by Mariah Carey
Please be at peace father
I’m at peace with you
Bitterness isn’t worth clinging to
After all the anguish we’ve all been through
—“Sunflowers for Alfred Roy”
LIGHT OF MY LIFE
Letting go ain’t easy
Oh, it’s just exceedingly hurtful
’Cause somebody you used to know
Is flinging your world around
And they watch, as you’re falling down, down, down,
Falling down, baby
—“The Art of Letting Go”
“You’ve always been the light of my life.”
My mother told me this over and over when I was a child. I wanted to be her light. I wanted to make her proud. I respected her as a singer and a working mother. I loved her deeply, and, like most kids, I wanted her to be a safe place for me. Above all, I desperately wanted to believe her.
But ours is a story of betrayal and beauty. Of love and abandonment. Of sacrifice and survival. I’ve emancipated myself from bondage several times, but there is a cloud of sadness that I suspect will always hang over me, not simply because of my mother but because of our complicated journey together. It has caused me so much pain and confusion. Time has shown me there is no benefit in trying to protect people who never tried to protect me. Time and motherhood have finally given me the courage to honestly face who my mother has been to me.
For me, this is the steepest cliff edge. If I can make it to the other side of this truth, I know there is relief of epic proportions awaiting me. Those people who have hurt me, over and over, whom I have escaped or walled off, are deeply significant in my story, but they are not central to my existence.
Removing myself from toxic people I love has been excruciatingly painful, but once I found the courage (with prayer and professional help, of course), I simply let go and let God. (I’ll add, though, that there’s a huge difference between simple and easy. It ain’t easy, baby.) Yet, there is no “artful” way of letting go of my mother, and our relationship is anything but simple. Like many aspects of my life, my journey with my mother has been full of contradictions and competing realities. It’s never been only black-and-white—it’s been a whole rainbow of emotions.
Our relationship is a prickly rope of pride, pain, shame, gratitude, jealousy, admiration, and disappointment. A complicated love tethers my heart to my mother’s. When I became a mother to Roc and Roe, my heart grew two times over; as my capacity for pure love expanded, the ability to tow heavy pain from my past diminished. Healthy, powerful love did that for me: it illuminated the dark spots and unearthed buried hurt. The new, clear light that emanates from my children’s love now rushes through every artery, every cell, every dark nook and cranny of my being.
Even after all this time, a part of me fantasizes that one of these days my mother will transform into one of the caring mothers I saw on TV as a child, like Carol Brady or Clair Huxtable; that she will suddenly ask me, “Honey, how, was your day?” before she gives me a report on her dog or her bird, or asks me to pay for something or do something—that she will have genuine, sustained interest in me and what I’m doing or feeling. That one day she will know me. That one day my mother will understand me.
To a certain extent, I know how my mother became who she is. Her mother certainly didn’t understand her. And her father never had a chance to know her; he died while her mother was pregnant with her. She was one of three children raised by a widowed Irish Catholic woman. My mother was known as the “dark one” because her hair wasn’t blond and her eyes were a mix of brown and green, not pure blue like her brother’s and sister’s. Blue eyes were a symbol of the purity of whiteness, and being of 100 percent “pure” Irish descent was central to her mother’s entire identity.
My mother grew up in the 1940s and 1950s in Springfield, Illinois. It was the capital city at the center of a state at the center of the country. But Springfield was also a center of insidious institutional racism. In 1908, a white woman was allegedly raped by a Black man (the same accusation leveled against my father and countless other innocent Black men), which ignited a three-day riot by white citizens in which two Black men were lynched and four white men were shot to death by Black businessmen protecting their property. In the 1920s, when my mother’s mother was coming of age, the Ku Klux Klan had a strong presence in the city and the city government, holding several key positions and setting the moral compass for the community. Springfield was a city openly cloaked in hate.
One of the few stories my mother told of her childhood was of being in kindergarten and sharing her mat with a Black boy at naptime. For this, the nuns at her Catholic school publicly shamed her. Obviously there was a rancid repertoire of slurs for Black people in my mother’s youth, but she also told me of the odd slurs and degrading names they had for Italians, Jewish people, and all “others” when no one else was around. She made me privy to the hierarchy of racism in their white community. Ironically, even among her beloved Irish there was a social caste system that divided the “lace curtain Irish” from the “shanty Irish.” The lace curtain Irish were “pure,” well off, respectable, and “properly placed” in society (think of the Kennedys), while the shanty Irish were characterized as dirty, poor, and ignorant. There was a critical and pitiful need, in this system, to have a host of others to look down on. To my mother’s mother, all “others” were below the Irish. But Black? Black people were always at the absolute bottom of the order. Nothing was below Black.
My mother not only ignored the moral code of her hometown, she rebelled against it, later becoming active in the civil rights movement. By the standards of her environment and family, she was a liberal eccentric. She was interested in life outside of their tiny, tight, white world. She was intellectually curious and drawn to culture, especially to classical music. She recalls that one day, while listening to a classical music station on the radio, she heard an aria. It was the most beautiful sound she’d ever heard, and she was determined to chase it, inside herself and out in the world. She decided to start her quest in New York City, which seemed a million miles away from her family and the small-minded place they inhabited.
