by Maria Bello
Finally, I got a hold of myself, popped up, and said, near tears, “I am in so much pain right now.”
He looked at me and asked, “What’s wrong, baby? Do you need an aspirin?”
And this just about sums up the depth of our emotional connection. An aspirin.
Another prince was actually a bit closer to “princely” than the others. Our relationship began in a magical place, with him riding in on his white horse to save me and the world. He asked me to marry him before we had even kissed. He was obviously looking for a princess of his own, a woman to save him and tell him he was a good guy. Three months later we were screaming and throwing steaks at each other’s heads and he was telling me what a “fuckup” I was.
All three of these men were figments of my imagination, just characters in my play. I had cast myself as Cinderella, hoping my Prince Charming would notice me and choose me as his special one. I actually thought every one of these men was my soul mate. Now I see how delusional I was, and how I debased myself when I should have known better. It embarrasses me, in some ways, to even remember the way I behaved. And yet the lessons I learned from each of these relationships were life changing. I realized that I “made people up.” I had a fantasy in my mind of who each of these men was, even when I didn’t really know any of them.
I’ve seen these guys in tabloids over the years. One of them turned out to be a lonely, addicted, unhappy, not-so-good-looking man who barely worked again. The other looks the same, except he’s orange, because he’s become addicted to the fake tanner he’s been using for years. And the third one, well, he’s still out there looking.
As much as I do enjoy a good vengeful laugh about my fictional princes, I see now that they were lonely and afraid, too, needing validation as much as I did. They needed to know that they were famous enough, rich enough, and good enough to be wanted by every woman they met. I can’t say I wasn’t looking for the same. We were all dancing to the same music. I felt like a victim of their neuroses at the time, but, in fact, I was just as neurotic as they were.
The names and circumstances have been changed to protect the guilty. So don’t try and guess who these guys are. Besides, who they are is not important. They’re really just one big mashup of variations on a theme: handsome, self-involved, with a heap of hopes and dreams projected onto them by me.
I wanted to be special. I thought when I became the one all of my anxiety would disappear and then I would be someone. These bad princes were not going to do that for me. But I eventually learned that not even the good princes could.
I was lucky to have a few good princes in my life. Men who held me when I felt I was broken, made me laugh, understood me, and showed me all of themselves. Thank God the father of my child is one of the good ones. But, even still, no one could help fill the hole that I felt was inside of me. I was on an endless search for the mate to my golden shoe.
My first golden shoe, the one I had found on the street in New York City as a young woman, brought me luck—from being cast on ER, then in Payback, Coyote Ugly, The Cooler, A History of Violence, and others that came after. One day during the acceptance of an award in San Francisco, I thought about my old shoe. I thought about how all the dreams I had connected to that talisman had come true. I was by then a working actress, acknowledged for taking challenging roles. I was a mother of a really great kid. I realized, while I was giving the speech, that the shoe had given me everything I asked for and more. I decided to tell the crowd the story of my magic shoe and decided the time had come for me to pass the shoe on to another Cinderella, someone else who needed dreams.
And I did.
Not long afterward, in the midst of yet another breakup, I went to New York to make a film. I brought my golden shoe. It was springtime and the cherry blossoms were out in Sheep’s Meadow in Central Park. I went with my golden shoe in hand to lie in the green grass. I was wondering what I should do with my shoe. I took out my phone and started to photograph it. First in the grass, then in my hand, and finally near the big tree I used to sit under when I was a struggling actress right off the bus from Philly. I realized the moment had come to let it go.
I went back to my room and wrote my story on two sheets of paper. I didn’t put my name on it, but explained the story of the shoe and how it had brought me luck and given me the courage to walk on no matter what. I wrote that the key was to stand on your own feet, in your own shoes, and not wait for Prince Charming or Cinderella to kneel before you with arms outstretched so that you could succeed.
I put the shoe on a piece of old cardboard outside of the front door of the hotel. I wrote in big letters “IF you are a size 9 please try me on, if not keep walking.” I put the note underneath the shoe and I made the doormen promise to keep an eye on it. A few minutes later I got in my car to go to the airport. I turned around and watched my shoe till it was out of sight and then I started bawling my eyes out. The kind driver asked me if I was okay and I told him my story. He said something like “It was very brave of you to let it go. Remember, what you give, you get back tenfold.”
I probably will never know who has that magic shoe, but I hope they were inspired by it as much as I was. I hope they are flying right now and following their dreams.
A couple of months later back in LA, Jackson, Milo, and I were walking on the beach with Milo’s mom, Camryn Manheim. Milo and Jackson were born one day apart and they are like brothers. Camryn has scraped me off the floor many times when I was having a breakdown about my child, my love life, and life in general. She is one of the most practical and generous people I know. As we walked on the beach that day, with the boys running ahead of us playing on the jetty and in the surf, I was content. Then Jackson came running back to me. He was holding something in his hand. “Mom, Mom, look! I found your gold shoe!” He was holding an old beat-up golden ballet slipper. Camryn knew the story of my shoe as well so we all just sat there in awe. I brought it home, of course.
