Tori Amos: Piece by Piece (24 page)

I thought that I would get a little boy, because I'd already put my little girl to rest. We'd known who she was; we'd named her and said goodbye. But the universe kept telling me I was going to have a little girl. I felt like Natashya's birth was a complete gift that came out of Venus.

At this point, I was communicating with friends online, and people were talking to me about how popular music was getting more violent. I felt I had to respond to Venus's pillaging. Male artists were saying these really malicious things—and I'm not talking about tongue-in-cheek statements, I'm talking about men wanting to rip women's clits out. I needed to answer that. Once I had Natashya, the idea really started to take root. Neil Gaiman came to visit, and we started to talk, and then the plot was hatched with Mark, Neil, and me sitting there. I was nursing Tash, and we came up with the concept for
Strange Little Girls.
And I went through with it; we gave 1000 percent to that project, to redeem Venus, who had given us so much.

Tori's always been a bit of a lioness. She's always protected her pride. But it's fivefold since Natashya came along. She's always watching for the dangers, and not just the physical dangers but pitfalls in her career, people wanting to rip her off or do her down or whatever. She's much more on the lookout for all of this. It's not in a negative way. She's always been very
clued in on the details of her career, but that's sharpened even more. She lets much less ride. She doesn't simply react to things: she acts.

Becoming a mom has in some way made me seem a lot more chilled out, because I think my energy is more compassionate and loving than in the old days. But on the other hand, where Natashya's involved, don't underestimate the crocodile when you're walking across the pond. Sometimes people take it for granted that when I'm out and about with Tash, I'm free to be approached. But at that moment, I need to be a mom. If they don't understand that, then they will see another side to me. I've had to be much clearer about the lines in the sand. I'm not okay if people take my mommy time away, because when they've taken my mommy time away they can't give it back to me.

When people don't treat Natashya as if she's a human being, and this can be anyone from a fan to a “friend,” that is not acceptable. They think they can call on the Tori Amos thing any time they want. I would never call you at your home when you are not on your work schedule to talk about work. But people feel they can call me anytime and talk about my work.

I've chosen to incorporate Natashya into all aspects of my life, which can be challenging for both of us. She was out on the road from November until September and she had already been out on the road on another tour. She left her school, her life, and her friends. There are consequences to that. Sacrifices were made, and when that is not understood and people take advantage, I have to turn around and say, “I am not a possession, and neither is my family.” I also have to discern what areas of my adult life Tash isn't yet ready to witness. She is really curious about the world of performing. Kids are curious about what their parents do. And you know,
a lot of parents take their kids to work. Then there are so many toys that evoke performance: there's Barbie, there's her Polly Pockets—you can buy little stages for Polly Pockets—and so she really can't see why she can't do it, too. She doesn't know why she can't go onstage with me.

We let her come out on sound check and play, sometimes, for a minute. At the same time you can't overindulge; it is that fine a line. During the shows themselves, she sees me from the side of the stage, but there are certain songs I feel she's not ready for. She's not ready to hear “Me and a Gun.” “Professional Widow”—she's not ready to see Mom do that. And she's not ready to see “Precious Things.” I know that and so does she, and that's okay. She loves “fairytale” and “Corncake Girl,” as she calls it.

When she's not allowed to watch, it doesn't feel like withholding because we don't treat it like withholding. There are times when she's gone from the side of the stage and I know that she and her nanny are backstage dancing or whatever. She's not seeing what I'm doing. I know if they've got screens backstage in every venue we play; I've sussed it out. I may not know every detail of each venue's operation, but as far as what Tash is exposed to, I'm present in that way, as a mom.

She's wanted to come out onstage a couple times, and I have to kind of battle her about it. She is getting to the age of “I want this, I want to do this!” You have to be able to say,
This is not good for you, it's not right, right now.
You can't tell yourself,
She thinks it's right for her now.
She's three years old. Are you nuts? I just say no, and then try to move on to another conversation. She doesn't understand a lot of the time when I tell her no. She says, “I don't like you, Mummy.” I say, “You don't have to like me. I will always love you.”

