There is a Borgore song called “Unicorn Zombie Apocalypse.” My son liked Borgore. I did too. I liked that song especially. So when there was a show in Santa Cruz, I bought tickets, and it ended up being the two of us going, and off we went. He was nineteen.

I felt old the moment we walked in, probably before we even walked in. This was a young crowd, a loud crowd, a very electronic crowd, and I was somebody’s mom. But my son was there, next to me, and I would have felt old in a lot worse places for a lot worse reasons.

It was packed. Shoulder to shoulder, the kind of crowd that moves as one big body. And my son, all night, kept making room for me. Kept shifting, angling, clearing a little pocket of space so I could see, so I wasn’t getting crushed, so I could just be there. I noticed it every time he did it, and every time it got me a little, because I spent his whole childhood looking out for him, and here he was in a sea of people his own age, quietly looking out for me.

We nodded along. That’s mostly what you do at a show like that. With electronic music it’s beats more than songs. I just needed to be next to him in the noise and the lights, nodding along to Unicorn Zombie Apocalypse, a middle-aged woman having the time of her life.

The kids around us kept saying how cute it was. A mom and her son at a Borgore show. They meant it kindly, and they were right, and it did make me feel about a hundred years old, and I did not care even a little. Let them think it’s cute. It was cute. My grown son took his mother to a show, and made room for her in the crowd, and I’ll take “cute” all day for that.

I keep coming back to how lucky I felt. Because I know what it is to be the parent nobody makes room for. I have written enough in these pages about showing up to things alone, about being the one who came when no one else did. And here was my son, nineteen years old, with a whole life and a whole world of his own, and he let his mom in it. That is not a small thing. I know exactly how not-small it is.

And then we got in the car to drive home. I don’t know how it happened, or who put it on, but somewhere on the way back, Tom Petty came on. “Free Fallin’.” And the two of us sang it. All the way home, my son and I, singing Tom Petty in the car after a Borgore show.

For one night he pulled me all the way into his world, the beats and the lights and the unicorn zombies, and made room for me in it. And then on the way home, without either of us planning it, we headed back to my generation. Tom Petty. A song older than he is. Two people who came up in completely different music generations meeting in the middle of a dark car on Highway 17, both knowing every word.

He tried to look out for me in the crowd. I’d tried to look out for him his whole life. And somewhere between his generation’s music and mine, on the drive home, we were just two people who loved each other, singing.

Free fallin’. Both of us. All the way home.