Your mom’s playlist in the car was annoying until you caught yourself singing every word in college.

Repetition installs things whether you consent or not. Hundreds of trips to school with the same album meant you learned every word while objecting to it, and years later it comes out of you intact in a room she has never seen. What felt like her taste being imposed turned into something of hers you now carry.

Ask her what the songs were attached to, because there is usually a year, a car, a person behind each one. Make a playlist of them and keep it. Then play her something of yours on the next drive and see whether the traffic goes both ways.