The Truth Is ... Read online

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  MELISSA ETHERIDGE lives in Southern California. Visit the Melissa Etheridge Information Network at

  www.melissaetheridge.com

  LAURA MORTON has co-authored a number of bestselling celebrity books. She lives in New York City.

  Copyright © 2001, 2002 by Melissa Etheridge

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Random House Trade Paperbacks, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

  RANDOM HOUSE TRADE PAPERBACKS and colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  This work was originally published in hardcover in a slightly different form by Villard Books in 2001.

  Except where otherwise credited, photographs and other material appearing in this book are from the personal collection of Melissa Etheridge.

  Song lyric credits are located on this page.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA Etheridge, Melissa.

  The truth is …: my life in love and music/Melissa Etheridge with Laura Morton.

  p. cm.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-76564-2

  1. Etheridge, Melissa. 2. Rock musicians—Biography. I. Morton, Laura. II. Title.

  ML420.E88 A3 2001

  782.42166′092—dc21 2001023733

  [B]

  Random House website address: www.atrandom.com

  v3.1

  Dedicated in truth to Beckett and Bailey

  with every last drop of love inside of me.

  With Love,

  Your Mama

  My understanding of truth can change from day to day

  And my commitment must be to truth rather than to consistency.

  —Ram Dass

  Acknowledgments

  • • •

  I would like to thank you, dear reader, for taking this time, right now, to take in some of the pieces of my life. That is all this is, you know, just pieces, bits of what I remember and how I remember them.

  I thank my mother for her ability to change and for standing by me even when what I speak and write might be painful for her.

  I thank my manager, Bill, for believing in every single thing I have ever done and finding a way to let me do it.

  Thank you Laura Morton for being a sounding board, therapist, friend, and writer, at a time in my life when everything was new and examining the old gave me strength. You were right, I could have it.

  Thank you Alex Metcalf, for helping to bring this book to fruition. You are my true friend forever … and damn talented, and a great husband and father, and sexy too, but what do I know?

  Thank you Bruce Tracy at Villard for not falling apart under deadlines and clearing the space to let me do this.

  There have been so many people in my life, some mentioned here, most, not. I thank you for the experience of knowing you, your hard work, your friendship, and your time. I am merely at the middle of this journey. Let me tell you about it, the truth …

  —M.E.

  Contents

  • • •

  Cover

  About the Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Introduction

  Lonely Is a child

  Ready to Love

  I Don’t Think We’re in Kansas Anymore

  Home Again

  Los Angeles

  Bring Me Some Water

  “Oh My God, That’s Me”

  Julie

  Brave and Crazy

  Talking to My Angel

  Yes I Am

  Your Little Secret

  Pregnancy

  Mothering

  Breakdown

  Lover Please

  The End

  Skin

  The Beginning

  Afterword

  Introduction

  • • •

  July 8, 1975, age 14

  To Myself:

  Who are you? Where are you?

  Why do you hide so?

  I search for you, for an answer.

  But I always end with a handful of broken dreams.

  An old tattered heart

  Worn down over the years.

  Inside of you is the pain and the sorrow you dare not let show,

  for fear that other minds might think that you are really reaching

  for someone who might understand.

  Your heart is heavy, for it holds the tears.

  But I should have cried, “come out!”

  Come out of that dark shell you hide in.

  If they only knew that for every time I’ve laughed,

  I have shed a tear.

  Am I so afraid of you that I cannot stand face to face with you?

  Yes.

  I fear you more than the darkest night.

  For I share the deep sorrow you feel.

  You are part of me—the part no one has seen.

  You are behind this mask I wear.

  When I am alone, you make me see what I really am.

  And I cry.

  If only I could set you free.

  Let you live the life I long for.

  But I shall move on. Taking life with a smile and you shall take the pain.

  And I will never cry.

  For those who cry feel sadness.

  And I am not sad

  Or am I?

  —Missy Etheridge

  OH, THE PAIN. READING THIS AGAIN, I CAN STILL FEEL THE pain all of these years later. I suppose that I was suffering from regular everyday teenage angst, but it felt like so much more back then.

  I’ve always been good at chronicling the many moods of my life, but mostly I have done it through my music. I tell stories of life, pain, joy, and love in three-minute snippets—little glimpses of who I am or who people perceive me to be. What I really am is this little girl looking for acceptance. Looking for love and trying to fill up this hole inside of me that has always been empty. Big-time empty.

  This is the story of my truth. What you are about to read is my perception of the events that have shaped my life, inspired my music, and brought me to a new understanding of myself and my life. I don’t really think of it as my life story; rather it’s the stories that have made up the layers of my first forty years. Sometimes, I think it would be a lot easier, and less energy would be expended, to not live so rooted in my truth. But the truth is always better. People may disagree, and some may not like what I have to say, but I stand by my truth. You see, my truth can sometimes collide with someone else’s truth. That doesn’t make my version more important. Nor does it diminish the significance each version brings to our lives. It’s simply the difference between how I remember things versus how somebody else might remember the same things.

