by Maria Bello
Catholicism is part of my heritage, my upbringing, and my experience in life. It is the framework through which I extend my relationship with God. I can appreciate all religions, and still have mine. That is the kind of understanding that Father Ray taught me, and a lesson I feel lucky to have learned. As my friend Lawrence (Doobie) Nowlan said before he passed away, “I believe in my God and yours, too.”
3
AM I FORGIVING?
Do you still hold on to the pain of your past? How does that pain impact you today? Do you need to forgive those in your life who hurt you to move on?
“Dad, do you remember when you chased us through the backyard with a gun?”
My sister Lisa and I are sitting with my dad in his garage. It looks exactly as it did 40 years ago. It is two weeks before Christmas and I have come back home to see everyone. Lisa and I are on the same wooden folding chairs that my grandparents, PopPop and Gram Bello, used to have in their basement. Dad sits on his walker that flips around to make a seat. He is taking drags of his cigarette in between gulps of Macallan scotch, which he always makes sure to have when I come to town. We are half a bottle in and Lisa, who is 13 years sober, is laughing.
“Ah geez,” he answers, “I was on so many pain meds at that point I don’t remember a goddamn thing.”
I am picturing the scene, a hot summer day more than 35 years ago. We four kids and my mother marched at gunpoint with a hunting rifle through the neighbor’s yard back to the home we had just run away from.
I laugh along with Lisa, but at the same time I realize how lucky we are that we can laugh at this. And not only us, but my two brothers, Mom, and our huge extended family, too.
I never thought that my angry, ornery giant father, who had caused me so much pain and anxiety in my childhood, would become one of my greatest teachers.
My siblings and I all agree: we were terrified of our father all the time back then. Sometimes we talk about our old war wounds and the battles we fought. We were soldiers in arms who fought side by side for many years. Our father was our common enemy. Vietnam, Philadelphia, it was all the same to us.
These days, I try to revisit my past without digging into old wounds. I spent most of my life up until I had Jack scraping off the scabs of my childhood with my fingernails until the hole got so deep it reached my bones. Those family scars never disappear entirely, but they can heal over time until they are tiny, nearly invisible lines.
Still, once in a while, even as adults, the thin lines glow a bright red and sometimes start to itch and bleed. The good news now is that we talk . . . and even laugh about the wounds that caused them.
When we were kids, we had an unspoken pact never to talk about what went on in our home. Or maybe we were afraid even then by how damaged we all were, and believed that if we started talking about it or crying about it, we’d never be able to stop. Maybe we thought silence was the only way to survive.
On the outside, we were the perfect family. The Bellos were the beautiful young couple with their four well-behaved, beautiful children, attending church every Sunday. But the truth was that many nights before church we were routinely awakened by our drunken father, closely followed by our crying mother, who was trying to soothe him. Dad would scream at us, “GO DOWNSTAIRS AND CLEAN THE KITCHEN! YOU LEFT IT A MESS FOR YOUR MOTHER.” Terrified, we’d all scramble down the stairs to be berated and threatened by the terrifying drill sergeant for two hours. Back to sleep at five, up at seven for church, perfect! We were very skilled at hiding our pain, our embarrassment, and our shame.
My father, Joseph Patrick Bello Jr., was a big, strapping Italian man, who lived, breathed, danced, loved, and worked in his body. He was crushed by a steel beam on a construction site when he was 30. He broke his back and in one second all of his dreams blew up in smoke. He was now trapped in a body that had betrayed him. Doctors gave him painkillers like candy. He didn’t know he had options, or ways to find help. Instead, he thought he could handle his pain. He just didn’t have the tools. My mother would try to give him the tools over the years, to “nurse him back to health.” In his heart, I think he wanted to be healthy again. Aren’t we all looking for someone to bandage our wounds and tell us we’re okay and love us no matter what? My father was no different. But no one could give him the self-acceptance he was looking for. Not even my mom.
