Sunday Pages: “Mother’s Little Helper”

Happy Mother’s Day!

Sunday Pages: “Mother’s Little Helper”

A song by the Rolling Stones.

Dear Reader,

What a drag it is getting old.

Thus begins “Mother’s Little Helper,” the opening track on Aftermath, the Rolling Stones’ fourth studio album. There is some irony here; as recently as two years ago, Mick, Keith & Co. were the highest-grossing live act in all of music. Maybe getting up in years isn’t so bad after all?

But in 1966, when the song came out, Mick Jagger was 23, and my mother was a senior in high school. That means that the song’s titular mother is not even a Baby Boomer. Like Mick, she was born either before or during the Second World War, and if she managed to stave off the feared overdose, is now well into her eighties. Even so, the lyrics could have been written about a mother from any subsequent generation—Boomer, X, Millennial, Z—and will, I’m sure, resonate with whatever the post-Z cohort is called when it’s their turn to assume parenthood:

“Kids are different today,” I hear every mother say.
Mother needs something today to calm her down.
And though she’s not really ill, there’s a little yellow pill.
She goes running for the shelter of her mother’s little helper,
And it helps her on her way, gets her through her busy day.

The nature of the “little helper” might vary. But whether the substance is prescription drugs, like in the song—Valium, at the time; today it would be Xanax—or wine or weed, or Instagram or hot yoga, the underlying sentiment does not change: Motherhood is a difficult, thankless job, and mothers need support!

The Stones remain atop the pyramid of great rock bands, and suffer no shortage of popular success or critical acclaim. Even so, Mick Jagger, to me, seems criminally underrated as a lyricist. When he’s on, he cranks out memorable lines about subjects his contemporaries simply aren’t singing about. This gem from “Paint It, Black” comes to mind:

I see the girls walk by dressed in their summer clothes.
I have to turn my head until my darkness goes.

I mean, that’s raw, and honest, and dark.

What really distinguishes Jagger is his sensitivity. Whether he’s singing about overwhelmed mothers, tortured painters, or the Devil, his sympathy shines through. I hear concern in the lyrics to “Mother’s Little Helper;” I do not hear judgment. In the song, we not only have acknowledgement that motherhood is hard, but exploration of why it is hard: kids being “different,” the thankless drudgery of “cooking fresh food for her husband,” and said husband’s chronic inability to recognize or appreciate all the shit she has to deal with. Men today “just don’t appreciate that you get tired. / They’re so hard to satisfy.” That was true 57 years ago, and remains true now.

“Life’s just much too hard today,” I hear every mother say.
The pursuit of happiness just seems a bore.

If life was much too hard in 1966—before the assassination of Martin Luther King. Jr. and Robert Kennedy, before the Tet Offensive, before Altamont, before Watergate, before Reagan and AIDS and crack, before Fox News and social media and Donald Trump—it hasn’t gotten any easier in the intervening decades. Today’s mothers have to contend with rampant school shootings, fentanyl-laced drugs, the perils of social media and smartphones, cyberbullying, and a mental health crisis related to the pandemic. That’s no picnic.

Not only that, but thanks to Sam Alito, Clarence Thomas, and the fascists Leonard Leo installed on the Supreme Court, pregnant women in red states are now being forced into motherhood, like it or not. That is happening in a climate in which rape and sexual assault are being normalized—most notably, and shamefully, by CNN a few days before Mother’s Day. But then, post Dobbs, the very words “Mother’s Day” have taken on a more ominous connotation.

Jagger hinted at this, too, half a century ago. “Gimme Shelter” is a sort of “The Second Coming” of classic rock—a Yeatsian song he himself described as “apocalyptic.” He sings of the tenuousness of things and the fragility of civilization. There is great foreboding. And he enlists the dazzling vocalist Merry Clayton to bring home the message, which sounds eerily like a prophesy:

Rape! Murder! It’s just a shot away!
It’s just a shot away!

Her inclusion was a last-minute decision. Clayton was famously roused from bed around midnight, whisked to the studio, and in a few short takes, delivered one of rock music’s signature vocal performances—at one point, you can hear Mick gasp in astonishment at the power of her virtuoso singing—before returning to bed a few hours later.

Things are different today. Life is harder today. Getting old is a drag. Catastrophe is just a shot away. We are on the precipice. It can be scary. And it’s harder than ever, it says here, to be a mom.

So today, I’d like to acknowledge and express my gratitude to all the mothers out there— especially my mom, who has always been so loving and supportive of me, and my wife, who is such a caring and wonderful mother to our children. I love you, and I appreciate you.

To all the moms reading this: You probably won’t get what you really want this Mother’s Day, but I hope that, when all is said and done, you get what you need.