  When I first sat down to write this book, I had no particular plan to pursue another concert tour in the foreseeable future, if at all. There was no real thought of writing any new songs, let alone cutting a seventh album. I wanted to spend more time at home with my family—watch my kids grow up, and spend quality time with my partner. At that time, that was my truth. Here it is, one year later, and though I have completed my book, I have also composed a new album, and I am getting ready to once again embark on a world tour. And, I am single again. That is also my truth. Both stories, though contradictory, are concurrent with my reality. Talk about an out-there statement! Life is filled with circumstances that, in an instant, can affect everything we do from that moment on. Like my music, the impact of these circumstances is open to interpretation. That interpretation, like the truth, is subjective.

  “Come to My Window,” my biggest hit ever, has always been
perceived as a love song, but it is really a song about being frustrated. On numerous occasions, I have written a song that started out as a love song but, by the time I recorded it, it had become a song about angst and desire and wanting and needing. And sometimes, people have thought of a song in a totally different way than I had intended it. Maybe that’s what makes a good song good. It’s certainly what gives it so much power. People use music to fit the circumstances of their own lives.

  © 1995 MELISSA ETHERIDGE/PHOTO BY JODI WILLE

  Performing “Silent Legacy” © 1996 MELISSA ETHERIDGE/PHOTO BY NICOLE BENGIVENO/MATRIX

  I am a songwriter. My job is to focus and balance the words and the music that live inside me and have lived there for most of my life. What you choose to do with them is up to you. Make my music the soundtrack to your life. Make it whatever you wish. Sometimes, through my songs, I get to share the pain of a breakup, and sometimes I am part of the seduction. Change the circumstances and there are days when I can understand, better than most, the obsessive feelings love can bring on, and I can feel that emptiness called loneliness. I look at it like this. If my music has the power to move and touch people, then ultimately that’s what I am supposed be doing: writing music. I do not write songs to keep for myself. I give the songs away. And they become whatever the people listening want them to be. Just because a song came from this certain place—maybe anger, maybe passion, whatever—once I let it go, it takes on a life of its own. That’s the beauty of creating music. It is something different to everyone. Someone once told me that a great piece of art is one that provokes an emotional response, whether positive or negative. I think the same can be said for music. You don’t have to like it to feel something.

  You see, I believe that people have their own points of view. This is simply mine.

  Lonely Is a Child

  • • •

  IN THE MID-EIGHTIES, AS A LARK, I HAD A PAST-LIFE REGRESSION. I was trying to find out why I’m a musician. Music didn’t run in my family, and I don’t believe that musical talent or ability is inherited anyway, so I just wanted to know if I was Mozart reincarnated, or something fun like that, in a past life.

  So one day, my doorbell rings and in walks the classic Crone, a big old wise woman who sat me down on my floor and began talking to me, gently and quietly. It was hypnotic. The rhythm of her voice took me back to five years ago, ten years ago, fifteen years ago, and then ages three, two, one. I’m back in the womb, looking for a light to be born into. I follow the light and start talking about being a half-Indian man in the 1800s. A doctor who died of scleroderma, a disease that hardens the skin. Then I go back farther and I’m an actor in a German cabaret in the 1600s. I was a woman dressed as a man, performing for a group of townspeople.

  Who knows where all this stuff was coming from? It was bizarre. But very entertaining, very amusing, clearly all in fun. I just went with it. Then the woman began to bring me back, step by step, pulling me out of the regression, part of which is to guide you back into your current life through reexperiencing your own birth. She starts talking me through, saying, “You’re in the birth canal.” And I was feeling it. I could feel what it was like to be in the womb and then in the birth canal. And then, all of a sudden, I couldn’t breathe. Out of nowhere, I was feeling this great pain in my legs. I started screaming and hollering and breathing really hard. The therapist was startled by my reaction, and she brought me out as quickly as she could for fear that I was really in pain. She said, “Whoa, okay. Okay, now you’re being born—one, two, three, four—five—six—seven, eight, nine, ten! Okay, you’re born. Whew!”

  She asked me if my birth had been difficult. Not that I knew of. I had never heard anything about it. I called my mom as soon as I got home, and I explained to her that I had done this past-life regression and I wanted to know if there were any problems when I was born. “Well,” she replied. “You were held back.” Held back? What did that mean? My mom sort of fumbled through her words, and then, for the first time in twenty-five years, she told me the truth about my birth.

  I was born in Leavenworth, Kansas, at Cushing Memorial Hospital, on May 29, 1961. My mother went into labor at home. As soon as she arrived at the hospital, they sedated her. That was the protocol in those days. It was one o’clock in the afternoon and all the doctors had just gone to lunch. My mother was ready to push and I was ready to be born, ready to enter the world and start my life. But it couldn’t happen without a doctor being there. Of course, this was before there were pagers or cell phones, so the nurses held my mother’s legs together so that I could not come out until someone could get the doctor. They held her legs together for fifteen minutes. Fifteen desperate minutes of struggling and straining to get out. Her uterine wall was pushing up against me and, as hard as I tried, I was not allowed to enter the world as planned. And so my first experience in this world was that I was being crushed. I was in terrible pain.

