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(public post....$3+ patrons, watch for a unique email/post in a second with your PDF & choice of WAV or MP3! note to $3+ patrons: the PDF is almost identical to the contents of the project page, plus a little thank-you at the start)

HOLA GUYS. 

NEW THING TIME! that was fast, eh? yes, it was. i wrote this song exactly two weeks ago, on the 11th. 

NOTE: the bowie-thing already dropped this month, so this is the first time i'm releasing TWO THINGS in the same month. that means if you've capped your pledge (which i know *many* of you have, and good on you for using that feature), you won't be charged for this one.  

OK!

the link to the song/project/footnotes is at the bottom of this post.

i'll try not to go overboard here...i already spent the last 48 hours writing up the document of footnotes (it's 8,000 effing words...to put that in perspective, that's almost one-tenth the length of "the art of asking")...and the footnotes tell you just about everything you could ever, ever want to know (and much more, i'm sorry) about the creation of this project.

after you click, PLEASE READ & FOLLOW THE LISTENING RECOMMENDATIONS! 

if you're at work, WAIT FOR A QUIET MOMENT! this betch is 11 minutes long! it needs you in the bath with wine! but i won't tell you what to do. just listen undistracted, if you can.

headphones..not as important as the bowie, but always nice.

i mention it somewhere in the footnotes (which are, in turns, hilarious but also really serious) but there's a point i'd like to make here so it doesn't get lost: motherhood frightened me for a long time. i was wondering how i would juggle being a parent and making Things. i do not consider it a coincidence that the birth of my patreon and the birth of my child came at the same time. it's working! it's WORKING.

i've always been able to juggle but often i've stumbled when i've juggled due to the rocky, unsure ground of bureaucracy, middlemen, the media....

now, with patreon, my ability to work fast has meant that i can juggle with a lot of power.....i'm on flat, sure ground. i can just DO MY SHIT.

for that: THANK YOU. you cannot understand the gift you are giving this artist and mother.

meanwhile: if you're a patron scratching your head skeptically and wondering if i've decided to throw out all of my song-edited skills and am just going to be barraging you constantly with 11-minute totally-literal songs with 5 chords: the answer is NO.

the answer is, i'm a maximalist. i want space for EVERYTHING. the song i recorded with jherek in january ("machete") still hasn't come out (next month! wait for it!) because we are POLISHING IT and editing and mastering and tweaking and fixing. 

the album i made with my dad SIX MONTHS AGO (!) when i was 8 months pregnant hasn't come out either...i'm going to drop it this summer, after we've created a video and when we have time to do a little tour. 

so?

the answer is: i want to reserve the right to do projects lightening-fast and molasses-slow, because NOT ALL ART IS THE SAME. 

to everything, turn, turn turn.

the beauty of the patreon is that IF i want to write a track and put it out  it a week later (like my hip-hop comrades), i CAN. 

and look, I JUST DID.

*mic drop*

wait, let me pick up that mic for a second so i can give you my link.

sorry, i'm not actually very hip-hop. i'm actually a huge dork.

here it is, ENJOY:

http://amandapalmer.net/amothersconfession/

(again, if you're a $3+ patron, you've got a second email with a PDF of the footnotes and the mp3/WAV downloads coming your way in a sec!)

if you love it, share it. if it resonates, share it. share your stories on the page. 

it's just me and you, guys. this is a new kind of Thing.

for advanced helpers....when you share, PLEASE USE THIS LINK IF POSSIBLE you'll have to copy n paste: http:/bit.ly/amothersconfession.

LASTLY, especially for the parents out there....

if you have feelings/thoughts/stories...PLEASE COMMENT on the page itself instead of here at patreon. it'll be nice to gather all the stories in one place, and not everybody can comment on the patreon since it's paywalled. use the comments here to talk backstage shop, and the comment space on amandapalmer.net to talk about the content. that'd be nice. 

i love you guys. 

xxx

AMFP

p.s.s.  your patronage covers the basics of jason's engineering and direct sounds, but the bulk of it on a project like this goes to my team, who helped me get this whole project and webpage together. HUGE THANKS to alex, bill, superkate and nick for being ninjas and working so fast and smart with me. and special thanks to neil for proofreading, and to jason for being jason. my soul sister. without him i would not have written this song. or recorded it. 

- as always, if you're getting this in email form...click through to comment.-

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Comments

Anonymous

Shared your song with a group of mom's this weekend on our ladies group get away. So reassuring to hear their stories and know I'm not the only one who makes mistakes. Thank you for this.

