May 1, 2023
Brooklyn, New York
I was 29 years old
Tried multiple times to call mom to wish her a happy birthday today and either my calls weren’t going through or I just kept missing her. Or she didn’t want to pick up! They’re on a cruise. Making several stops in the Caribbean, including Grand Cayman. Or so they thought! After a day or two of overcast skies, it was announced this morning that they wouldn’t be stopping there at all. My mom posted a selfie to Instagram shortly thereafter, a picture of herself in sunglasses and a signature low-cut top, looking so unhappy despite already looking so tan, pouting all pitiful, her caption reading: “All dressed up and nowhere to go. Grand Cayman stop was canceled due to rough seas. Glass half full: I’m on vacation.”
Poor thing. I had to laugh, though. And I’m glad I could. Of course she knew she was being funny. But when she’s pulled this in the past, acting so miserable about bad weather on a vacation—I would always feel so mad, so resentful at her unhappiness. It can be overwhelming, my mother’s feelings. And, thankfully, the sun did come out soon enough, per their texts to us. After seeing her Instagram, I sent my mom that video I’ve always loved of Madonna on the set of her Louis Vuitton campaign, where she says, “Well! All dressed up and nowhere to go…what else is new?” Mom responded, “Ain’t that the truth!” Made me think how so much of my love for Madonna is just my love for my mother.
August 16, 2023
Brooklyn, New York
I am 29 years old
I used to see this very old school therapist. As in I asked him one time whether or not he was going home for Thanksgiving and he responded, “Do you think I’m going home for Thanksgiving?” That said, he was tall, gorgeous, soft-spoken and brooding with a unibrow and Bianchi bicycle leaned against one wall. I was willing to suffer. Not that I got to look at him very much, this therapist of mine. A bonafide head shrink, he was insistent that I lay down on a couch facing away from him. I was hesitant but only until I found myself really spilling my guts. I’ll tell anyone anything, clearly, but this felt different. Embarking on some thought about my relationship with my boyfriend or with money or with Bushwick, I’d talk for minutes on end only to, somehow, perfectly stick the landing. Arriving at conclusions that made me feel brilliant enough not to care that I was leaving his office with zero tools to avoid repeating any of my same old shit. Though maybe I didn’t give him enough of a chance, especially once the pandemic began and our sessions took place over the phone where he started sounding less like a probing God on high and more like a sliding-scale thirtysomething wearing AirPods in his Greenpoint one-bedroom. I stopped seeing him. Sometimes I wonder what he’d make of me now, how he’d react to some of my newer platitudes, the slogans I use to talk about myself. “The resilient child is one who knows his family history,” that’s one. “We become our names,” a newfound Brian Burns classic. And then maybe my most recent addition, one I’ve found myself saying quite a bit lately—“I love Madonna as much as I love my own mother.” He’d have a field day with that one. Because it is, of course, always about the mother.
“Madonna?!” spat one of our coworkers from across the break room, after hearing me say, indeed, that I love Madonna as much as I love my own mother. Utilizing the hours-long paid breaks at our museum workplace in an appropriately academic manner, I was talking to my friend Jarod about how upset I’d felt about Madonna’s recent health scare—a bacterial infection that landed her in the hospital after initially being found unresponsive. My stomach sank, seeing those news reports. And in my shock, in the true sorrow of being confronted by the mortality of an icon, of my icon, it seemed I could finally put into words something I’d long understood as the truth: that I love her as vitally as I love the woman who gave birth to me. And while Jarod, graciously, nodded and smiled at these delusions of mine, our aforementioned coworker could, evidently, care less. “Yes, Madonna,” I told her, “They’re just alike!” Recognizing a losing game, she shrugged, saying, “What do I know, I guess I just never saw Madonna as particularly…maternal.” Well, guess what, lady? Neither is my mother!
Baby Boomer women, just six years apart in age, Madonna Ciccone and Kristine Conway both grew up in the suburbs of a still-promising, union-strong U.S. of A. Two American girls who’d become two thoroughly American women, with all the beauty and bloodshed that implies. Madonna is one of eight siblings, my mother’s one of five, oldest and youngest daughters respectively. From big, vulgar, loud but emotionally silent Catholic families, Madonna chose Veronica for her confirmation name while Kristine settled for Marie after her mother said, “Maria?! What do you think we are—Italian?!” Both green-eyed. Both gap-toothed. (Or at least until my mother had hers capped, tragically.) In high school, Madonna felt like a “lonely girl who was searching for something” while my mom has said, “One day, I’d dress in a preppy outfit and, the next, I’d dress in gauze skirts—I didn’t know who I was, who I wanted to be.” Neither of them graduated from college but both moved away from home by 19 years old. One headed to New York City to pursue her dream of being a dancer, the other to a Brick Township condominium with her hot-headed husband. Madonna, famously, would have a hot-headed husband of her own soon enough. Both marriages ended in divorce and both women would get married for a second time, to varying degrees of success. By 29 years old, one had three platinum records and the other had three children. Madonna’s kids, all six of them, were still to come. Boasting the perhaps easily-won title of Madge’s longest lasting friend, Debi Mazar posted a birthday tribute to her a couple years ago, writing, “I remember you always as MATERNAL.” I’ll take Debi’s word on that. And you’ll just have to take mine on Kristine. Because, yes, they may be brash. And bold. Capable, the both of them, of being a complete and utter bitch. But I pity the child who can’t immediately recognize all those things as something motherly.