  Mom isn’t the kind of woman who would make a scene. Not even if she were giving birth. Mother never wanted to make trouble, especially on an emotional or spiritual level, even though everything in her body was telling her to let me out! She acquiesced, and said, “Okay, we’ll wait for the doctor.” That’s right. She put the power in somebody else’s hands, and all the while, I’m dying.

  I was born severely black-and-blue and bruised. I had a hematoma, which became a birthmark on my chest that was there until I was twenty. And my mother had never said a word to me about it. For twenty-five years. That’s my family: “We just won’t talk about it.” “Everything is fine.” I survived, so we never talked about it. Ever. And we would probably have never talked about my birth experience if I hadn’t had that past-life regression. I was born black-and-blue and close to death. I guess you can say that I was bruised from birth—figuratively and literally.

  I was born on my older sister Jennifer’s birthday. I don’t think I was the present she was expecting that day she turned four. From my very first breath of life, I would be this “thing” that took attention away from her. Neither of us ever had our own birthday. We had to share the day like twins, without the joy of having a twin or the connection that comes from a twin relationship.

  As far back as I can remember, my sister has been one of the most powerful influences on my life. Not in a good way, necessarily. But powerful. She was prettier, she was thinner, she was more tan, her hair was nicer. She took care of herself, she knew what clothes to wear. She had that whole girl thing I never really had. I was very much a tomboy, completely awkward in my body. I wanted to be like her. My mother never showed me how to do my hair, how to dress “right.” I still don’t know how to braid hair, I never learned to wear makeup and I never dressed especially feminine. I didn’t know how to do any of that girly stuff you’re supposed to learn as a kid. I longed for that and, on many levels, in a strange way, I got that from my sister. But, what I also got from my sister has affected my ability to connect emotionally in every way.

  One of my earliest memories of Jennifer is at around age three or four. We were playing in the basement of our house. She was trying to get me to drink a Coke. I did not like anything carbonated, and for the most part, I still don’t. I can tolerate champagne, but just barely. I kept refusing to drink the Coke. I just didn’t want to drink it. My sister finally decided to hold me down on the floor and forced the Coke down my throat. She just poured it into my mouth, choking me.

  After all, she was angry at me from birth. I can only imagine that she was home, expecting to celebrate her fourth birthday, and her mother and father were nowhere to be found. She sat there alone—no party, no cake, no celebration—all because I was about to come into the world.

  My family, who hid any sign of emotion, never explained to Jennifer that I wasn’t a threat. All she knew was that whatever little love and attention she usually got on her birthday wasn’t going to happen that day, and she has stayed angry and envious ever since. I felt cared for in my family, but I never felt safe. As a baby, I ne
ver learned to crawl. I scooted. There are home movies of me scooting, but none of me crawling. Experts say that this is a sign of fear. I also used to stick my finger in my ear, and my parents were concerned that maybe there was something wrong, but there wasn’t. I guess it was just a comfort thing. Comfort and safety were two things I never really sensed when I was growing up. I think this lack of warmth and affection is the spine of a lot of issues that I still carry with me today.

  Outside the home, of course, was a different story. Classic America. We lived about two miles from downtown Leavenworth, down a barely paved road packed with houses full of children. There were open fields and always something to do. Kickball. Baseball. So it looked perfectly normal. Except for the prisons. The Federal Penitentiary. The Kansas State Penitentiary for Men. The Kansas State Penitentiary for Women. And the Army Penitentiary. All of which were the main industry for the town. My best friend’s dad was a guard at the prison. He used to walk to work. So it never seemed like anything out of the ordinary. Not at the time. The Federal Penitentiary had a dome, so it always looked like the Capitol Building as far as I was concerned. And I thought that every town had one.

  As I got older, Jennifer got angrier and more physical. She used to torment me by hiding in the closet, or under my bed, and there was always this awkward silence just before she would jump out and scare me half to death. I knew she was hiding there and I’d just stand in the middle of the room and wait. Wait for her to scare me. To this day, I still can get frightened if someone hides and tries to scare me, even if it’s just in fun. It was very manipulative and controlling behavior—two traits that today I find so attractive in other women, especially women I am romantically involved with.

  When I was around six years old, things started to change with Jennifer. She began to want things from me. Things I was uncomfortable with. I know that all kids experiment and play doctor and that might have been all Jennifer thought it was, but it sure wasn’t that to me. At night, in the bedroom of our home, she would be gentle with me, talking sweetly to me, which was curious in itself. She would tell me what to do and I would follow her directions. I would do as she asked. I knew that touching her was wrong and I knew that it was something that would never be talked about. Not in our family. I felt tremendous shame, though I didn’t know what to call it at the time.