Time away

Step by step, I cleaned up my act. I got married [to video director Jim Staskauskas], then went back and painstakingly found my old friends. I started entertaining, making a house, having a baby. It sounds really traditional, but I needed that desperately. Having a baby, becoming part of a community again, in the most general, American sense of that term, it's like saying you'll join the PTA, you'll join with the world at large. I embarked on a four-year crusade to join back up again. It made me so much happier and stronger. If I didn't have a life to go back to after this work jaunt, I wouldn't know when to say no, when to say yes. I wouldn't have any sense of myself outside of what I do to make money.

At a certain point in your life in your life you really get a clue that we are all alone on this earth, and it's really important to have good friends and to maintain those friendships and to keep connections alive because when you are young, you have so many connections and the most interesting thing seems to be to break them apart and strike out on your own. When you get older, it's much more important to your identity to feel loved and known. My friends that are my oldest friends matter so much to me because they know who I am and it's so easy with them... and that's just a huge blessing in life.

I knew my husband was The One because he made me wait. People told me that he liked me, they said he would ask me out to dinner, they told me he was single, available, and interested. And it dragged on and on. I was like, "What's up with this?" I'm thinking, 'Who is this dick? He had the whole editor, bigger-better-older-than-you thing going. But I also had an immediate physical reaction to him. Well, it was three weeks, but it seemed like forever. He just waited. I think I liked that about him -- he wasn't diving right into it. I'm kind of a diver, but he played me really well. He played me like a goddamn fiddle.

There's one song called 'Jealousy' that I'm really proud of... I never experienced jealousy until I met my boyfriend (now husband Jim). I did not realize how much I had controlled situtations in the past and how demanding I had been, without being perceived as demanding, ever. I prided myself on the fact that they loved me this way because I was in some way better. It didn't occur to me that maybe I was being a manipulative jerk, you know?

Well, we had(planned on having kids), but not this soon. It's the love child theory. If it isn't a surprise, you're not gonna get the love child. And love children are better than scheduled children. It takes an extra-strong sperm to go through a certain amount of resistance, so you know you're getting the really good ones.

When I was pregnant, I was all excited to have a girl and was really disappointed when I found out from my ultrasound that it was a boy. Which is ridiculous, because the minute you have a baby it doesn't matter what it is. It doesn't matter if it's a dog. I just had this whole narcissistic sense that it would be myself, it would look like me and all that kind of neat stuff. Plus I spend a lot of time around men, and I thought another girl around the house would be nice. But then, if it was a girl she'd hate me in high school, whereas a little boy will always love his mom.

The nicest thing that my husband ever did for me was to make me feel desirable all throughout my pregnancy. He would get aroused and chase after me even when I was like "Oh, God, I'm a huge whale." And he kept me from realizing how tremendously large I was. I felt beautiful the whole way through.

Husband Jim and son Nick

When I was pregnant and feeling crappy for a while, I kept asking Jim, 'Where's the magic?'" I felt kind of faded, like I'd seen the world already. Then Nick was born, and I started having fun without money or drugs. I mean, who knew? Now, I'm not nearly so 'me' centered and it's very grounding and very good in that respect. But I think with the baby, you can't help but have this kind of enthusiasm for life that you didn't necessarily have before. Everything seems, like, really beautiful and cool and a little more magical, because I'm looking at it through his eyes. Everything seems really interesting.

It was a 30-hour labor that began at seven in the morning. I was gonna do it all naturally. I imagined this heroic scenario where I was dilating wonderfully, and I'd get to the hospital and they'd say, "We can't believe you waited so long! You must have been in great pain!" But when we got there at 10 p.m., they told me I hadn't even gone through the early stages of labor yet. I looked at them with horror. Then I went home again. I made it for another three-and-a-half hours and then I was just, like, "OK! Painkillers!" That was it for me. I'd done my natural baby birth stint.

Till almost eight months, I'd sing to him every freakin' night and for every nap, just mommy songs, songs I'd make up for him, like [sings] "Nicky's flying in a spa-a-ace taco, a spa-a-ace taco. Someone said I should do a children's album, but... I could never do that.

Becoming a mother gave me insight into my mom's struggle. I'm presuming because our adoption isn't really something that she talks about. My mother was absolutely a full mother to me, but what must it have been like to raise us and, every once in a while, wonder about this child's attachment to you? Because it's what I wonder about Nick every time I leave town.

Motherhood surprised me. I thought that motherhood would turn me into the baked cookie angel. But I'm still the same person. At first I was so preoccupied with learning how to be a mother that I wasn't really myself. Now I'm stronger, and I like myself a lot better. It's being able to accept the fact that my mom and her friends are still the same people inside, but I don't know... they look so motherly. It seems like an obvious thing to say, but when you're inside of it, it doesn't seem that obvious.

Motherhood has changed me a lot. It was instant adulthood, in a positive sense. It makes me feel like a real human being. I feel good about doing something well that was hard to do. It makes me want to do more things that are hard and do them well.

It (returning to music) was open-ended. I was really into being a mom. I had a lot of friends who were doing the same thing at the same time, and that became my identity. I was still playing music, but it was sort of a sketch pad rather than a formal endeavor. I just had that competitive urge all over again. After the baby, you get very soft and cuddly and exhausted. After a while, you begin feeling this renewed energy, and, all of a sudden I felt gung-ho, ready to take on the world.