I spent so much time, energy, and pain becoming Natashya's mother that I'm not going to take any aspect of her for granted. Yet having a child hasn't lessened my dedication to my work—if anything, it has grown
since the work helped me through so many hard times. What's truly difficult is convincing other people that I can manage it all. You have to set very clear boundaries. And there will be people who do not hear you. You try to give them warnings, and if they do not heed them then they are out of your life. I've spoken with several working moms who didn't get hired for a particular job that they were qualified for simply because of the “working mother” stigma, the implication being that a working mother works less than a single working woman. When I heard that, I pulled back from my life like a camera and tried to see if this was true in my case. I concluded that I put in the same amount of time working as I did back in 1992. I just sleep a lot less …

I can see why some women artists just throw their hands up and say they cannot deal with all this confrontation. Those women retreat from their careers, or else they grow distant from their children. Sometimes even Tash will say to me, “Mummy, it's Tash time, stop working now.” Any mother who works at home or has their child on the “road” with them will understand exactly Tash's and my predicament, because lines that separate work from home life can be blurred when they occur in the same physical space. But the upside of this is that I get more work done and consequently have a lot more Tash time because I don't spend half of my life traveling to work and working away from home. Sometimes “home” is a bus, sometimes home is a hotel room—now, naturally Tash knows this is not her “home home,” but it is a bus home and a hotel home and of course, like anybody, she can get homesick for “home home.”

Then sometimes as a mom you can feel guilty, and that really pulls on your energy levels, thereby unfortunately creating the climate for “cross Mommy” to be the creature that takes over your body. Tash will say, “Mummy, you didn't get enough sleep. You're cross Mummy. Don't be cross with Tash. It hurts Tash's feelings.” And then of course that's like
cold water rushing through your capillaries, and sometimes the only thing that you can think to do is take a minute and call your own “mommy.”

Luckily I have a mom who knows exactly what to say when I'm upset because I've hurt my child's feelings and been an all together Miss Grumpy Boots. This kind of love is the archetypal Great Mother that all mothers seem to tap into, some more frequently than others, let's be honest. My physical mother has held this loving archetype, I would say more than many—certainly more than I ever have. And because of this, I have a walking instruction manual, a map, that shows me “what is compassion,” how to set boundaries firmly but lovingly, how to say no—my mother taught me the most important lesson when she said, “Tori Ellen, I don't have to agree with you all of the time to love you. I may not like something you say or do, but I still and will always love you. Love does not waver from a mother's perspective. Like, however, is a chameleon that can change as a lizard's colors can, and sometimes we can all be lizards. And I still love you when you're a lizard.” And I said to my mother, “Surely not a lounge lizard, Mom.” And my mother said, true to form, “You can still be a lounge lizard, sweetheart, and play Radio City. A lounge lizard, a particular lounge lizard I know, made a lot of people happy playing lounge lizard music. Don't belittle that, my darling. Lizards have their place, too.”

With my mother's heart condition, which I write about in the song “The Beekeeper,” I've had to step into a different role in the family scheme. My sister and I and Cody, my niece, have had to become the female caretakers for the older generation as well as the younger. My sister caretakes from a medical “how to keep somebody's heart still ticking” point of view, whereas I have to be more of an emotional problem-solver than I had to be, say, five years ago. Becoming forty, I think, gives everybody a license to have to deal with the complicated family issues that all big extended families/friends have to deal with. Cody, who is nineteen,
holds the role of giving a perspective on the real issues and difficulties that her generation faces. We have a lot of family friends in this generation, and I must consider the effects and consequences of a decision that we make as the responsible adults. Cody helps us to see the ramifications of certain decisions before we make a mistake out of ignorance, not maliciousness. There is no way that you know how to be nineteen in 2004 if you've never been nineteen in 2004, but you do know how to be forty if you are forty in 2004.

So as you can see, you don't have to be a physical mother to hold the mother nurturing space in a friend/family tribe, but the nurturing Demeter archetype must be carried by one or more of the women in a friend/family tribe or the hive will be destroyed and the Beekeeper cannot be the queen. However, some women wouldn't be happy, giving mothers if they didn't work. Other mothers are not happy mothers if they work in the secularized world. Very simply, I would not and could not ever consider giving up music. I would consider not being as active in the music industry, but that day is not today. So if I'm not willing to give up the music, or give up having my relationship as it is with Tash, which is right here present in my heart, then the best thing to do is to “whistle while you work.” It just takes a lot of energy. But the team I have in place understands this, and if they don't then they're not part of this team. That's very simple, right down the line. Natashya is a non-negotiable.