As hard as it was, emotionally and physically, it was a pretty great pregnancy for Julie. She’s so damn healthy, and so strong. Julie made it a point to stop smoking, even before she became pregnant. Quitting wasn’t easy for her because she had been a smoker for a very long time. She ate all the right foods. She read every book ever written on pregnancy, childbirth, and parenting. We took a parenting class. She went to pregnancy yoga classes where she met our dear friends Alex and Heather. Heather’s due date was the same as ours, and they were going to use the same midwife we had chosen to use for our birth.
I came off the road around Christmas. Julie was due January twenty-fifth. All of January, we just hung around the house waiting for the arrival of our baby. I watched a lot of football and did a lot of puzzles. Julie was certain that she was going to deliver two weeks early, so around January fourteenth, we were saying, “Any day now.” January twenty-first rolled around and we were still saying, “Any day now.” It started wearing on our last nerve. Then Julie’s due date passed and the days kept going by. Day after day. I remember that every morning, Julie would cry. She would wake up and she’d still be pregnant. Those last few weeks were tough. She’d walk down the steps, trying to induce labor. She couldn’t go anywhere or do anything. She was so pregnant and so over being pregnant. Those last four weeks were the slowest time that ever passed for me.
The back page of a tour itinerary was the closest thing I had to write on when I wrote “All the Way to Heaven.”
Life on the road while Julie was home pregnant with Bailey
© 1996 MELISSA ETHERIDGE/PHOTO BY NICOLE BENGIVENO / MATRIX
I just want to go home.
© 1996 MELISSA ETHERIDGE/PHOTO BY NICOLE BENGIVENO / MATRIX
A quiet moment backstage with Julie, during her pregnancy
© 1996 MELISSA ETHERIDGE/PHOTO BY NICOLE BENGIVENO/MATRIX
For most of the pregnancy, we had been calling the baby Austin. I had all sorts of little songs and rhymes made up about baby Austin. A few weeks before the baby was born, Julie said that she didn’t think the baby felt like an Austin anymore, so we decided to go with Bailey, which was one of our other top choices. That’s what happens when a baby is late. You have all of this time on your hands and you start to change your mind about everything.
Our good friend Laura Dern has her birthday on February tenth. On February second, she said to Julie, “Wouldn’t it be funny if the baby was born on my birthday?” No, it wouldn’t be funny at all. That would mean that Julie would be two weeks late, and we thought, “No way. It’s not possible.” But it was possible.
At 11:00 P.M. on the evening of February eighth, we had just turned out the lights to go to bed and I swear that I heard Julie’s water break. It was like a small-sounding pop. One of the first rules of labor is to go back to sleep, but this was our first child and we were excited and not going back to sleep. By the next morning, she was in steady labor. The midwife came and said that she was dilated only a few centimeters and still had a long way to go. The baby was posterior. It hadn’t turned yet in the uterus to come down the birth canal headfirst. Julie was in back labor, which makes every contraction terribly painful. After twenty-four hours of labor and excruciating pain, Julie decided that it was time to go to a hospital. She was in a tremendous amount of pain.
Bailey’s groovy birth announcement, drawn by my bass player, Mark Browne
Bailey
Reading about childbirth
© 1996 MELISSA ETHERIDGE/PHOTO BY NICOLE BENGIVENO / MATRIX
Bailey and me
I knew that there was a possibility that if Melissa Etheridge and Julie Cypher checked into a hospital to have their baby, there’d be an onslaught of media waiting for us pretty quickly thereafter. I just couldn’t deal with that concept while Julie was in labor. So, I called Steven Girmant, my tour manager, and told him that we were heading to Cedars Sinai to have the baby. I knew that he could deal with all of the hurdles so that we could have Bailey in peace. I’m not sure how Steven beat us to the hospital that day. He lives in Manhattan Beach, about thirty minutes from the hospital, and we were coming from Beverly Hills, which is about five minutes away, but somehow he was there waiting for us when we arrived. He made sure that everything on a personal level was going to be taken care of. I swear, if a nurse had walked in and asked for an autograph, I would have lost it. But Steven was right there, keeping everyone calm, including myself. There’s a certain comfort level that he gives my professional and my personal life.
We arrived at the hospital and Julie was given a light epidural. Within twenty minutes, she was completely dilated and ready to push. I was holding Julie’s head, looking into a mirror where I could witness Bailey being born. It was miraculous. Words can’t even begin to express how I felt as I saw my daughter being born. As I held her for the first time …
Despite our wish to not spend the night in the hospital, it was hospital policy that a pediatrician must check a newborn baby before it can be released. There was no pediatrician on call until early the next morning. So Julie and I hunkered down with our newborn in a small hospital bed until the morning.
