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geekrock84-deactivated20191230 asked: Let me start out by saying that I'm big fans of both you and your wife. Lately, I've noticed her commenting about being a single mother, I believe it was on a Facebook or Instagram post of her's, I dont recall. Anyway, how do you feel about her claims of being a single mother and life being hard because she works a lot. As a single mother I felt slightly offended because she is in fact not a single mother but has a husband who is well off and a part of their child's life.

neil-gaiman:

I do understand why you are offended. I think what Amanda is saying is that she feels very much like a single mother right now. She’s in the US, with Ash. She dresses him and walks him to nursery school, picks him up, walks him home and looks after him until bed, and tries to get work done in the cracks, when he’s at school and after he’s asleep.

I’m in the UK right now, working 7 days a week 13-16 hours a day in order to get Good Omens over the finish line. I went home to the US for Thanksgiving, and at Xmas, but in the last 3 months I’ve been home for about 8 days altogether. And yes, I call home, and yes, I’m financially fine should Amanda not work (although Amanda makes her own money and does her own work, and has for much longer than I have known her, and is not stopping her album release schedule or touring plans because she has a child). But she’s being, in effect, a single mother right now, and one dealing with a small boy determined to go to London and see his dadda.

I go home on Saturday, if nothing untoward happens to keep me here, after working on Good Omens away from home full time in the UK and South Africa for 18 months. I cannot wait.

And then we will change roles. 

It would not surprise me if, at times in the next 18 months, with Amanda on a world tour to support her upcoming album (It’s called There Will Be No Intermission) I wind up feeling a bit like a single father. (I won’t be. She will come back. But you can feel very lonely if you are looking after a child alone for a week or so, let alone for 3 months.)

(And yes, we are both privileged as hell and aware of that. She’s a songwriter and performer, and she’s successful, has a Patreon that supports her now better than an old-style record label ever would have done. I’m a bestselling author. We can afford food, places to live, and help, and we can afford babysitting and all the other things that make life as a parent less difficult. And we are grateful.)

thanks, neil.

“good, enough.”

what is astounding to me lately, as my feeble brain dawns to the shard-sharp realization at the ripe young/old age of 45, is this:

living, surviving, existing, in order to be measured, and finding meaning only in the measure.

the measuring tape was never within. it curled and danced around me, held only by others.

as if living in that moment of curious terror in a doctor’s office right before stepping on the scale. a measurement; not yours to judge.

like that; twenty four hours a day, 365, a lifetime of held breath while the measure of goodness waited to be recorded.

by others.

it’s a full-throated liberation i did nothing see coming. even though i’ve preached this brand of self-understanding my entire adult life. even though i’ve preached my head off about self-love, self-acceptance, even though i’ve flailed my hands towards a different way, a different angle…a part of me was still missing the point completely.

and perhaps - i still am. sometimes i feel like i’m always just finding the front door.

i understand now: i have spent my entire life falling short of expectations that were impossible and ridiculous expectations to begin with, and i’m only just starting to understand how rigged the game was.

i was always trying so hard to be good.

good. to be good. to be seen as good. to pass the test.

good; according to expectations set by some outside force, some alien bible, some cultish rulebook.

good according to some hostile, cryptic, clinical outside force; a place so far outside myself that i could never even really understand it or hope to visit it myself.

a place so faraway and foreign i could only ever fear….and trust my fear instincts were serving my essential survival.

but the outside measuring sticks never really have your best interests in mind.

how can they?

they don’t know you.

i have spent my life trying to be a good student.

a good american.

a good athlete.

a good punk.

a good role model.

a good writer.

a good child. a good meditator. a good cook. a good host. a good mother. a good rock star. a good friend. a good lover. a good businesswoman. a good sport. a good rebel. a good yogi. a good listener. a good wife.

a good loser.

a good little girl.

a good BAD little girl.

i mean, a GOOD bad little girl.

what a classic.

because everybody secretly loves those. but you still gotta do it right - get it right, do it GOOD - to rack up the correct points from the stiff outside panel of judges. it was never about how it felt inside, or whether it was nourishing. the nourishment came only from the degree to which the good bad little girl (or the good mother, or the good student) was declared a legitimate specimen - and it was always empty calories.

it’s taken me forty-five years to finally retreat away from the clattering measure of judgement from the outside, most of which is just ricochets of halls of mirrors inside my own head, like some echo chamber of past fears - those teachers, long dead, still rolling their eyes - that never dies down but just keeps repeating itself ad nauseum. to retreat from the toxic, menacing and unfulfillable desire to be accepted by others - not as i stand, bot as i am, nor as i come, but as good - above all else.

thank FUCK!!!!

what a terrible fate that might have been! what a limiting number of options would have been on offer in this short life!

like dorothy emerging into the full technicolor of oz, i don’t know whether i’m waking up into a dream or waking up from a dream, but it barely seems to matter. i’m in whatever it is.

i’m only just starting to feel the cloud lift, my bones literally expanding by a few cells, my breath deepening, i can hear the crack of my back and ribs as my heart silently shouts

here i am

here i am

here i am

……

i’ll never know whether these things would have revealed themselves had i not been touring aotearoa new zealand for that particular week of march in 2019, or if neil hadn’t left a month later, in april. or if things, people and countries hadn’t fractured so painfully, goaded on by more fear, anger, and powerlessness than i’ve ever seen simultaneously explode all at one time in my lifetime.

there are a lot of things i don’t even bother to wonder anymore.

but i do know it happened, and it happened here.

from this little singular moment, on this old land, from this strange little point on the globe a few days before the darkest day of the year, i can say for the first time, in my own singular, hoarse, joyful voice:

i’m good.

wherever you are,

know that you’re good, too.

let go of those old voices. the ones in your head, and the ones in your circle. they are many. they are endless. they are black holes, and they are useless.

let them go.

let them go.

i am here, and i love you. right now.

right now….i know it.

you’re good.

and enough.

xx

afp

originally posted on https://www.patreon.com/posts/52525124, and that’s where i’m replying to comments. if you’d like to get these sorts of posts straight to your inbox, and you’d like to support my team and art, please subscribe to the patreon. it’s an awesome and supportive community.

vienna konzerthaus, last night.

there’s something particularly poignant about telling these stories - about loss, feminism, abortion, art, about the ridiculous slide this world seems to be making towards fascism and isolation, about light and dark and death - in a venue where the vienna philharmonic usually plays and where my dressing room was dominated by giant portraits of wagner and mahler, titans of darkest dark darkness.

roll over, sweet dead men.

this bitch stole your act.

shot by Gabrielle Motola.