EJ

LISTEN. This is exactly the kind of rambly literal AFP that I am here for. Crying on my commute. Had to email my mom and tell her I love her. For what it's worth, too - I'm the oldest of six and all these things plus more happened to me and all my siblings as babies. We fell down stairs in walkers, got left behind in department stores, she closed our extremeties in car doors once or twice; on one under-supervised occasion, my six year old brother took the car off emergency brake and rolled over my four year old sister's foot with it...and we're all still here. We made it. Our mother is much better with teenagers/grownups than babies. And we all still love her. ;)

Anonymous

Amanda, this is an awesome piece for a confession. It took me a while to be ready starting to listen, to read, to work myself through this whole thing, but now I'm understanding. This thing itself could be the one reason why I love your art (and Jason's!). I'm still listening in repeat mode for a long time and well, it almost made me cry. Thank you for letting us participate in your daily routine - it's moving. Just in harsh times like these all over the world. Wish you and your loved ones all the best. Greetings from Germany.

Phoenix Quinn

My mother died from Cancer when I was 26 after 2 1/2 years of taking care of her. One of my biggest regrets is that I made her cry. We had a stupid argument and when she cried she said she felt like a bad mother. I'd never seen her be vulnerable like that her whole life and I felt that despite her sickness that moment of feeling like a bad mother was one of the hardest and worst for her. Even though we were at odds for our entire relationship I have found a way to love her for all of her good traits that at the time I had a hard time seeing. I have in my adult life been able to look at how hard it was for her and appreciate where she came from and what she went through to give me a good life. Thank you for sharing this side of your experience. It again reminds me of the struggle she went through for me. This will help with my long journey of healing. Thank you. Thank you.

Anonymous

This is beautiful :-) I'm going to ring my Mum.

Zeralda La Grange

What an incredibly beautiful, honest moving piece. Thank you!

Anonymous

I am getting to all of your Things very slowly these days, Amanda. I don't know why. I remember with Bigger On The Inside I was all over it that day because I had heard the rough version of you playing it on a youtube video already and had emotionally connected to it and hoped and hoped that you would record it for real some day. Anyway. So this is when I have gotten to this song. I don't have children so I don't know what it's like. But thank you for doing this, it's so brave of you. "At least the baby didn't die" sounds like an excellent mantra. Sometimes I feel the need to confess to myself all the moments where I've been kind of a shitty human, but sometimes when I'm wallowing in too much guilt, or too much shame for not doing or being more, or sleeping too much in a depressive episode, I just think - "well, not giving myself a free pass, but just on the whole, I think I am good and I don't try to hurt people and that has to be enough right this moment."

Brielle O’Elle

Thank you so much Amanda. I'm crying and typing. I can't even put into words all the things I want to say, and I'm too embarrassed and ashamed to talk about how inadequate I feel as a parent to my amazing tiny humans- how scared I always feel because I love them more than literally anything- so I'll just say thank you. Thank you.

Alison Martins

So many confessions...I have a similar 'falling in slow motion' moment of watching my oldest tumble down all 14 stairs and landing on hard tiled floor below. Each step I took down the stairs i was just an inch shy of securing his foot in my hand, I don't think I actually touched any of the step on the way down. He was in my arms and I was trying to soothe his voiceless cry, praying he would scream...I looked him over, head to toe, for weeks. I think I still do even to this day! Being a mother is the most rewarding fucked up, tough, exhausting, thankless job we can ever have and I know, even on my worst feeling day, like today, I would not give it up for the world!

Lisa

SO sorry I'm late to this. I'm trying to catch up with bits, bit by bit... I'm actually meant to be doing my tax return today.. Anywho... What an honest song. I applaud you. Although I'm not a Mummy, I am a Nanny (not the Grandma kind) and recently I managed to lock myself out of the house while the 1 and 2 year old were in it! I went to put the recycling out and a breeze came through the back door and blew the front door shut! Luckily they were napping and the 1 year old was in his crib, so were actually pretty safe. He did wake up and cried (wailed!) for about half an hour before his Mum came home, which broke my heart, but he seems fine. I'm the one carrying all the guilt and worrying I've emotionally scarred him for life!

