Tag: Amanda Palmer

Fear, Fame, and AFP

Me and Amanda Palmer backstage at The Pageant, November 2010

My grandmother told me not to toot my own horn, which meant that I wasn’t encouraged to take too much pride in my accomplishments. She also believed that you should never enjoy anything too much, or God will punish you. These two beliefs made her life incredibly bleak, and in turn made my childhood not exactly a bowl of cherries. Skip ahead decades of therapy later and I thought I had worked through the issues those two messages had given me. Of course, bedrock issues from childhood aren’t so easily conquered. In fact, one of the things that’s been most disappointing about therapy breakthroughs is that even after you figure out what your personal demon is, the demon doesn’t always go away. Sometimes they do, sometimes the exorcism works and you’re free of that issue – free forever. I love it when that happens, it feels so liberating, but there are some issues that no matter how much cognitive therapy holy water you throw on them, they refuse to let you go.

I have trouble being proud of my accomplishments, because though my grandmother has been dead for years she raised me and she raised me not to be too proud. I’m not sure why taking pride in a job well done was such a sin. Weirdly, you were allowed to work hard to get good at something and then to do it, but once you actually started getting positive attention about it, then you had to not be prideful. It was an odd double message, be good, but not too good. It was good to get good grades and be smart, or good in athletics or whatever, but don’t get a big head about it, don’t get too full of yourself. It was okay for you to be told you were pretty, or smart, or whatever, but you couldn’t call yourself any of that, because that would be getting above yourself. Conversely anything you were bad at, or not perfect at would be pointed out immediately with comments like, “You’re so clumsy. You’re stupid. Etc . . .” I don’t know why she felt it was so wrong to praise success, but totally okay to criticize on the other end so harshly. I wondered in hindsight if she thought cutting me down would help keep me humble, just like not praising me to my face would? At her wake friends came up and told me how proud she was of me and how much she praised my accomplishments. It was news to me, and by that time I had totally taken in her mixed message of succeed, but don’t let yourself enjoy it. Due to my parents divorcing when I was a baby, my grandmother was with me from birth, and the only parent I had from age six when my mother died. She was my only parent, my world, and a lot of her beliefs and behaviors had a profound influence on the person I am today for better and worse.

I have pictures of me with famous people and I’ve posted almost none of them. Actors, singers, other writers who probably fully expected me to post the images on social media, but I didn’t. Why? Because I still can’t shake a terrible discomfort with being that kind of famous. In fact, the picture with this blog of me with Amanda Palmer, singer/song writer/author, almost didn’t get posted with this, because it made me so uncomfortable as if just the picture was bragging, and bragging wasn’t allowed. Then this morning I got the notice that Amanda had dropped a new song from her upcoming album to Patreon’s only, and since I’m a Patreon of her’s I listened to it. Gods, it was so intimate as if she were whispering into my ear, her breath against my hair. The rawness of it, it feeling so personal made me cry, and in that moment I knew that I had to use the picture of the two of us together for this blog. The picture is seven or eight years ago when she came through as one half of the amazing duo that is, The Dresden Dolls. I joined Amanda’s Patreon in part because she seems to thrive on social media and attention, and be much more comfortable with fame than I am. She is one of several people that I’ve tried to study to see if their ease with fame will help my discomfort. What I learned is that I can’t be Amanda Palmer, or anyone else. I have to figure out how to be famous as Laurell K. Hamilton.

I’ve had offers of free stuff, if I’ll just wear their clothes, or use their product and post about it, take pictures of myself in or with it. I accepted one offer of lovely shoes and then I didn’t post any of the pictures when they wanted me to post them. Why? It would take me a few more years to realize it was because the idea of me wearing shoes being possibly able to influence other people to buy them freaked me out.

Any time that I got too much attention in this area I’d sabotage it, not on purpose, not actively, but it was still self-sabotage even if just by procrastination, or losing an email. I’m never so disorganized than when it’s something that might raise my profile higher than it already is, and honestly if my agent didn’t insist on it, I probably wouldn’t say, New York Times #1 best selling author, but I am and my agent has chastised me enough times that I use it.

A journalist on the tour for my latest novel, Serpentine, this summer asked me if I’d thought about where my papers would be donated. It took me a second to realize he meant my archival papers like my drafts, notes, literary detritus and mementos. I was completely at a loss. It hadn’t occurred to me that any college or institute would be interested in my literary fingernail clippings. I explained that I’d been raised not to take too much pride in things and I just couldn’t shake it. He was older than me by a couple of decades, and we talked about the fact that some things that we know are damaging to us, old beliefs we were raised with that hold us back, never leave us. He said something to the effect that you have to stop trying to get rid of the parts that won’t go away, and just accept them. Since he’d been trying to slay his personal demons for at least a decade longer than I have, I appreciated him sharing his insight. It should have been discouraging that twenty years from now I’m still going to be fighting this deep issue, but it wasn’t discouraging, instead it was encouraging. (I cannot find the file with all the interviews from last summer’s tour that would have this wonderful, and professional newspaper journalist’s name in it. I’ve sat on this for two days trying to find the information, until I realized I’m using it as an excuse not to post this blog. When I find it, I’ll post with all his information, but for today, no more procrastinating.)

