"She Used to Be Mine" is a eulogy for someone who is still alive. The singer looks in the mirror and describes a woman she no longer recognizes. She lists that woman's flaws and her kindness, her mistakes and her stubborn hope. Then she says the girl is gone. The grief in the song is real grief, and it is grief for herself.
The song does not stop at mourning. In its last verse the singer admits she still wants that girl back. She wishes she could start over and write a different ending for the girl she knew. In the bridge, the child she is carrying reminds her to fight a little to bring the fire back. The lament turns, quietly, into a longing for restoration.
The book of Ruth tells of a woman who said almost exactly this. She came home from a foreign country and told her old neighbors not to call her by her name anymore. The woman they knew was gone. Scripture also knows how her story ends.
The Song and the Show
Waitress began as a small film. Adrienne Shelly wrote and directed it, and it premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2007. Shelly did not live to see it. She was murdered three months before the premiere. The film became a modest hit, and its story was later turned into a musical. Sara Bareilles wrote the music and lyrics, Jessie Nelson the book, and Diane Paulus directed. When it opened on Broadway on April 24, 2016, it was the first Broadway musical with women in all four top creative roles.
The heroine is Jenna, a waitress and gifted pie baker in a small Southern town. She is married to Earl, who controls and abuses her. She discovers she is pregnant and does not want to be. She saves money in secret, hoping to win a pie contest and escape. "She Used to Be Mine" comes late in the show, after Earl finds and takes the money she has hidden. It is the moment when, as Bareilles put it, Jenna feels she has lost all hope of saving herself.
It was the first song Bareilles wrote for the show. She has said she was "coming from the closest place in myself" and called it very autobiographical. She described it as being about waking up and realizing that part of you no longer recognizes who you are. The song has since outgrown the show. Thousands of people have recorded their own versions, many of them with no connection to the theater at all.
Is This Naomi?
Naomi left Bethlehem during a famine with her husband and two sons. In Moab all three men died. Years later she walked home with only her daughter-in-law Ruth beside her. The whole town turned out to look at her, and the women asked one another, "Is this Naomi?"
Her answer is the song's chorus in Hebrew form. "Call me not Naomi, call me Mara: for the Almighty hath dealt very bitterly with me. I went out full, and the LORD hath brought me home again empty" (Ruth 1:19–21). Naomi means pleasant. Mara means bitter. She asks her neighbors to stop using the name of the woman they remember, because that woman is gone.
Jenna does the same thing in the mirror. She speaks of herself in the third person, as if describing a friend who moved away. The girl who was reckless and hopeful still exists in her memory. She no longer exists in the apron and the diner. Like Naomi, Jenna tells the truth about how much she has lost. Neither woman pretends.
Scripture lets Naomi say it. The book does not correct her or rush her toward a lesson. It records the new name she gave herself, and then it keeps telling her story.
Thou God Seest Me
Another woman in Genesis fits Jenna's circumstances even more closely. Hagar was a servant in Abram's household, pregnant with a child she had not chosen, and treated harshly by the woman who held power over her. She ran. In the wilderness, by a spring of water, the angel of the LORD found her and asked two questions: "Hagar, Sarai's maid, whence camest thou? and whither wilt thou go?" (Genesis 16:8).
Those are the questions Jenna asks herself in the mirror. Where did the girl I was go? Where am I going now? Hagar could answer only the first. She knew what she was fleeing. She had no idea where she was headed.
The angel's instruction to go back is hard to read, and it is no warrant for sending anyone back to abuse. What has lasted from the story is what Hagar said next. She is often called the only person in Scripture to give God a name. "She called the name of the LORD that spake unto her, Thou God seest me" (16:13). In Hebrew it is El Roi, the God who sees. A frightened, pregnant woman whom no one in the household truly saw discovered that she had been seen all along.
Jenna's song is sung alone, to her reflection. No one else is in the room. Hagar's story insists that a woman alone in the wilderness is not as alone as she believes.
A Restorer of Thy Life
In Waitress, the pregnancy Jenna dreaded becomes the turning point. Soon after the song, she goes into labor. At the hospital she gives birth to a daughter and names her Lulu. When Earl reminds her of the promise he forced from her, that she would never love the baby more than him, she holds her daughter and finds the courage she could not find for herself. She tells him she wants a divorce and orders him out. The child she did not want gives her back the woman she thought was gone.
Naomi's story turns the same way. Ruth stays with her, marries Boaz, and bears a son. The same women who once asked "Is this Naomi?" gather again. "Blessed be the LORD," they tell her, "And he shall be unto thee a restorer of thy life, and a nourisher of thine old age: for thy daughter in law, which loveth thee, which is better to thee than seven sons, hath born him." Then "Naomi took the child, and laid it in her bosom" (Ruth 4:14–16).
The woman who went out full and came home empty ends the book with her arms full. No one calls her Mara anymore. The neighbors use her real name, and the story uses it too.
The prophet Joel gave that kind of restoration a promise. After a plague of locusts had stripped the land, God said, "And I will restore to you the years that the locust hath eaten" (Joel 2:25). The years are not erased. They were eaten, and the text admits it. What God promises is to give back what they took.
A New Thing
The song longs to go back. Its deepest wish is to recover the girl who used to be. That is an honest wish, and most people who have lost themselves share it.
Scripture honors the wish and then goes further. Through Isaiah, God told exiles who were mourning what they had lost: "Remember ye not the former things, neither consider the things of old. Behold, I will do a new thing; now it shall spring forth; shall ye not know it? I will even make a way in the wilderness, and rivers in the desert" (Isaiah 43:18–19).
Naomi did not get her old life back. Her husband and sons stayed buried in Moab. What she received was something she could not have imagined on the road home. The child she held was Obed, "the father of Jesse, the father of David" (Ruth 4:17). The woman who renamed herself Bitter became the great-grandmother of Israel's king.
Hagar found her spring in the wilderness, the way Isaiah promised. Jenna found her courage in a hospital bed with a newborn in her arms. In each story, what came back was more than what was lost. The girl in the mirror is gone, as the song says. The God who sees her is making something new out of what she has left.