My mom, Kathy, was Polish, a blue-eyed, blond-haired beauty who at 15 resembled Marilyn Monroe. Looks are where that comparison stops. Kathy was known as a saint, an angel, who we always joke was so religious that she not only went to church every day, but got on her hands and knees to clean the marble floor of the vestibule while she was there. With a toothbrush. She did it all with a smile, prayerfully and joyfully.
Enter Joe Bello. He looked like Elvis, all black slicked-back hair, wild dark eyes, and slim strong body. His nickname was “Animal.” He earned the name on the football field when he reached inside the rival quarterback’s face mask and accidently tore his lip off up to his nose.
He fell in love with her right away. She fell in love with the bad boy. They were perfect for each other.
My mom said that after the “animal” incident, Joe Bello came to her crying. “Poor son of a bitch,” he said. “What the hell did I do? Yeah, he’s Irish, but he’s a good guy. Why’d I do that?” And in this vulnerable moment my dad told my mom the story of what happened when he was seven years old. After Dad snuck out to ride Cousin Rusty’s horse without asking, his father beat him with a belt and then tied him to a pole in the basement for the entire night as rats scurried over his ankles. He cried out all night but no one came to save him. After that evening he never really cried again.
It wasn’t just that time but many that he was beaten. He was routinely told he was “good for nothing.” He had to sit on my grandfather’s right side at dinner so he could backhand him if a pea fell out of his mouth. In one night on the football field, all that rage just flew out toward the Irish kid. My mom saw then that he had a lot to be angry for. She had so much compassion for my dad. She saw the truth of his heart from the start and no matter how he acted, she would always love him.
But after the accident, things changed. My dad, coming from old-fashioned Italian immigrants who had all worked construction, was especially ashamed of his inability to provide. Now my mom had to take care of him, pay off the house, pay all of our bills, and take care of the kids. He could do nothing, and he was furious about it. There were years of operations that only left him more scarred and in more pain. There were also the psychological effects. Back then he wasn’t “disabled,” as we say now, but a “cripple.”
He was given painkillers to dull the pain. He drank to dull the pain. He sat in his orange-and-red Barcalounger for years cursing the guys who had taken his life from him. He also cursed and abused my mother, us kids, and even our dogs. He would scream and yell, throw things, and chase us through the backyard with a gun when we ran away.
He hit bottom when we discovered my mother had non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma 30 years ago. She was given five months to live. My dad went out of his mind. That summer, my family was running a pizzeria down at the Jersey Shore while my mother was in Philly getting chemo. Dad spent every day raging back and forth from the pizzeria to our one-bedroom apartment next door. After nights spent drinking, he would come to the restaurant and scream. The raging stopped when he knocked me down in anger for closing up five minutes too early. My older brother threw him out of the window. We all had had enough. That was the last time my father ever laid a hand on any of us.
My father and I have healed a lot over the years. It is an ongoing process. I could always see his light, though it was painful at times. I saw how much he hated himself and how his father had passed that self-hatred down to him. I saw the possibility that I could be that way, too, if I didn’t face my own demons.
After having gone through years of my own therapy and developing a deeper understanding of myself and my dad, I’m not terrified of him anymore. Now I
am compassionate, painfully curious, and heartbroken for him. How must he have felt every time he had to ask one of us little kids to tie his shoe? He was in too much pain to perform even simple acts himself. Even my child self knew I was crossing some sort of dangerous territory as I dropped to my knees day after day to tie the “protector’s” shoe. A man who could once lift an entire building now could not tie his shoe. I can only imagine the shame.
Now, as an adult, I can focus on the beautiful things my dad did and the sacrifices he made for us. He got up every Saturday and Sunday at 5 A.M. to drive my sister and me to our jobs at the local bakery, and my brothers to their jobs picking up nails on construction sites. He drove even though he could barely sit up straight. He taught us the value of hard work and how to become self-reliant. He made sure every one of his kids went to college and saw Disney World before we left home for good.