A month later I was walking out of the Hollywood Bowl with my then boyfriend, Bryn. After a few blocks I looked down to step around an object on the dark pavement in front of me and stopped in my tracks. It was a gold spray-painted UGG. I picked it up. A few feet later, another object blocked my path: it was a gold sneaker. And there was another and another and another. In all I picked up five gold shoes! I learned later that on the bottoms of the shoes were stickers with an advertisement for an art show. It didn’t matter to me. It was another sign. I now had six gold shoes. The driver was right, I gave something away out of love, and it came back to me more than I could ever imagine. The shoes now sit on a shelf in my living room next to the photo of my old gold shoe.
I will never stop looking for golden shoes—signs that I am on the right path. But I have stopped looking for someone else to deliver the “missing one” to my door. I just bought myself a pair of gold peep-toe pumps at DSW that fit me perfectly!
That’s the thing about shoes. Only you know how they fit. No one can tell you how they actually feel or just how far you can walk in them. Seems to me, if you wait for some prince or princess to come along and deliver them, you’ll be waiting forever.
So I’m passing on my shoes to you, in the form of lessons that have changed me. I have finally stopped waiting for someone to bring me my lost shoe. Oddly enough it was my father who helped me see this most clearly. He was never the Prince Charming many young girls expect their fathers to be. Quite the contrary. But later in life, as we healed our relationship, he helped me see that he and my mother had already given me the pair of golden shoes that I would never lose.
My own two feet.
9
AM I DAMAGED?
It wasn’t until the late 1980s, when Oprah came on television, that we discovered my father had bipolar disorder. When my father was growing up, and even when I was growing up, people who seemed strange, agitated, or not quite there were labeled “crazy.” I remember going to Norristown State Mental Hospital when I was a Girl Scout to give cookies to the patient
s. I will never forget the smell of urine and the chorus of screams. I will never forget the poor man lying on his side in a pile of his own feces. I wondered what was so wrong with him that he had to live there. I now wonder why the head of our Girl Scouts troop thought it was a good idea to bring young girls to a place like that.
When we were children we didn’t know that in addition to being addicted to alcohol and drugs, my father was also bipolar. He would rage and hit and scream, and then sometimes was not able to get out of bed for days on end. Still other times there were moments of sanity and kindness. And yet, through it all, we believed that my dad was a good man with a kind heart, a behavior our mother modeled for us. We saw his hurt through our own pain and often sympathized with him.
After my father broke his back he was labeled “a cripple.” Now we call it “handicapped.” But the worst part is that it wasn’t because he was physically disabled that he went off the rails. From a very early age, my dad showed signs of what we now know as bipolar disorder. The beast was always there. His injury just unlocked the cage.
My father wishes that he had gone to college at 17, instead of joining the army. Back in the 1950s, they didn’t have diagnoses like ADD or ADHD, so my dad was just labeled “a troubled, dumb kid.” Even his parents told him so. But he was curious. He wanted to learn. He could have done great things had he believed in himself, and understood himself more.
From the onset of puberty, I would become possessed by rages and depression. I contemplated and staged my suicide at age 12. I wrote about it in my pink Holly Hobbie diary, which I locked with a key. I’m sad I don’t have that journal now, but I remember every moment of the evening.
I was 12 years old, living in my suburban Philadelphia neighborhood. I was five five, the tallest kid in my sixth grade class. I weighed about a buck forty. I was not a little girl. My house was in chaos. Some months before, my dad had been taken away to rehab after he had destroyed the house and the hearts of those of us inside, yet again. When he got back after a few months, he seemed okay, but out of it. Since he was off painkillers, he was in agony every minute. Of course that made him depressed. How could it not? And when he got depressed, instead of going inside of himself and putting his head under the covers, as I did, he would lash out. I tried everything I could to flee that house.
I was in love with Robbie, a boy in my older brother’s class. After school some days, I would sneak out of our house if my dad was passed out, on the pretense of walking my dog, Coco, and steal looks at Robbie riding his little Honda 85 motorbike. I fantasized that he’d stop one day, hold out his hand, and ask me to ride. I’d hop on back, throw my arms around him, and we’d jet away like Aidan Quinn and Daryl Hannah in Reckless. I’d never have to go back home. I would be saved. I heard Robbie liked me, too, so I went out walking every day for two months. He would talk to me in his shy way with his bike revving high and then ride away without asking me to hop on. Soon, I thought. Soon.
A week before Christmas a public school girl had a party. I was invited and so was Robbie. I knew it would be the night that we would kiss. He would hold me and we would fall in love. We had a connection. I was sure that he was my soul mate.
I arrived at the party in my new Christmas clogs and my cool green corduroy “horse pants,” as I called them, since they had a label with a horse on them. I didn’t know then they were Levi’s. When I got to the party I felt quite shy, but I held my head high, walked down to the basement, and looked for my man. When my eyes adjusted to the blackness, I saw a swarm of people slow dancing to “Stairway to Heaven.” I imagined I’d find him alone in the crowd and we’d begin a slow, sweet dance that culminated in a kiss. Pushing through the crowd I found him in a corner making out with the party girl’s cousin. Tongues everywhere. Before I knew what I was doing, I grabbed the black-haired ninth grade girl whom he was kissing by the hair and pulled her off him. Then I pushed him and ran back up the stairs.