Young Patricia had big dreams—many of which she realized. She was extremely gifted and driven. Winning a scholarship to the prestigious Juilliard School for music, she would go on to sing with the New York City Opera, making her debut at Lincoln Center. My mother built an exciting, artsy, bohemian life in New York City. She was in the downtown scene and dated a diverse cast of men by whom her mother would have been mortified. Her pure Irish Catholic mother wouldn’t approve of her dating anyone who wasn’t lily-white. (Of course, in turn, the white supremacists of Illinois weren’t crazy about the Irish or Catholics—the WASPs [White Anglo-Saxon Protestants], as they were referred to at that time, always needed a fresh supply of people to have beneath them.) An Italian guy would have been a problem, a Jewish man, a tragedy. My grandmother would’ve come completely undone if she knew my mother had had a steamy affair with a rich, older Lebanese man named François, right before she fell in love with, and married, a man her mother could not even conceive of. My father. A beautiful, complicated Black man. This, to my grandmother (and her community) was the worst thing her daughter could do to her and to the family lineage. Talking to a Black man was considered a shame; befriending one, an outrage; carrying on with one, a major scandal, but marrying one?
That was an abomination.
It was the ultimate humiliation. My mother’s marriage to my father was beyond betrayal to her mother; it was a high crime against her white heritage, punishable by excommunication.
To her mother, who grew up in a time and place where the KKK openly held mass rallies and were active in government, marrying a Black man carried a burden of shame she could not fathom. Her mother was raised not to drink from the same fountain as Black people, not to sit in the same seat as Black people or swim in the same pool. She was taught, and believed, that Black peo
ple were dirty and that Blackness could rub off. After all, the United States is the birthplace of the “one-drop rule,” the racial classification system that asserts that any person with an ancestor possessing even one drop of Black blood is considered Black.
In my grandmother’s view, my mother loving my father made her a bottom-feeder, procreating with the lowest human group and making mulatto mongrels—me and my siblings. Needless to say, my grandmother completely disowned her daughter. She told no one else in the family her daughter was married to a Black man (and pregnant with a son). Save for a few sporadic, secret phone calls, my mother became almost entirely disconnected from her mother. She wouldn’t go back to her hometown for many years to come.
Even the most gifted, compassionate, progressive person cannot easily overcome being completely rejected by their mother. To have the love of a mother is too primal a need. Whatever soft place my mother might have had to land was hardened like concrete by her own mother’s ignorant, fearful family and upbringing. Even her marriage to my father and the births of three beautiful children couldn’t fully heal the deep wound of maternal rejection—nothing can. I also doubt loving a Black man and having mixed children is the cure-all for generations of belief steeped in white superiority, and my mother and her family were steeped down to the white of their bones.
I’ve often wondered why my mother defied her mother, family, and heritage by marrying my father. What was her full motivation? Was it all in the name of unconditional love? It was never “we belong together” between them. She never reminisced to me about their romance, nor was there any physical evidence of it: no photos, no poems, no letters, no trace of a great love. (Well, there were three children.) Maybe my mother wanted to keep her history and memories of my father private, though I can’t help but wonder if her marriage wasn’t, in part, a rebellion against her mother. Did she do it for the attention, the drama of it all? More than once over the decades, I’ve heard my mother order her coffee “Black, like my men.” She’s often done it in front of me and one of her young Black grandsons—awkward.
To be honest, I don’t know if my mother ever wanted to get married and have children so young. I could understand her wanting to create a safety net, a new family of her own, and to continue blazing trails, leaving her backward home and family behind. But what I couldn’t understand was her abandoning her promising singing career to do so. From very early on I decided that I didn’t want the same fate; I couldn’t have a man or an unplanned pregnancy take me off my path. Witnessing my mother’s and my sister’s detours was a sad and stinging warning. Watching their dreams go up in flames burned a cautionary tale into my mind.
In 1977, my mother recorded an album she titled To Start Again. But by that time, she’d already had a troubled interracial marriage, three kids, a divorce, and one child still living with her, me. Did she think a record company would suddenly discover her? This is one of many miscalculations that as a child I observed my mother make and placed in a file labeled “What Not to Do.”
* * *
Time rolled by after my parents’ divorce, and eventually my grandmother allowed my mother to visit her with her granddaughter—but only her youngest granddaughter. I was a twelve-year-old little girl and didn’t quite understand why she only invited me. Looking back, I suspect it was because I was blond-ish and very fair for a mixed kid. I didn’t raise much suspicion to the culturally untrained eye. I was too young to know how my mother and her mother interacted with each other, and I never knew what happened between them at that point: Was there an apology from Pat’s mother for disowning her daughter and withholding family from her? Did she reckon with her racism? Was there forgiveness? I don’t know. What I do remember is that she was stiff and formal. She had stark white hair that she wore neatly away from her face with one big wave in the front. On her stern face she wore black cat-eyed glasses. Her house was not warm, and there was no smell to the place. I recall her coming into the quiet, sterile bedroom where I slept while I was there, after my mother had put me to bed. She sat on the side of the bed in the dark and, in a whisper, taught me the Lord’s Prayer.