Mothering
• • •
MY LIFE CHANGED FROM THE MOMENT I BECAME A PARENT. My role was no longer just as a partner or a gay rights activist or a rock-and-roll singer. I became half of the team that was now responsible for shaping and guiding the life of this beautiful child through the world. There’s a certain sense of wonderfulness when you have that opportunity in front of you
I have to admit, though, it didn’t happen instantaneously. I had thought that the moment I held my daughter everything would change and I would instantly understand motherhood. Of course it wasn’t that easy. I held my daughter and I panicked. “Where’s the instruction book?” I thought to myself. The world is actually trusting me with this newborn life? Honestly, I think I was more scared those first few days than anything else.
Our whole life became about our daughter. We would sleep with her. Breathe with her. Watch her tiny mouth as it strained for the nipple. Wipe her tiny butt when she pooped. Those first few months, the three of us were in a sort of familial bliss. Everything was about the baby.
Gradually, those feelings of fear and insecurity began to shift. I began to understand that raising a child is as much about raising myself. As a child, I learned that the only proper way to deal with intense emotion was to walk away. To ignore it. But I couldn’t walk away from Bailey. I didn’t want to ignore it. I wanted to steep myself in her presence. To really deal with what was going on inside this little life. It was scary. But it was also wonderful. In some sense, having Bailey forced me to grow up. To really deal with those issues that were still left over from my own childhood. I wanted her childhood to be different. To be full of the wonder and joy of life. I didn’t want her to be scared or confused or need to build all those walls around herself that I had been building and breaking down all my life. I wanted her to be whole. And to model that for her, I had to find the wholeness within myself.
As time went by, though, I began to miss my physical relationship with Julie. I sensed a distance from her that was disconcerting to me. Yes, we were bonded over our child, our perfect Bailey Jean, but we, as a couple, were not taking the time to be together, to work on our relationship. Like most parents, having children was a lot harder than I think we thought it would be. Our relationship certainly was not focused on sex anymore. We were mothers. But that wasn’t the cause of our nonexistent sex life. We would go to couples therapy and we tried to work it out, but the sex wasn’t coming back into the relationship. I am a very sexual being and sex is important to me in my relationships. I kept giving Julie the benefit of the doubt. I didn’t want to push anything. I didn’t experience giving birth to a child. I didn’t know what that does to you. I’ve heard stories from lots of people; all my friends; their wives were having babies and they hadn’t had sex in a long time either, so I kept thinking that it was common and just the way it w
as after having a baby. I thought that it would eventually come back. When I’d bring this up to Julie, she’d always say, “Give me space. Give me time.” But I couldn’t help but wonder: How much space? How much time?
That first year of Bailey’s life was such an emotional roller coaster for me. I was so confused about Julie’s needs and what she felt she wanted from me and our relationship together. On the other hand, the time I spent with Bailey was so profound. As the role of mother began to settle in more deeply with me, I couldn’t help but look back at my own childhood, my own mother. Having a child is hard and, once you have one, there’s a little bit more respect available for your own parents. This tiny crack in the door offered me the opportunity to talk to my own mother, to really try and deal with some of the things that had been so disturbing to me over the years. She and I are still not done with that process, but Bailey’s birth definitely helped to open a bridge between us. At least we’re trying now.
Julie began to talk about wanting another child. She’d always said she wanted to have two close together. I was still unsure of our relationship and what that would mean, but when Julie got something in her head, she went ahead and did it. So, as she began to make plans to inseminate again, I started to feel the need to write. I hadn’t written any music in over two years—the longest I’d ever gone without writing. I began pulling out my notebooks, putting ideas down on paper. I was starting to write “Breakdown.” And I had no idea how prescient that title would be.
My lyrics and my writing know a lot more about my life than I do. Up until the time I began the songs for my new album, Skin, my writing had tended to be ahead of my emotional and psychological consciousness. Breakdown, the album, as I discovered while writing this book, contained a lot of subconscious writing. Looking back on it, I am aware of what I originally had in mind when I wrote the songs. But from my perspective a few years later, it has become very clear to me that, in my creativity, I was allowing my emotions—what was happening in my life at that very moment—to come out as cleverly disguised (and sometimes not so cleverly disguised) metaphorical songs. I now know why that album was not really understood by critics or fans. It was crafted with contradictions and hidden messages. No wonder no one got it. I was terribly confused and my confusion is all over that album.
I was in New Mexico when I wrote the song “Breakdown.” When I wrote the lyrics, I transcended myself back into a past experience. The song is about my decision to leave Kansas and drive to Los Angeles—at least, I thought it was when I wrote it. In retrospect, “Breakdown” was really about what was happening to my relationship with Julie. It was the same fork in the road that I had faced with other women in my life: my mother, my sister, Jane, Linda, Kathleen.
I got to a point, in all of these relationships, where they became too painful. They weren’t filling me up in the way that I wanted. They were actually causing me more damage because emotionally, they all became too hard to handle. In each case, I knew that the time had come to move on. The hardest relationship to admit that about, of course, was with Julie, because I had stayed for so long. But I knew that there was nothing left and we were staying together like plastic and stone. It could have fallen completely apart at any given moment. And I really believed that I would be okay alone, even if I stayed in my relationship. My life was unraveling, and driving is a metaphor that I have used in a lot of my songs, to represent leaving or running away. Sadly, for Julie, all of this past history was very much a part of who I am. It came with me as part of the overall package.