My hero worship of Madonna began, in earnest, around 12 or 13 years old. A bar mitzvah all my own. It’s hardly coincidental that it was during the raging tumult of puberty, just as I was making sense of who I was in contrast to everyone I knew, that I declared independence from one mother and allegiance to another. Downloading her entire discography, watching all her videos, fashioning myself a home-made Kabbalah string in 7th grade home-ec and occasionally dabbling in a British affect, I fell more and more in love, and became more and more obsessed. In her mythology, artistry, image, I was inspired and I was soothed, molded and informed and challenged, disappointed and, at times, even repulsed. In so many words: I was parented. Because really, for any gay boy, what’s the difference between his mother and his favorite pop star? I feel like there’s a crass punchline in there somewhere, something vaguely vaginal that would probably make both Madonna and my mother laugh. Perverts. These two blond (“blond”) broads who, come to think of it, never laugh harder than they do at their own jokes. Even if it’s the only laugh in the room. That takes chutzpah. A real individual. A woman.
I can accept, grudgingly, that what I actually love most about Madonna is just her job. But here’s the thing—I’m never more tickled by my own mother than when I’m calling her up at work. A pharmacy tech at a supermarket, she’ll answer the phone and sound so alive, so competent and clever and the least bit scary. Her coworkers call her “The General.” For most of my life, not only have I understood her as a person first and my mother second, I’ve loved her more because of it. And yet, somehow, this still managed to take me by surprise, a couple months ago, when I sat down with my mom and recorded her answering 126 of my questions about her life. In doing my own work at the museum—telling the stories of tenement families and facilitating conversations with visitors about their own—the whispers from the universe, from my Talmudic angels were only getting louder and louder. Urging me to sit down, individually, with my sisters and my parents and document them talking about their lives. It wasn’t without courage. Sitting down first with my dad, my kind and tender but fundamentally quiet dad, I was so grateful for how thoughtfully he answered each of my questions over, all told, three and a half hours. And also just a little grateful that it was finished and that now I could look forward to the session with my mother that I imagined would be, comparably, easy breezy. It was—and it wasn’t.
For four hours and fifty-five minutes, split up over two days, noontime sun too precious to waste, Kristine told me about herself. Her girlhood’s most cherished outfits and bedroom decor, the jobs she’s had and friends she’s kept, about crying the whole way home after seeing The Other Side of the Mountain and selling cans of soda during the gas shortage to people parked for miles down the Parkway. I took this very seriously, journalistic in my approach, framing my questions as if I’d never heard of “Mary Jean” or “Pathmark.” We were using a proper microphone, screwed into its stand and fixed in place, offering—if either of us needed it—a shield. I must have known what I was doing, even unconsciously, when I took my spot at the kitchen table not directly across from her but over to the side. Not exactly laying her down on a couch but nevertheless giving her some space, an impartial middle distance if any answer to any question proved too much for face to face. After all, neither of my parents have had a day’s therapy in their life.
But go figure—it was me who eventually had to take a break. It was during the final stretch, just a dozen or so questions remaining, when I started crying and couldn’t stop. “Why are you upset?” my mom asked, through tears of her own, and before I could explain why, before I could even understand why, she answered her own question. “Time?” Yes, and no. Of course some of my tears were for knowing I won’t always have her, that—in sitting her down for this oral history—mortality inevitably entered the room. But I was also weeping for her disappointments, for her love lost, for all the pain she felt at the hands of her father, and for all the dreams she has where her children are still three years old. And, not least of all, I cried for seeing my mother clearer than ever. Like how my sister must’ve felt the day she got her first pair of glasses and said, “Oh my God, there are wires between the telephone poles!” A person first, my mother second, that’s what I always believed. And I was right.
We finished recording and, shortly thereafter, she left for work. Naturally. She was probably already behind the register, long a woman out in the world by the time I looked in the mirror and saw the lipstick from her kiss goodbye still on my cheek. Wiping it off, though not before taking a picture, I went out on a walk, my usual hours-long loop up and around the hilly streets of my New Hampshire hometown. There was so much for me to wrestle with, so much to process after such a revelatory couple days with my parents, and yet I swear all I could think was, “I need to meet Madonna.” Feeling suddenly so equipped, so prepared. Like I finally had whatever it’d take to handle the reality of her. Don’t meet your idols, I know. But if I could learn the truths of my family’s history and not be wrecked because of it, is it so crazy to think she couldn’t possibly disappoint me? This woman who, more than ever, feels so close to home. I remember, at one point on this walk, I was listening to “Oh Father” from Like a Prayer. A song, like all her songs, I’ve played a hundred times before. It’s painful, touching on her mother’s death and her father’s anger and a husband’s violence. A woman’s life and its many heartbreaks. Maybe someday, when I look back, I’ll be able to say you didn’t mean to be cruel, somebody hurt you too/You can’t make me cry, you once had the power, I never felt so good about myself. Just as the song was coming to an end and I turned the corner to make the steep climb up a different street, for the first time in a while—I wasn’t under the shadow of tree cover anymore. It was like the roof had suddenly been torn clean off a house. And into this true blue sky, I looked up to something that was as mournful and soaring as music.