Kate Norlander

I'm late in responding, too. You must have linked to this somewhere, and I saved it as a bookmark. I was tidying up bookmarks this morning and finally listened to it. It made me cry. I'm a mom of one 17-year-old daughter. When she was a baby, I used to change her diapers on the floor. One day after changing her diaper, I was starting to pick her up, and I noticed an enormous spider on the front of her outfit. It startled me so much that I _dropped_ her. I hadn't gotten her _too_ far off the floor yet, but she was at least a foot off the floor, and I felt horrible until a dad I knew told me about the time his kid fell off his lap and then later he had the same kid on his shoulders and he walked through a doorway and didn't realize the kid was higher up than the top of the door, so she smacked into the top of the door. Also, before I ever dropped my kid on the floor, I brought her to church when she wasn't even two weeks old, and I was juggling things around -- baby here, program there, etc., and the hymnal fell off my lap and onto my baby, and people around me gasped. We left church (for the day, not for good). The service hadn't even started. When you are a new parent, you are so tired and life is such a blur... I can never blame other parents for forgetting babies in cars and whatnot. I understand how that happens. The thing is, these things keep coming, even as your kid gets older. When my daughter was two, I took her to a family reunion and thought she was safe when I was getting food, but when I came back to the table, she was gone, and no one knew where she was, and I thought she'd gone outside and locked herself in a hot car or fallen into the lake. Turns out she was "playing hide-and-seek" with me. When she was in elementary school, we stopped at a bakery for a treat, and when she opened her bag with her cookie, they'd accidentally put there price sign in the bag, so I stopped at the bakery again to return their sign, but there were no parking spots in front of the store, so I told her to bring them the sign and I'd drive around the block and pick her up. Turns out she didn't know what "around the block" meant; she thought it meant around the corner. So while I drove around the block, she went around the corner to look for me, and during that brief time I couldn't find her, I thought someone had abducted her. Helen's right to say "I love you" often.

Anonymous

Hi Amanda - I don't know if you read comments on old posts but I will write anyway. I was pregnant when you wrote this song and I bookmarked it in my brain because I was damn sure I would be able to relate to it, and SOON. My baby girl is 18 months old now and in these 18 months I have bumped her head on the wall, given her sour milk, driven home with her in the car seat but without it being buckled, watched her fall off the couch, and I'm sure more things I can't recall right now. But the worst was just a few days ago and I have been searching for an outlet, thinking of calling my old therapist, and generally beating the ever loving shit out of myself/thinking I'm certainly the only Mom who has done this. I was in Target with my sister, trying to find a present for our Dad (whom we both have a difficult relationship with and were really only buying something out of a feeling of obligation, a detail which makes this whole thing worse) - we were going from aisle to aisle and suddenly I hear my name come over the PA system. It took me about 3 seconds to realize WE DIDN'T HAVE THE BABY. I was pushing a shopping cart full of crap, and my sister was on the phone with her daughter and we left the fucking stroller with my baby in the grocery section of fucking target, Amanda. I ran, not even knowing where I was going. Thank God my sister knew her way around Target so she could direct us the the "seasonal" section which was where I was paged to go to. Along the way, I met a parade of Mom's with nasty looks on their faces, yelling things at me. My baby was absolutely fine. She was in her stroller, playing peekaboo with a Target employee named Stuart. Stuart made me sit down. He comforted me. He told me not to listen to all the people shouting things at me. It had been somewhere between 10 and 15 minutes that we had been shopping without her. I know because Keith, another Target employee, came over to literally wag his finger at me and say "It shouldn't have taken you 10 minutes to notice!" As he walked away, I gave him a sarcastic "THANKS, KEITH" in response. Other employees kept asking me things like "We're you even looking for her? How far away were you?" - Apparently they called my name twice over the PA and I only heard it the second time. Probably because my sister was on the phone with her daughter arguing about whether her daughter could go to the mall that afternoon instead of seeing Grandpa. It was so long that they had to call the cops. The office was nice enough, but told me she had to report this to child protective services. We left me with a resounding "your baby should be your first priority, not your shopping" - thank you cop lady, that's a tidbit of parenting advice I didn't know. I clearly did this on purpose and yes indeed, I care more about shopping than my baby. Excellent conclusion. - I hardly slept. Child protective services came to my house the next morning. A late 20's chick with a clip board. She came in, smiled and said "it's silly I'm here, but I got the call and so I had to come. Can you tell me about what happened?" I told her the story and she nodded and said "I get it. It happens" SHE WAS SO FUCKING NICE, AMANDA. She's running background checks on me and my husband, even though we told her and she believed us that she will find nothing. Protocol. And the case should be closed up in two weeks. There's still a part of me that thinks I'm the worst person alive and shouldn't be allowed to have a child. I know you know what I mean. I hope you know what I mean. But hearing your song again has been a healing salve on my heart. Bless you bless you bless you for existing. I don't know you personally, but I love you. If I ever meet you, I hope to give you a great big hug. Please take this *virtual hug* for now. And keep being amazing