Ep. 13 When AC/DC Influences Your Kid (What We Pass Down Beyond the Wounds)

We spend so much energy trying not to pass down our pain - we forget we're also passing down our magic. The songs. The rituals. The way we recover after we lose it. The way we honour a quiet no. This episode started with Thunderstruck playing in a delivery room and ended with a six-year-old teaching me about boundaries. It's about generational patterns - the ones worth keeping.

Book 1:1 here

Transcript

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Hey, I'm Leslie Turner. I'm a mom, a somatic practitioner, and an intuitive coach. This is the Intuitive Drop. Short conversations about emotional truth, the nervous system, and living from your intuition in real life without losing your mind along the way. Let's drop in. Hey, hey, everybody. So this episode came from a dance party in my living room that turned into one of those full circle moments that I totally wasn't expecting. And then my kid humbled me at the end of it, which, yeah, that sounds about right. But before I get into that, I need to set the scene. Okay, picture this: a hospital room, me, I'm 38 years old, I've got fuzzy slippers on. I'm ready to evict a human from my body at any moment. My husband Jarrett is sitting beside me. He is 41 at the time, really into classic rock, classic country, kind of diehard. And he goes, Let's play the baby some music. Now, you might think in that really tender, sacred about to become parents moment, he would choose something soft or meaningful, something you'd hear in a movie montage about a new life beginning. But no, he chose Thunderstruck by ACDC. Full volume, held the phone up to my belly like he was introducing my unborn child to his greatest heroes. And my son kicked, like immediately. Like he'd been waiting his whole gestational period for someone to finally play something worth moving to. And Jarrett looked at me like, yep, that's my kid. And I couldn't argue with that. So fast forward, Tyson is now six. And last weekend we were having a dance party in the living room. I was solo parenting. And because that's just something that he and I do, actually, Jared joins in every once in a while, but it's it's a Tyson and me thing. And then I put on Thunderstruck. And Tyson immediately, without hesitation, grabs a pair of drumsticks and starts absolutely destroying my Ottoman. Full commitment, eyes closed, living his best life. And I just stood there thinking, he has no idea. He has no idea that this was the first song he ever heard, that his dad held up a phone to my belly and played it before he even took his first breath, that his little body responded to this before he was even born. It was already in him. And that's when it kind of hit me like an aha. We spend so much energy as parents, as people doing the inner work, as moms who've read the books and done the therapy and downloaded all the parenting apps. We spend so much energy trying not to pass down our wounds and our conditioning, our anxiety, the people pleasing, the way we shut down when we're overwhelmed, the voice that sounds a little too much like our own mother when we're at the end of our rope. And we're so focused on what we might be breaking that we completely forget we're also passing down our magic. And magic isn't always glitter and grand gestures. Sometimes it's in the way you laugh, the way you repair, the way you apologize, the way you dance like no one's watching, even when someone very much is. They're absorbing your nervous system, your humor, your resilience, your rituals, the songs you play, the phrases you repeat, and the way you handle hard days and good days. It all lands somewhere. And I want to keep you here for a second because I know some of you are listening to this and thinking, I'm not passing down magic. I'm just trying to survive parenthood. Or I'm working too much and I'm too tired. I snap, I forget things, I feed them cereal for dinner more than I want to admit. So let me tell you a story. This is not my story. I borrowed this from a thread I I saw. There was a mom who'd had her hours cut at work. Money was tight. And so she had to pull back on groceries, on extras, on luxuries, and all the things that she thought made her a good mom. But one thing she kept doing, one really small thing, was taking her little girl to the drive-thru, getting the cheapest thing on the menu. And then they'd sit together in the parking lot and watch music videos on her phone. And that mom felt like she was failing. She thought, someday my daughter is going to look back on this and know we were struggling. Someday she's going to resent this moment. And years later, when things were better and more financially stable, her daughter turned to her and said, Hey mom, can we do that again? The drive-thru and the music videos? She had no idea about the money, absolutely none. But what she remembered was her mom. Fully present, just the two of them, music playing, nowhere else to be, nowhere else to go. Why am I tearing up over this? I have heard this story a couple times now. But I think what I'm getting at is we think they're tracking our