Madonna and Me (15 page)

Madonna’s family was Catholic, and her mother’s funeral Mass would have taken place in a church where a statue, a stained glass window, or a station of the cross would have depicted a scene from the life of Madonna, the religious icon. Months earlier, perhaps on Mary’s feast day, the priest’s sermon might have mentioned something about how the biblical Madonna was spared death, literally lifted up into heaven by her divine son, because he loved her too much to see her body fail.

How does a five-year-old reconcile this teaching with the loss she has just suffered? In Andrew Morton’s biography
Madonna
, the pop star recalls, “I saw my mother, looking very beautiful and lying as if she were asleep in an open casket. Then I noticed that my mother’s mouth looked funny. It took me some time to realize that it had been sewn up. In that awful moment, I began to understand what I had lost forever. The final image of my mother, at once peaceful yet grotesque, haunts me today . . .”

Madonna’s faith taught her that, in at least one case, a mother can be saved from death by the love of her child. Combine that understanding with the memory of her mother lying in a casket with her lips literally sealed forever, and perhaps Madonna made sense of the world by relying on the power of her own voice to ensure everyone remembered not just her name, but her mother’s name. In this way at least, she could keep her alive.

With so much meaning and memory associated with her first name, it’s no wonder that just one year before she starred as Eva Peron in
Evita,
Madonna told an interviewer that she was absolutely certain she wanted children. Why wouldn’t she want to recreate the mother-daughter relationship after grieving it for so long? Nonetheless, her self-awareness surprised me for its clarity. Despite having an already full and busy life, here was a woman who
clearly
knew she wanted children. Why did this knock me for a loop? Perhaps because when I held that mirror to my own life, the desire to have children wasn’t that clear. Yet I found myself walking a very deliberate and difficult path to do just that.

When I discovered that my husband and I weren’t likely to get pregnant on our own, the faint sense I had that motherhood might be “nice” became poor consolation. Maybe that’s because I had grown up hearing about my parents’ struggle with infertility. For six excruciating years, they waited for me. From their stories, I learned to fear infertility, not just because I might never have a baby, but because hoping could wear me down. Still, I went forward with infertility
treatments believing the life I painted for myself was just around the corner. The “warrior maiden” in me also wanted the chance to defeat what had been a road block for two generations in my family. I would win, infertility would lose, and my life would continue without the same agonizing interruption my mother had endured. What I failed to realize was that I could not battle my way through an experience that has no real enemy lines, and pick up again where I had left off.

Before I stepped foot into a fertility clinic, I don’t think I was very different from women who imagined they would enjoy raising a child, would begin the adventure by waking up pregnant, feeling both a little nervous and a little excited to start rolling with the punches of motherhood. But when I started in vitro fertilization (IVF) treatments, I had to give up the idea of falling into parenthood. Every injection, sonogram, and blood test felt like I was verifying that yes, in fact, I
really
,
really
,
really
wanted to be a mother. If I didn’t know that for sure, why on earth would I be there? But I didn’t know anything for sure. To tell you the truth, I don’t know what motherhood is about. I’m an only child. I’ve had pets, and I wave to the friendly neighbor kids across the street—there’s my maternal instinct for you. Yes, I wanted to recreate the loving relationship I had with my own mother, but I also wanted to vindicate her struggle by loving the life she had helped win for me, as it existed, with or without children. I could spend my time trying to get pregnant, or I could be out living my life. Even if my own existence is proof that staying in the game can give you a happy ending, the more treatments I needed, the less I understood why I kept coming back.

When the hormones gave my thoughts the jagged edges of anxiety and depression, and when my body fought off rare reactions like “ovarian hyperstimulation syndrome,” a condition that almost landed me in the emergency room, I had to remove myself from treatments to assess what I was doing. I had only attempted three cycles and spent less than sixty days as an IVF patient. Taking a break was the right thing to do, but it felt early, and I was used to
confronting obstacles, not walking away from them. I knew women who’d suffered multiple miscarriages during IVF, and they showed up for as many as ten cycles because they knew how much having a child meant to them. “Just remember what you are doing it for,” they would say, not to dismiss the physical pain and heartache but to help catapult me over it. But where they could push forward without flinching, I hesitated. For a moment, that hesitation begged the question: Did I even want children?

The answer, I finally realized, was a qualified yes. When my mind painted pictures of my future, I noticed that despite everything I’d gone through, a child with my husband’s dark hair and my blue eyes was still somewhere in the frame. However, no matter how hard I tried, no one could guarantee this child would ever exist. Without that real infant in my arms to make me slip into the heady cocktail of motherhood, I didn’t know if the struggle was worth it. I found myself trying to hang on to who I was as Kelly, the person beyond the blue exam gown, while the desire to be called “Mom” started to lose its hold on me. Some women suffering through infertility envy women who can get pregnant easily. That has never been my problem. I envied women who wanted motherhood without a doubt. It turns out I was a little too successful at convincing myself that I didn’t “need” a child. But I also never imagined walking away from parenthood forever. My warrior maiden was vexed, and I was left with a tattered war cry caught in my throat.

I have always appreciated Madonna’s ability to play among the gray tones rather than choose black or white, especially as it relates to motherhood. If you take a sampling of her work from 1985 until her daughter Lourdes’s birth in 1996, you will find both the subtle and the obvious attempts of a woman teasing out the mingling identities of Madonna the religious icon, Madonna the departed mother, and Madonna the girl who became a powerhouse on stage, eventually
contemplating her own shot at motherhood. For most women, including me, it’s harder to distinguish between the images of motherhood we cling to in our heads, and the reality we are offered.

