Amanda Palmer Instagram – From the desk of Motherhood and Songwriting. Last night I did something I’ve never done before.
When I was young, I couldn’t write at the piano with anyone listening, with anyone in the house. I have had a hard time explaining this to people.
Last night, the song was in my head, half-formed and screaming to get out. The song-seed sometimes screams like a toddler, it demands to be tended, watered . You do or you don’t. You compose or you ignore. The antenna in my head that picks up songs has never shut off, and it’s more sensitive when I’m enraged.
For the last 9 years of motherhood I’ve let the songs fade, wither, collapse, die on the vine. Child first. Mental health first. A primal lack of privacy. A child always there. Or another something, someone, blocking the passage.
Last night the song came to me in the car on the drive home from our play date. I told Ash, who was in the backseat, reading (as he often is), that he was just going to have to occupy himself for a while when we got home. Mama needed to write a song.
He was non-plussed. We pulled into the house, I didn’t even take my coat off, I didn’t want to lose the melody, I walked straight to the piano, and I emitted a gorgeous Ginsberg-level cross-generational piano howl.
Ash hung out and read a book. Then we read books together and we went to bed. It was a school night.
It took 9 years. It took a lifetime. I do know that whatever has happened lately, it is causing me to write the best songs of my career. There’s always a silver lining.
The mother took charge, the poet retired, the poet is taking charge. The mother is now a poet, the poet a mother, the two are intertwined, the singularity has come.
To the parents out there who are in despair, who wonder when and if the balance will ever arrive; I am here to offer you hope. There will come a day when you will get to take a shower, read a book, write a song, and feel like your actual self again. And that actual self – if you have allowed your soul to submit to the actual annihilating fire of (especially solo) parenting – will be ten times larger when you do. The song will be louder than sound. Hold steady. Hold steady. ♥️💥🌊 | Posted on 11/Apr/2025 20:37:52