stress, but they're really tracking our connection. We think that they're measuring what we couldn't provide them, and really they're measuring how it feels to be with us. We are so convinced that we are screwing them up. And sometimes the things we think are the worst parts are the things they're going to crave when they're grown. My kid is being raised by two people in their mid-40s currently with strong opinions about music and absolutely zero shame about it. And so my kiddo doesn't know a single current song out there, but he knows Thunderstruck and he knows Paradise City. His favorite song, and I wish I was kidding on this one, is uh Cotton Eye Joe right now. He regularly sings the theme to Smokey and the Bandit. You remember that movie? And his other favorite song, which is not my finest parenting moment, but Dragula by Rob Zombie. Thanks for that, Jair. He is going to walk into the world with the most gloriously uncool, deeply specific, completely confident taste, because that's what's being given to him by us. The goal was never to become one of those blank slate parents. It was to become conscious enough to choose what you carry forward. And a lot of what you're carrying, the joy, the humor, the music that moves you, the weird specific things that make you you, your kids are catching all of it, whether you're trying to pass it on or not. Now, the end of this story. I posted the dance party and the baby bump listening to the cell phone music on Instagram. And it got seen by a lot of people, which felt great. And then I showed it to Tyson. And here's the thing: I didn't even know he fully understood what posting or social media means. He's scrolled uh YouTube in the past, but I'd have never shown him Instagram. And I don't really scroll it with him looking at it. I didn't think he had a concept of what it meant by posting and having it public. But he looked at me very seriously after seeing the video and he said, Did you post this? And I said, Oh, yeah. And he goes, Take it down. What? Oh, okay. Now, to be fair, I you couldn't really see his face or any defining characteristics of him, but he was drumming and being vulnerable. And something in him just knew. He didn't necessarily have the language for why. He just knew it didn't feel right. So if you saw that post on Instagram, you'll notice I took it down. Because here's what that moment meant for me. We talk so much about raising kids who know their own boundaries, who can say no, who trust what feels right in their body, even when they can't totally explain it. And then sometimes, without even realizing it, we as parents override that knowing in the most public way possible. We post them or their face, their location, their vulnerable moments, their funny ones, and we share them with thousands of people before they're old enough to have a say. Now, I'm not here to shame anyone because I've done this, but I have some hard lines that I do follow that feel right for my family. So I do not post his face. The only people who get pictures of his face are family. I never post while we're still at a specific location. There are no school names or identifiers. And there's never another person's child without explicit permission. Now, these aren't rules that I read somewhere that are must-haves. They're just things that I landed on because I kept seeing it and asking myself, whose story is this? And mostly it was his. He said, Don't post that, mom. He didn't even fully understand why. His body just knew. And that's intuition. Not loud, not dramatic, just a quiet, no, no, thank you. The same kind of knowing I am trying so desperately to help grown women reconnect with every day because they have been taught to override this voice. Override it to please, override it to be easier, to be safer, but we need their inner voice to be loud. So this moment wasn't just about social media. It was about me proving to him in real time that his internal compass matters more than my external validation. If I'm asking him to trust what feels safe to him, to use his voice when something doesn't feel right, I have to honor it when he does. That is the whole point. I'm not trying to be a perfect parent. I will never live up to that title, but I am trying to be here to listen to him in the moment, to be present. The magic we pass down isn't just your taste in music. It's the moments when we show them that their voice matters, especially to us. And if you're worried about what you're passing down, that alone tells me that you are paying attention. And paying attention changes everything. If anything in today's episode resonated with you, whether it's that full circle moment that you're passing down without realizing it, or the things you thought were failures that might actually be your child's favorite memory, or just thinking about what your own guidelines are around sharing your kids online, I would love to hear from you. Find me on Instagram at the Leslie Turner. And if you're curious about going deeper into your own patterns, I have a new container called Parenting the Pattern that is specifically for moms. Until next time, you're doing better than you think.