honest.” I am now pleading (whining) my case to the paladin in the other hotel bed. “I allowed for moral ambiguity and the experience of my years. There are bad people in the world. I am not going to pretend I love them or care about their welfare. There are people who DESERVE to be eaten by gelatinous cubes or clubbed by orcs. If that makes me a barbarian, well, then I’m a barbarian.”

“It’s not bad to be a barbarian,” she tells me. “It just means you’re passionate…about what you’re fighting for.”

This quiz does help pass the time as we wait for Taylor. Sophie’s excitement is growing. Now she’s furiously typing on her phone: her group chat is blowing up. This is a BIG drop, apparently.

It’s a big birthday too, from where I’m sitting. I can’t quite reconcile the 4-pound infant of April 19, 2001 with this flushed, happy human slash paladin across the nightstand from me. Her hair is shiny black and coiled, still damp from her bath earlier.

Before Sophie dropped, I prayed she’d get her father’s walnut curls. I still don’t know why God only seems to entertain small requests.

Me in 2000: Please, God, give her curls like her father’s.

God: And so it shall be! Your firstborn shalt have the curly hair for which you have prayed!

Me in 2024: Also, please, no more war, no more school shootings, no more Donald Trump, Putin, MAGA, floods, earthquakes, rapes, racism, misogyny, forced birthing, animal abuse, honor killings, billionaires, police brutality, tiny plastics, stillborns, suicides, and cancer.

God: Your firstborn still hath great hair. As does your secondborn, especially when she uses a diffuser.

Me: Yeah, thanks, but hey! That was 23 years ago. Could I get something else off my list now?

God: …

It’s cozy in room 1112. I don’t understand all of the terribleness outside our hotel room window and so far beyond. The U.S. is effed. The world is effed. Even sweet Canada to our north is effed. We’re in Toronto tonight — Hattie’s university turf. The city glitters like a broken mirror around the CN Tower needle. So many homeless souls, with nowhere to bathe a body, or build a life. During the day, we step around ragged souls trying to sleep on warm subway grates, and glide by others who have wedged themselves into the city’s darkest nooks and crannies.

I’m feeling lucky right now and guilty for it at the same time. It’s sometimes hard for me to believe a sentient force could have created this universe without feeling compelled to intervene in it, to make right of at least some of the wrongs. The nuns of my childhood blamed the world’s unpleasantness on free will. All mess is our fault, and Jesus took a big one for the team.

It makes no more sense to me now than it did then. If anything, I have more anger now, toward a God who grants curls, but not safety, to girls, the God who shrugs at suffering. It’s no wonder we do, too, most of the time.

My hotel bed is absurdly comfy. We are safe, sheltered, and waiting for Taylor Swift’s Tortured Poets Department. The world is this small, for tonight.

The group chat is blowing up. Sophie can’t barely contain herself. My firstborn is thriving creatively. A jazz singer with one year left at McGill, she has her shit together, despite having a lot of shit to deal with. My good fortune is a front row to her life and her sister’s. It feels like wholly undeserved blind luck.

When midnight comes, I turn my thoughts to Taylor.

“It’s out!” Sophie yelps, switching to Spotify.

Fortnight fills the room.

I’m searching for lyrics online. “Found them!”

“Already? Wow,” Sophie says.

I was supposed to be sent away
But they forgot to come and get me

“Okay, I love that line,“ I say.

I was a functioning alcoholic
'Til nobody noticed my new aesthetic

All of this to say
I hope you're okay but you're the reason
And no one here's to blame
But what about your quiet treason?

I kind of love it, but I wait for the songbird’s take. She also kind of loves it. Taylor’s lyrics are pleasing for a lot of us writer types: extreme, imperfect, wetly witty.

We work our way through the whole album. It gets sweeter and thicker as it goes: a melancholy molasses, run through with streaks of blood. The Taylor detractors will go wild, we know it. The new album is primal, raw, messy, huge, an easy target for hating online. The forecast: a summer of cicadas and viral misogynists.

I can’t worry about the cicadas or the misogynists tonight. We’ve listened to the whole thing, Side A through Side D, and it’s good. My sleepy meds have finally kicked in and that blessed (see, that’s a good use of the word) slumber is creeping in around my ears.

“Happy birthday, baby girl,” I say.

“Thanks for staying awake with me for the drop,” she says. She’s happy, my Swiftie birthday girl slash paladin. She snaps off her bedside lamp. The only sound in room 1112 is the brown noise app we both use for sleeping. At 2 a.m. Taylor will release a second album, something Sophie suspected she might do. Such birthday bounty.

Outside the window, Toronto glitters on.

Jennifer Mattern