I’ve had open invitations to come back for radio, blogs, podcasts, and all sorts of wonderful interviews with great people who wanted me to come back any time I wanted, and they meant it. I have not initiated a single return interview except when a new book came out and my publicist told me to do it. Why? I don’t know why, or I didn’t, but I know what issue is behind the behavior.

So, to all the celebrities that tried to get into contact with me, especially early in my career, I’m sorry if I dropped the ball. Sometimes I couldn’t believe you were actually contacting me, like the shy girl who suddenly gets asked out by the most popular guy in school. There must be some mistake, or it’s a cruel joke and will end in ridicule and tears.

I will be trying to post more of the pictures as I find them, and I will try and believe it when people say, come back any time for an interview. I’ll try to be more comfortable with it all. Now that I know what some of the issues are that hold me back in this area I’ll try to move forward as if I don’t have the issue. Fake it until you make it, I guess.

I will at the very least stop torpedoing my opportunities for more publicity and fame. I can’t get rid of the part of me that squirms with embarrassment about me being “famous”, but I can admit it its a problem. I can admit that as successful as I’ve been I probably could have been even more successful if I had been able to embrace that success more wholeheartedly and not missed certain cues. Here’s to being a better dance partner with my success in the future, and kicking this particular inner demon down the road.

Yes, Amanda, You Can be an Artist and a Mother

 

Motherhood does not define me. There, I’ve said it.  I love my daughter dearly.  She brought new worlds and concepts into my life that I would never have discovered without being a parent; but it was not a natural role for me.  I never came to a point where I thought it was easy because every time I got the hang of it, she got bigger, older, changed, so that it was like learning the rules all over again.  Parenting is like dating someone who changes every few months, but you’ve already married them, so you just have to figure it out as you go.  You can buy all the parenting books you want, nothing prepares you for the reality of having a tiny human-being dependent on you twenty four hours a day, seven days a week, three hundred and sixty five days a year.  It was, and is, the most overwhelming and challenging task I have ever attempted.  My daughter is in college now, in the dorms. Other mothers I know bemoaned their empty nest but I was ready for less hands on parenting.  She’s twenty, and I’m thrilled that she is starting her own adventures out in the larger world.  I’m a little terrified at the thought of her being out there on her own, but mostly I’m just excited that we raised her to legal adulthood.  

 

I know I would be a different person if I had not had a child, and since I like who I am, I’m happy with what I discovered of myself and learned along the way. But I’m here today to strike a blow against this ideal: that women are defined by motherhood and that not having a child makes any woman one bit less a woman. That’s bullshit.  If a woman chooses not to have a child, that is her choice, let her make it, leave her alone about it.  Stop asking women in their twenties, thirties, or Gods forbid, forties, when they are going to have children.  First of all, unless that’s your uterus walking around in that woman’s body, it’s none of your business.  Second, why should you care if this other woman has a child? Because it’s almost always women who do this type of bullying.  Yes, I said it, bullying.  I saw it as bullying when I was in my twenties and early thirties, married for years and had no children but was constantly being asked, when, why not, why don’t I have children yet?  Strangers would ask me this – constantly.  

 

I finally started answering, “I’m concentrating on my career.”

They said, “What if you wait too long and then you can’t have children?”

I said, “Then I won’t have children.”

They never seemed to like that answer.  

 

My first husband and I were married for ten years before we had the house with a room for a nursery.  I felt that I had had enough therapy so that I had dealt with the worst of my childhood demons and wouldn’t share them with our daughter.  I stopped using birth control and within three months of trying we were pregnant.  Let me add that I had a terrible pregnancy, like my mother before me, and was very ill.  I was in and out of the hospital trying to keep our baby inside long enough to be born and survive.  I did not glow.  I did not enjoy the process of producing an entire human being inside my body.  There were very few Hallmark moments during my pregnancy.  If you decide to get pregnant, please do not go into it thinking that it will all be cute booties and wonderful moments of ever growing closeness with your spouse or domestic partner.  Check out how well your own mother handled pregnancy and that may give you an idea if it’s going to be “normal” or exciting like mine was, trust me, an exciting pregnancy is not what you want.  

