Ear worms, I’ve heard them be called. The songs that coil their way through a person’s brain and intrinsically link themselves with memories, some that will remain out of reach, trying to grasp at them as the tune plays somewhere far off and others that are core memories. Memories that evoke a sense of place and time and smell, transporting you back to a specific point in time and space, to a time where you were happy or a time when you were sad. But always a time where the memory and the feeling are strong.

I woke with the song streaming through my head. The opening words, the chorus line as I started to hum them softly, feeling the vibrations in my chest and throat as the low hum turned into soft singing and by the time I was in the shower, the words were coming out fast and furious, belted out with a passion that was both loud and out of tune, but I didn’t care. I never cared when it came to this song, a song that I have loved for a very long time.

“I did my best to notice, when the call came down the line …” as I bound down the stairs and into the kitchen to the groans of my wife, hands coiled around a cup of coffee as she shoots me a look that clearly says ‘not that song again’. The song that I always get stuck, and the song that she’ll threaten to divorce me for every time it is stuck - I can understand that, when she endured nine months of pregnancy and how each morning I would wake, song stuck in my head, blaring it out like her own personal alarm, only for it to fade as I’d held my firstborn in my arms.

I shrug, attempting a smile that I hope is both endearing and innocent, but she shoots me a look that tells me it is anything but. Still, the slight hint of amusement glitters through her eyes and I take that as a win “… come on baby, it’s been a while …” I begin only to be cut off with her ‘two years, six months and three days’ with an accuracy that startles me for a second, not because I don’t know how old my daughter is, but because of the quickness and ease that it comes out with.

Pouring my own cup of coffee, I took my usual seat next to her as I try to gage her mood and try understand it; although, that I know is a far off hope. “Baby, it’s just a song …” I try, as she sips at her coffee and shoots me another look, clearly irritated with my inability to understand her or what I am meant to know, as though my lack of clairvoyance is an issue in that moment.

And then it hits me.

Like a thud to the gut as I realise what she’s telling me, and how each time it’s been stuck there’s been a shift or change in our lives. Nine months of pregnancy, our daughter’s first steps, her first words … but the last time it was stuck like this, I swallow and reach for her hand, squeezing it assuringly and getting her to look at me. “Are you … are we …?” I began, trying to formulate the words that I want to say, but quite unable to at that moment in time.

A nod is all it takes, a nod and a smile, and I know then that this song, this wonderful and annoying song will be our song for the next nine months. Until we get to hold our second born child in our arms.