And now, three decades later, I am sitting in the garage with him and my sister just talking, remembering those painful and joyous moments of our childhood. I am humbled by his courage. He quit the drugs and heavy drinking. When I was in my 20s he was finally diagnosed with bipolar disorder. He started medication and has been much saner since. In my 30s, he was wrongly diagnosed with early Alzheimer’s and was given more medication that made him shake so hard he couldn’t bring a spoon to his mouth. He was eventually rediagnosed with multiple sclerosis. He loses more mobility every year.
But the thing that makes me honor my father most is that he was able to own his mistakes. He has apologized to all of us for years. He cannot remember most of what happened when we were younger, but he apologizes nonetheless. It hurts him deeply to know that he hurt us. And my brothers and sister and I have accepted his apologies. We better understand his illness and the grief he was plagued by when he lost the life he had.
He is a great grandfather to Jackson and his other five grandkids. They like hanging with “Pop,” whether it’s going fishing with him or learning to shoot pellet guns in the backyard.
He has slowed down over the years, but still comes often to Los Angeles to see my brother and our family. Clare dotes on him as he sits on his scooter on our patio and smokes his cigarettes. (He always quits right before he comes and then starts smoking with me immediately when he gets here.) He fixes things around the house. He repaired the antique white French bistro chairs we had that were missing slats of wood. It took him six months. He sketched the exact dimensions and took them home to his workshop so he could make exact replicas. I can see the chairs now. We didn’t repaint the new wooden slats to match the old white ones. And we never will. We like them mismatched. It reminds me of my dad and his endless courage and grace to overcome the worst of what life might hand him.
I don’t really know how many years it took to transform my relationship with my dad, to come to a place of peace with the things that happened in my childhood. My experience with my family reminds me of the fluidity of all relationships. If we can only allow our relationships to go through their changes and get to the bottom of our own rage, sorrow, and shame, then we have the opportunity to become stronger, and more open to love.
My brothers and sister have emerged from our childhood as extraordinary human beings. They are my partners in many ways. None of my other partners will ever know what it was to grow up in that house. We have a shared experience. Instead of that making us more distant, it makes our bond stronger. My older brother, Joey, always says, “Friends will come and go, but you’ll always have family.” And I am confident I will always have these three in my life.
Forgiveness is said to be the only balm for old war wounds. There are so many incredible stories of forgiveness for acts that truly seem unforgivable. I am in awe of the stories of forgiveness from heroes and heroines such as Nelson Mandela, Somaly Mam, Louis Zamperini, and many others. I’ve ventured into the battlefield a few times over the years and always came back with the same answer. Forgiveness is complicated. It entails a rational decision. It’s something you do as an adult. A child is not rational. A child just feels. I can’t tell someone to forgive. My siblings and I grew up in an atmosphere of violence and unpredictability. I can’t erase that, and, believe me, I have tried over the years. It is a part of me. But, yes, I have forgiven my Pop. And I can forgive others who have harmed me. But I couldn’t have done that without accepting that what had happened was part of me. For me, forgiveness as an adult is really about acceptance. Though the child within you may never forgive the wrongs, perhaps the adult self should just work on accepting them.
I have come to see my father and mother as people, not just godlike figures who controlled my life. I have acceptance for where they came from, and what they were taught, who they were, and what their values are. Knowing and accepting doesn’t always take the pain of what happened to our family away, but it does help us to pull away the fear and trauma and see the good inside of each other. Maybe it even helps us to forgive ourselves a little more. And I know, it is far better to be a forgiver than to be bound by anger.
4
AM I A BAD GIRL?
Have you done something you’re supposed to be ashamed of?
I am watching the married man I had an affair with for two and a half years kissing another woman in a movie. I heard he was actually having an affair with the actress in real life. Now I know how his wife must have felt back then.