 

Was it worth it to get our daughter?  Yes, hell yes.  Do I regret having her? Not for a minute.  But I did not make being a mother the end all, be all, of my life.  Her father helped make her, so I made sure he helped me take care of her.  At one point in my pregnancy when he’d done something that made me doubt he was understanding that I saw parenting as a shared event, I told him this, “If you make me raise this baby as if I’m a single parent, I will be.”  Never argue with the pregnant woman who is puking her guts up trying to bring your child into the world.  I stood my ground and made him help me as much as possible.  One, because that seemed fair to me, and two, because I had books to write, stories to tell.  I’d wanted to be a writer since I was fourteen-years-old.  I’d only wanted to be a mother since my early twenties.  I was never one of those people who defined myself by marriage and children.  I’d never planned on marrying.  I was a writer.  By the time our daughter was born I had six novels and numerous short stories published.  She’ll turn twenty-one this year and I am planning the tour for my thirty-eighth novel.

 

My editor at that time worried when she found out I was pregnant.  She thought it would make me soft, lose me my edge.  My first novel written after her birth had the highest kill count of anything I’d ever written.  Motherhood didn’t make me soft, it made me fierce.  It made me more committed, determined to succeed.  It made me cranky when our daughter was very small, because lack of sleep will do that to you.  Even with my now ex-husband dividing up the newborn caregiving it was beyond exhausting.  My hat is off to all new parents because it was the hardest stage of parenting for me.  It just gets better after that.  

 

Amanda Palmer and Neil Gaiman are expecting their first child together.  Amanda is a wonderful musician, singer, bard, and recently, writer of her very own book.  Neil is an amazing writer of novels, children’s books, comics, screen plays, pretty much if it can be written he’s done it and done it well.  They posted a lovely photo of Amanda and a female fan promptly commented to Amanda that she had ruined her career as an artist.  

 

First, the fan hit Amanda in the fears of many female artists when they decide to have a family.  Will children take all my creativity and time?  Will my art die?  Will I change so much that I can’t write, or sing, or paint?  I said publicly on Twitter that all that is bullshit.  I’ve written short stories and thirty-one novels since my daughter was born.  Having a child didn’t make me less of who I am anymore than marriage did.  You remain yourself no matter who you bring into your life, even if it’s a whole new human-being.  I understand the fears though, but I do not understand the other woman telling Amanda such hurtful lies, because I’m proof that they are lies.  You don’t have to give up your life to be a mother, and before someone says it, no I did not have a nanny for my child.  When she was born I couldn’t have afforded it and I also decided that I wanted to be the main input on our child, not a stranger that I paid, but that was my choice later on, when she was born it was just my ex and me to do it all.  I would take her to childcare first for a couple of hours a day, and then gradually longer, but I learned to write in McDonald’s play lands while she explored the kiddie hamster trail.  I wrote anytime she slept.  Her naps were my chance to do a few pages.  I handed our baby to my husband at the door when he came home from work and then vanished into my office.  (This may have contributed to our eventual divorce.)  I wrote on the kitchen table with the baby in a pumpkin seat beside my portable computer.  If you are not determined and driven you can combine parenting and a career as an artist.  

 

I believe that Amanda Palmer is driven and determined.  She also has Neil Gaiman, her husband, in her corner to help.  I had some help from my ex-husband, but when I married a second time I found even more help in Jonathon.  He took care of her when she was sick more than I did so I could make my deadlines.  He picked her up from school more often and he brought his wonderful mother and step-father into our lives so that by the time our daughter was seven, or eight, they were grandma and grandpa.  One of the best things I ever did was offer his mother a chance to be a full-time grandma.  I had more help as our daughter headed into double digits than I ever had before.  It’s only now as Jonathon has more empty nest syndrome than I do, that I realize how much I pushed my new husband into the deep end of the parenting pool.  He was twenty-five and had never been married and I just excepted him to step up.  He did, but it’s only now that I realize how hard it must have been on him as an only child to suddenly be a dad.  I have faith that Neil and Amanda will step up for each other as artists and parents and as a couple.  It can be done, and done well, it just does take effort, planning, compromise, and a determination to make it all work.  Don’t let anyone tell you that you can’t mix art and babies because that’s just not true.

 

But one thing that is strangely absent in the whole online furor about whether Amanda can be her artistic self and a mother is that no one has raised the same doubts about Neil.  Yes, the woman carries the baby in her body, and the man can’t do that, but why is it assumed that the woman will sacrifice her career for parenthood but the man doesn’t have to?  

 

I am the main breadwinner for my family, but I have had people ask me already if I’m going to be a full time grandmother and help my daughter raise her kids when the time comes.  I say, no, and they look at me strangely.  They have never asked the same question of my husband.  I plan to do what most successful writers do: die when I’m old and gray, still typing away at my keyboard trying to tell that one last story.  I expect Neil Gaiman will do the same, but I’m willing to bet that no one has asked him if he’s going to quit writing and become a full time grandpa and help raise his grandchildren, just as no one thinks a new baby will end his career.  

 

If you want to stay home and be the primary parent for your children, then do it.  If it makes you happy and you can afford it, then do that, whether you’re a man, or a woman, but please stop assuming that because we are women that it’s automatically our job to sacrifice everything for diaper duty.