It’s telling that Madonna, the woman who would go on to become known as “the mother of reinvention,” would not choose a stage name to launch her career. No one would have blamed her if she ran as fast as hell away from the memories and expectations that came with her birth name. Instead, she self-titled her first album and faced a wave of criticism. The controversy suggested it was blasphemous to invoke a divine figure’s name on a pop album, and not just any divine name—the virgin mother’s. I was seven years old when
Madonna
came out, and I remember many adults around me were shocked by her moniker. Who uses that name and sings about losing her virginity?

On her third album,
True Blue,
the song “Papa Don’t Preach” describes a young girl who is very similar to a modern-day Virgin Mary. She’s a teenager, she’s pregnant out of wedlock, and she is going to keep her child no matter how scandalous it seems to the outside world. Madonna didn’t write this song, but she chose to include it on the album, and she chose to answer the wave of criticism that came after it. Some listeners thought she was advocating that teenage girls go out and become mothers. She was also attacked for alluding to abortion. It’s never mentioned explicitly in the song; instead, people latched on to what was implied in the lyrics, “But I’ve made up my mind, I’m keeping my baby.” In a 1986
New York Times
article, Madonna commented on the song and its meaning:

“‘Papa Don’t Preach’ is a message song that everyone is going to take the wrong way. Immediately they’re going to say I am advising every young girl to go out and get pregnant. When I first heard the song, I thought it was silly. But then I thought, wait a minute, this song is really about a girl who is making a decision in her life. She has a very close relationship with her father and wants to maintain that closeness. To me it’s a celebration of life. It says, ‘I love you, father, and
I love this man and this child that is growing inside me.’ Of course, who knows how it will end? But at least it starts off positive.”

Four years later, Madonna released the album
Like a Prayer
. The slow, bittersweet track “Promise to Try” (“Will she see me cry when I stumble and fall/Does she hear my voice in the night when I call?”) was a departure from her usual up-tempo pop beats and was written to honor her mother. Twelve years and a stream of hits later, Madonna took on the role of Eva Peron. Known as the “Mother of Argentina” to a devoutly Catholic people, Evita was revered in a way that’s very similar to the Virgin Mary. She was a woman who carved out a place for herself in politics, not content to merely be the wife of the man in power. Evita died of uterine cancer after refusing a hysterectomy because it might have interrupted her political work.

Before shooting began on
Evita,
Madonna was interviewed by Forrest Sawyer for ABC’s
Primetime Live
. It was an introspective and moving interview. The conversation began with Sawyer asking Madonna about the life of Evita Peron. At first she replied in a slightly aloof, even sarcastic tone, mocking Sawyer’s attempts to psychoanalyze her character, but when the discussion turned to the similarities she shared with Peron, the interview grew serious. Asked if, like Evita, Madonna had been hurt by life, Madonna gave a poignant answer: “Losing my mother at a very young age was a devastating experience, and I really did feel completely abandoned . . . I’m sure that has influenced every decision I have made, and left me with a feeling, a hunger, a longing, a feeling of emptiness . . . afraid to love things because they are going to leave you.”

The interviewer pressed on, asking if there was any place she felt safe at all. Tears welled up and Madonna answered quickly, “No, not really.”

I am fortunate that my mother is still alive. I’ve never felt abandoned the way Madonna must have felt. But when she talked about a hunger, a feeling of emptiness, and a fear of loving things you can’t hold onto, my heart ached. I have gone through enough IVF cycles to
know the grief of loss. The bruising reality of a negative pregnancy test has stayed with me even as I try to pick myself up and hope again for something I barely understand. I don’t want to say goodbye to the beautiful mystery of having a baby, but I don’t want to cling so tightly to that idea that I wear down my body and spirit.

Eventually, the
Primetime Live
interview turned to whether Madonna wanted children of her own, and her answers were emphatic. “Absolutely,” “definitely,” and “it’s time” came without hesitation as her porcelain face lit up with a beaming smile. For those who wonder if Madonna was trying to one-up Angelina Jolie by adopting two children from Malawi, it’s interesting to note that in this interview, she mentioned the possibility of starting her family by adopting one or two children. The interview took place on December 6, 1995—when Angelina was barely an adult, burning up the screen as the crop-haired computer whiz in
Hackers.
Madonna’s first daughter, Lourdes, was born less than a year later, followed by Rocco in 2000, and her two adopted children, David and Mercy, in 2006 and 2009. By then, Angelina Jolie was an active humanitarian, and Madonna’s struggles to adopt from a foreign country brought awareness to the odyssey hopeful parents experience as they try to find their family.

I take comfort in the fact that this woman, who started life with a name intractably tied to her own mom’s tragic death, found a way to not just accept and understand the idea of motherhood, but to rush toward it with open arms. Early in her career, Madonna told
The New York Times
, “I think people are named names for certain reasons, and I feel that I was given a special name for a reason. In a way, maybe I wanted to live up to my name.”

I hope for a similar type of resolution: to live up to my name as a warrior maiden, soldiering on through frustration to get my baby, whether biological or adopted; or, equally brave, to walk away from motherhood all together.

Sarah Sweeney

 

 

 

 

 

I TOSSED MY pink felt coat across my unmade bed and took off my pajamas. Nude, I slid into a pair of leather pumps I’d sneaked from our front closet. It housed the ’80s glamazon wardrobe my Aunt Gayle had left behind when she died of breast cancer. Aunt Gayle was my mother’s sister, and unlike her, she’d been a fashionable head-turner. I would open the closet late at night when my parents were getting stoned in their room and my brother was hooked to cartoons. I would be wide awake, bursting with wanderlust, as I rifled through Aunt Gayle’s old business suits, shoulder-padded blouses, lingerie, and shoes.