How women helped me reach the top — and how I’m returning the favor

It’s 1992. I’m on tour for my hit single, “Damn, I Wish I Was Your Lover,” off the album “Tongues and Tails.”

My band and I, including a woman drummer and percussionist, a woman keyboard player, and a woman background vocalist, arrive at the Old Vic theatre in Chicago. 

The sound man hands me a note. It’s from Tori Amos, who also had a hit album out, “Little Earthquakes.” 

She writes to me that we shouldn’t be compared in the press. We are two unique artists, and she loves my album, especially the song, “Carry Me.” 

I’ll never forget her kind gesture — and I’ll always pass on Tori’s magnificent, generous spirit toward women artists in the field. She stood up for our equal success. 

Throughout my career, I’ve had incredible support from women. Right from the beginning.

In the spring of my 14th year, when the birds and drummers returned to Bethesda Fountain in New York’s Central Park, I started work on my own way forward. 

I studied African drums. I thought if I practiced hard enough, I could become the djembe soloist for the National Dance Ballet Of Senegal.

It was magical thinking, yet it built my foundation for songwriting.

By my third year at the Manhattan School Of Music, I could compose, but I needed to write songs to tell my stories, to find my true voice.

I played drums in bands around New York and got my original tunes into each set, straining to sing from behind my kit. 

Then I met “Serpentine,” aka Roberta Baum from Brooklyn. 

A singing teacher, she taught me to repair my voice. I sang my first song for her, “I Cried for a Hundred Years,” accompanying myself on djembe. 

“You can really write songs,” she said.

That affirmation spread my wings.  

We rise by lifting others. And the more I heal myself, the more I attract supportive, kind, independent women. 

And I help them, in return.

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Being a woman doesn’t depend on reproductive organs, but for me, becoming a mother at the age of 43 and again at 50, and creating a family in which I feel safe, have been my first opportunities truly to surrender in love.

I achieved this while living in California, the land of new ideas, when I was 31, by freezing my embryos. It was new science then, and I’m so grateful it worked!

My family of three — my son, my daughter, and I — relies on my female friendships for balance, inspiration, connection, and fun. 

In her book “Wild Dark Shore,” author Charlotte McConaghy writes about the purple dandelion seed attaching itself to the wing of an albatross, and being carried across continents to make a new home. 

The seed must find a way to survive the unsurvivable. 

I was the purple dandelion as a child, in search of being carried. Becoming a woman made me into the albatross, and now I carry others.

When I needed to hold my son above water, and leave California because of the breakup of a 17-year relationship, I was his albatross.

I didn’t want him to feel the hurt of my childhood, and my California women friends surrounded us with love and support as we embedded in the new-old shores of my roots on the East Coast. 

My 10-year-old daughter recently asked me what’s the most important quality in a friend, and I replied, “Loyalty.”

Without the warmth, compassion and sacrifice of my women friends, I would not have found my voice. Nor would I have reached the top of the music world — or succeeded as a mother.

Each and every day, let’s join forces. Raise your voices for the change you know will heal our humanity. 

Go beyond politics; reach out to help another woman. A neighbor, a rival, a friend.

We rise by lifting each other. Let that be our consciousness. 

Sophie B. Hawkins is a singer-songwriter, musician, and mother.