The end of the song is an image of driving out of Leavenworth and leaving that part of my life behind. On one hand, my life as I knew it was completely coming undone. On the other, I was about to go out into the world, to spread my wings and pursue my dream, and fly. “Breakdown” is about emotional collapse, the end of my relationships with each of the women who have had any significant impact on my psyche, and the most obvious one—to everyone but the songwriter, me—the total crumbling of my life with Julie.
BREAKDOWN
How could I stay
How could I breathe
There had to be more for me
Promises gone
Plastic and stone
I’m doing fine all alone
So you’re having a breakdown
So you’re losing the fight
So you’re having a breakdown
And I’m driving and crying
Unraveled and flying
I’m coming to your breakdown tonight
I cannot run
I cannot hide
It came with me locked inside
The bough will break
Cradle will fall It only takes one call
So you’re having a breakdown
So you’re losing the fight
So you’re having a breakdown
And you need me tonight
I found my place in this downtown
Salt air and yellow street lights
So you’re having a breakdown
And I’m driving and crying
Unraveled and flying
I’m coming to your breakdown tonight
Not all the songs on that album were my subconscious working itself out through my music. There was one track that jumped right from the headlines. I couldn’t help but write about it. In the fall of 1998, Bill called and told me that the U.S. women’s soccer team wanted me to write a theme song for them. The United States was hosting the Women’s World Cup that year, and Bill explained to me that it was going to be huge. I thought it was pretty cool that they wanted me to be involved and be connected to part of the event, so I agreed.
I asked John Shanks, my co-producer on Breakdown, to send over a sample of some really driving and intense drum loops. I wanted to write this really great, dynamic, forceful song—my version of “We are the Champions.”
It was October seventh, 1998. Julie was pregnant with Beckett, and we were in the kitchen fixing supper. I was caring for Bailey and we were listening to the news. A story came on CNN about another brutal attack on a young gay boy in Wyoming. I was, like, “Oh God, what’s happened now?” I went over to the television, turned up the volume, and listened with great sadness. The young man was hanging on to his life by a thread. It was so devastating. In my little cocoon, with my alternative family, I had been thinking I was a big gay rock star actually doing something to change the world. The news report was like somebody just dropped a huge brick in my kitchen.
My phone starting ringing. People asked me, “Did you hear what happened?” All I could think of doing was getting together with some of my other friends. Ellen DeGeneres was already organizing a trip to the Denver hospital where this innocent victim of such a violent hate crime lay waiting to die because of his sexuality. Of course, I am speaking of Mathew Shepard.
Julie was very, very pregnant and I didn’t want to leave her by herself with Bailey. I was still feeling pretty guilty about being gone for most of her first pregnancy, so I chose not to join Ellen on her visit. It was hard to say no, because the attack was so very brutal—a sign that this kind of hatred toward the gay community still exists in this country.
I cried uncontrollably when Mathew Shepard died. It was a sad day in many ways. He was so young and innocent. He looked like Gary, one of my best friends in high school, who was gay and lived in Leavenworth just like me.
Later that night, I went into my office and I tried to write the soccer song. I picked a loop at first that sounded very “Here-we-go, women-winning.” Shanks had sent me another loop that was really, really intense. I didn’t even have a guitar with me. I just started singing “Scarecrow, crying—.” This image of a scarecrow was in my head because the bicyclist who found the boy’s body thought that it was a scarecrow in the field until he got closer and realized it was a young man. I started jotting sentences down. The words just came pouring out of me. Mathew Shepard was a student at the University of Wyoming. He was beaten, tied to a wooden fence outside Laramie, and
left on the windblown prairie to die at the age of twenty-one—all because he was gay. The vision in my mind—that young man hanging on a fence, condemned to die in such a dreadful way—has never subsided. The words were powerful, but not nearly as intense as the violent images that were in my head. I wrote and wrote and wrote pages of lyrics for “Scarecrow.”
I tried to get back to writing the soccer song, but every time I sat down to write a rah-rah women’s song, I’d come up with more words and questions about why this terrible tragedy had occurred in the first place. I wrote vivid descriptions of how bloody he was. Tying him to a post made his death Christ-like, and I wanted to draw the comparison. Lyrics like, “They tortured you and burned you. They beat you and they tied you. They left you cold and breathing. And for love, they crucified you. I can’t forget, hard as I try, this silhouette against the sky.” I had never written anything so graphic as this song.
The news kept showing that piece of fence where Mathew’s body was found, and to this day, I cannot clear that image out of my mind. “Waiting to die, wondering why.” I can’t imagine what was going through his mind while he hung there, like a helpless scarecrow, for eighteen hours, just waiting to be found and waiting to die. I wrote, “The angels will hold and carry your soul,” with the hope that his soul left his body long before his last breath.
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