At first, I wasn’t going to turn on the movie. But that night, after being alone for many hours, I decided to turn it on. I was riveted. The man I’d been involved with hadn’t even appeared yet, but I was loving the plot and the lead female character and the actor who was portraying her. She was strong, beautiful, and brilliant. Everything out of her mouth seemed true. She fully inhabited that character. And when my still-married ex-lover popped on the screen, I didn’t instantly think, “They’re having an affair.” I thought, “He’s a really bad actor.”
At the time I was involved with him, he was the love of my life.
We met years ago at an industry event. When we first shook hands, I was taken with his good nature and all-American good looks. I also noticed his gold wedding band. I did not have a band but had been in a serious relationship for many years. By the time I met him, that relationship was on the rocks mostly because of my inability to commit and my continuous search for the one. At that moment I didn’t even consider the man a potential, with the ring and all. It wasn’t till a week in that I was overtaken with a desire akin to a tsunami. A few weeks later, we began an affair.
Within a week, my current relationship began unraveling. My heart was opening and breaking into pieces at the same time. I had lied to the man I was with, hurt him terribly, and felt shame and remorse. At the same time, I was allowing myself to completely give in to my desire for this other man. These were complicated feelings, all of them, smashed up together.
After our first 10 days together—he went back to his suburban life, and I went back to the carnage of mine—I got an e-mail from him that read:
My love.
I can’t do it. I can’t leave my kids. As much as I love you, I cannot do it. They are at a very vulnerable age. My wife is a good woman. We’ve had a partnership—have for many years. But you must know that you are the most extraordinary woman I have ever met. You are definitely the sexiest. If I could I would live my life with you. Yes, we could try to continue the half-ass thing that we had for a couple of weeks (stolen moments and all). But it is not fair to you. You deserve to be loved fully and without reservation. I’m sorry to savage your heart again. I truly am. I am still in love with you and will be for the rest of my life. Good-bye my girl.
Yours.
Me.
I got this missive and about 200 similar ones from him over the next two years.
Our letters were always filled with drama, breaking up and not being able to keep away from each other. In retrospect, it was a lot like the good old-fashioned romance novels I read as a teenager, minus the storybook ending, of course.
H
ere’s what our “relationship” looked like for years: He would sneak away to Los Angeles or me to New York for a day or two. We would meet at my house in LA, a hotel in NYC. We would immediately find ourselves in bed. And after hours, we would make great meals together and laugh and talk and share. And then we would go back to bed. It would have been a month or a week from the last time we were together. But we couldn’t help seeing each other again even though every time we said it was the last. And we had mind-blowing sex. Eye-to-eye, raw-animal, but loving sex. I had never had sex like that before. And then again, I had never been with a married man before. The secrecy made the rush that much more intense.
Afterward, we would lie side by side talking, dreaming of what our life could be together. We would go to Africa or to a fishing camp in New Zealand, where he had just shot a movie. I would wear my brown bikini and we would get lost on a beach in the middle of nowhere. We would go to Machu Picchu and Brazil. We would meet fabulous people and tango all night. Or we would just walk hand in hand in my Venice neighborhood, eat burritos at Stroh’s deli, and read the New York Times on Sunday. Our first trip would be to Mexico. We would proclaim our love. He would tell me that I was the one and he would never leave me. And for a few days, a few weeks, we would live this dream. And just as suddenly as it started, it stopped.
I knew the relationship was finished a few weeks before it officially ended, when my friend John and I sat in a café in Venice having lunch. John liked this man and liked that I was happy with him. I remember John saying to me, “He is nice and not an asshole. But, if he wasn’t great in bed, would you still be interested in him? What if he was in an accident and his dick fell off, would you still want him?”
John described him and me as bifurcated. This man wanted his family and could be entirely present with them. Yet, he would call me in the middle of his kid’s football game. I too was bifurcated. I liked the pleasure of our relationship, but I was pained by the baggage. When it got to the place where we went away for a weekend but couldn’t hold hands walking from store to store, it was a big wake-up call. As much as I liked the secrecy, passion, and drama, I liked living life in the open much more.