Everyone had stopped to stare and now they rushed up the stairs after me. The cousin was right on my back, and before I reached the driveway, she turned me around and slapped me, all the kids looking on. “You crazy bitch! What the fuck do you think you’re doing! You’re fucking crazy!” she screamed. The mother of the party girl came out and yelled at me to leave. I started walking away toward a smirking Robbie and he promptly tripped me. When I was on the ground he chuckled and said, “You are really fucked up.” Laughter all around. I got up and walked home. I had broken my new clogs. I had a rip in the knee of my new horse pants. I was humiliated.
I went home to bed, stuck my head under a pillow, and cried for the next two days as I planned my suicide. I cried because no one would ever want me, because I was too messed up. And now, everyone knew. They knew that my father was sick in his head and that I was just like him.
The day of Christmas Eve, after helping my mom peel the potatoes and clean the celery and radishes for that night’s feast, I went to my room and began to write in my little diary:
Dear Diary,
Today will be the last day of my life. Tonight after 6 o’clock mass, I will not stay with the rest of my family for cookies and coffee in the hall with the other parishioners. I will pretend to be sick. I will walk home. I will go upstairs to my father’s armoire where he keeps his magazines and his guns. I will take out the little gun and go to my room. I will hold the gun to my head and pull the trigger. I will die. Robbie will know I love him. My parents will be sad. I will never have to face my classmates again. I will be so happy.
Love,
Maria
P.S. The only way I won’t follow through with my plan is if it snows tonight by the time I get out of church. Then it will be a sign from God that I am not supposed to kill myself. Thanks.
I don’t know why I wrote that P.S., but I did. It was a particularly mild December and we had seen no snow that winter. There were no signs in the forecast, either. I suppose I was looking for a miracle, like the virgin birth and those three kings following a star to find the stable in Bethlehem where a king would be born. How did they know which star to follow, anyway? That was definitely a miracle. So, if God really wanted me to keep on living my lousy life, if he wanted me to go on living with the knowledge that I was a monster, if he wanted me to suffer for the next seven years until I could get out of this house, then he’d send me a miracle, too. He’d send a little snow.
I dressed for the occasion of my death. I wore my maroon, flowered Laura Ingalls dress, a two-inch heel from Sears, my mom’s pantyhose, and my long bleached blond tresses hanging down my back except for a tiny braid off to the left side. I walked up to the tiny church with my brothers and sister. I wore no coat because it was nearly 68 degrees. We walked in silence.
During mass, I thought of little else but my death. I realized that in a few days, all of these people would be gathered again to mourn at my funeral. All the girls from my class who had stopped playing with me because I hung out with the younger Marianne Murray, the mean Sister Michael, and, of course, Robbie (who would be devastated) would all be there. My mom and dad, grandmas and grandpas, and siblings would all be in the front row sobbing.
When mass was over and it was time to walk outside, I stopped behind the closed wooden doors and let the others go ahead to the hall. This was it. I was ready. I looked back at the altar. The smell of frankincense hung in the air. Good-bye, God, old friend, see you soon. I walked out with my eyes closed.
I felt a tiny wetness on my face. I opened my eyes to a sprinkling of little white flakes that vanished as soon as they hit the ground. It was snowing! Kinda sorta. Thank you, God! I was overjoyed. Not to be spared death, but because someone was finally listening. It was a miracle. My own little Christmas Eve miracle, just for me.
I would contemplate suicide many times after that. I thought that something from my childhood had broken me in such a way that I could not survive. I tried to cure myself of the pain by latching on to spiritual healers and spending hours with therapists.
&nb
sp; Most people just thought I was a deep kid. During high school, college, and my years acting in New York City, I was plagued with pain, depression, rages, and manias. And yet my friends accepted me exactly how I was. In some instances I could see myself from the outside and agreed that I had value, that I was sane. And then in the next minute I would fall down into a ditch of despair. Then, after a few days in bed, I was fine again. Until the next time.
Right before I moved to LA, a magical thing happened. In the midst of a depression, which left me terrified to be in groups of people, I had to cater a fancy party. As I served the mushroom tarts and then went in the kitchen to try not to cry, a man approached me. He told me he was a painter and asked me if he could paint me. I said, “Yeah right, you want me to be naked or something?” He said no, I could pose however I liked and that he would pay me $100 an hour. When I asked him why he wanted to paint me, he said, “I’ve never seen anyone more on the verge of insanity as you.”
I took the job, sitting in a little studio on the Upper East Side for six weeks. I posed on a tiny bed, looking out of a small window onto a tree as he painted me. I really felt that with every brushstroke, he was taking a bit of the depression from me. The top of the canvas where he started was dark and moody, but as the days went on, the painting got lighter, and I, too, started to feel lighter. By the time I left, I felt solid again. It was the ultimate demonstration that art heals.
When Jackson was one, I met the kind painter by chance in an elevator in New York City. He remembered me and was happy for my success. He sent me the painting and it’s hanging in my bedroom. It always reminds me of my shadow and that there is always a way to heal.