Sunday Diva/Three From The Hip: Melissa Etheridge

Sunday Diva/Three From The Hip: 

Melissa Etheridge

In my own, personal, big gay church, there is a wing dedicated to Those of the Heart. These are the singers, songwriters and muses who have spent a lifetime capturing various aspects of the human condition. Frequently, due to the whims of the music industry, their lives were not always their own... but they persevered... ultimately remaining true to their roles as seers of the heart. 

One such soul?

Journeyman, Melissa Ethridge.

That voice. One for the ages. A knowing ache. An earnest yearning. Unafraid, she would declare.

She'd swagger like a rock goddess and then bring you in close to whisper secrets in your ear.

Her influence? Immense. Her legacy? Intense.

Yes, she followed in the footsteps of those before her, but no one before her had moved units the way this diva did. 

Her first three albums sold big. Her fourth? Huge. 

For, yes... she was!

With that kind of groundswell support, how could she not share her true self? And she did, breaking ground socially as radically as she had musically.

Her coming out opened streams for dialogue. To speak unafraid. To discuss that which had remained unuttered for so long. 

Musically unique, coming from a soul that had known its share of pain, she then paved social avenues in a manner unlike any activist before her. 

Partnerships? Marriage? Motherhood? Cancer? Nothing could stop her.

Yet, it was not all easy. 

Relationships are fragile, especially when one relies on the other for a kind of validation that should be coming from within. Bodies are prone to revealing their flaws in caustic ways. And children grow up to become adults with minds and lives of their own. 

The death of her son, Beckett shook Etheridge to her core. But she came out of it both stronger and wiser. The lady is a survivor.

She's become a woman who knows herself well. And continues to share what she's learned in her music to this day.

The gospel according to her?

Here are three from the hip, dropping from her lips.

The topic? Losing Beckett

"Teachers would say: ‘He just glowers at me.’ He looked like he was angry all the time. I think he was afraid."

"He was so sensitive. I think this is a common thing in people we lose this way. I would have the deepest conversations with him at 11 years-old. We would talk spirit, the world, history, existence, everything. But when it came to things like school, if he couldn’t do things perfectly, he didn’t want to do them. So he’d never start anything. It just stunts you. I spent years sitting there with him and his homework going: 'Just pick up the pencil.'"

"He was a gifted snowboarder. After a bad accident, he started taking painkillers, which led to his opioid addiction."

"I’m constantly thinking about him. Constantly. His pictures are up. We talk about him. The way I make myself okay is I actively do not choose guilt or shame. In his last year, I said to myself: I need to make choices now, because there is a possibility that he may not live. I need to know I did everything I could for him, but also take care of myself. It is not my job to save him. I can’t quit everything I’m doing to try to convince him not to take heroin or opioids. That’s not the way humans are made. He was an adult and he was making his choices, so I came to peace with that a few months before he died."

“If I dig down and I think about it, yes, there is a certain amount of relief. That’s actually harder for me when it comes to the guilt – how relieved I am. I’m just being honest. It was so hard for years. It was making me ill again. If he was in trouble, it affected everything. When he died, there was awful, awful sadness. Horrible. But there absolutely was relief I didn’t have to be afraid to look at my phone any more. I was relieved for him, but, yes, for me, too.” Did it take a long time to admit she was relieved for herself? “You’re one of the first people I’ve admitted it to. Talking to my wife, I would absolutely say there is relief.”

"I believe that, when I think of my son in loving ways, I am close to him. His spirit is there. When I am grieving and sad, that’s when I think I’m far away, because I don’t think those things exist in the non-physical world, so you have to be in a loving state to connect with loved ones. He wouldn’t want me to be ruining my days thinking awful things. So it’s my job to stay in a state where I can connect.”

Bring Me Some Water - Melissa Etheridge

I'm The Only One - Melissa Ethridge

Faded By Design - Melissa Etheridge

And one last parting shot...

"People were like: 'Do you think coming out hurt you?' and I was like: 'Oh God, no! Coming out was amazing for my career.' It made me unique back then. The world was changing in the 90's. The gay movement was coming up, we were organized and it was just a perfect time for me."

"Growing up in the late 70's and early 80's, being gay meant you weren’t going to have children. I was like: 'I want to be a rock star,' so it was fine with me. Then in the 90's I was with someone who was like: 'Hey, I want to have a baby.' The more gay people have children, the more it’s normalized. People constantly came up to me and said: 'Thank you for showing me we can have children.'"

"That’s one of the things that broke my heart when Beckett passed away. I thought, everybody’s going to go: 'See, they can’t have children.'"