Give us this day our daily bread
And forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us.
Matthew 6:11–12
That’s all I remember of that visit to see my grandmother. In an unusual twist of fate, she died on my mother’s birthday, February 15. After that, oddly enough, my mother pretty much sainted her. As an adult, my mother was never a practicing Catholic, but for many years she went to light a candle for her mother on that date. Strange how death can make people forgive those who trespassed against them and their children.
* * *
For most of my early childhood it was just my mother and me. We moved constantly. After an exhaustive search, she found us a place by the water. She wanted to be in a more peaceful setting where she could take long walks with the dog and go down the road to the beach. The two of us moved into what she referred to as a “quaint cottage” but I later learned the entire neighborhood called it “the shack.” I found the neighbors’ description to be more accurate.
It was a small, rickety structure covered in a wavy faux-brick siding that had buckled under the elements. Inside, a layer of dank sadness seeped through the floorboards and walls, which were covered with cheap “imitation of wood” paneling that was paired with filthy flea-ridden carpeting. No matter the time of day, it was always dark inside. Prior to us moving in, the place had been abandoned and had become a hangout where teenagers would smoke, drink, and mess around. It was set off of a rough, unpaved driveway of rubble and stones and faced a big white Victorian house, which made it look like something the big house had belched out. It was marked, and so were we. My mother and I were the eccentric lady and her little girl who lived in “the shack.” How … quaint.
* * *
The first chapter of Marilyn Monroe’s autobiography, My Story, is entitled “How I Rescued a White Piano.” In it she writes about her mission to find her mother’s 1937 baby grand piano.
Gladys Monroe Baker, mother to Marilyn Monroe (born Norma Jeane Mortenson), was in and out of psychiatric institutions all of her life. It’s been documented that she suffered from paranoid schizophrenia, an incurable disease that performs a violent dance with the mind, releasing it to lucidity for brief moments, then, without warning, spinning it back into hellish delusion. As a result of her mother’s inability to maintain sanity, Marilyn spent most of her childhood in orphanages, followed by a series of foster homes. During one of Gladys’s rare healthy periods, she and little Norma Jeane lived together for a few months in a small white house near the Hollywood Bowl. The most prized possession in their modest abode was a baby grand piano. When her mother’s illness reared its ugly head again, dragging her back into darkness and into another institution, the few furnishings and the piano were sold off.
After Norma Jeane’s transformation into Marilyn Monroe The Movie Star, she spoke very little of her childhood, her mentally ill mother, or her unknown father. And though Marilyn had made herself into a radiant icon, I imagine there was a piece of her still searching for an uninterrupted childhood, longing for her mother to be whole. I see how the piano must’ve become a symbol of a time when she and her mother were together in relative peace and harmony. Pianos are elegant, mystical, and comforting—from them simple tunes and majestic compositions can spring forth and fill a dismal living room, a dank bar, a concert hall, or even a shack with joy and glory.
Marilyn went on a mission to find her mother’s piano. As the story goes, while still a struggling model and actress, she found and purchased the piano at an auction and kept it in storage until she was able to move it into a home of her own. It accompanied her to all her residences. One of its final homes was the lavish Manhattan apartment Marilyn shared with her third and last husband, renowned playwright Arthur Miller, where she custom-coated the instrument in a thick, shiny white lacquer to match the apartment’s glamo
rous, angelic décor—“a world of white,” as her half sister, Berniece Miracle, called it. “My happiest hours as a little girl were around that piano,” Marilyn said. I imagine when your childhood was fraught with insecurity and fear like Marilyn’s and like mine, the romance of those lost happy hours is extremely valuable. I understood why she searched for, bought, stored, and cared for the piano—so much so that I rescued it at auction at Christie’s in 1999. It is a treasure and my most expensive piece of art. And now, Marilyn Monroe’s white baby grand piano is the centerpiece, the pièce de résistance, of my own glamorous Manhattan penthouse. Marilyn was my first vision of a superstar that I could relate to, on an almost spiritual level.
We did without a lot of things when I was young, but what my mother couldn’t live without was a piano. We always had a piano, and I had many happy and formative hours around it with my mother. My mother would go through songs and scales with me, and of course I would hear her practicing her dramatic operatic scales. It was at the piano where I would sit and make up little tunes of my own.
My mother never had much money, but one of her greatest contributions to my development was exposing me to all kinds of people, especially musicians. She made a few dollars here and there by giving voice lessons at our house. Her practicing was a constant, but what I treasured most were the jam sessions. Accomplished musicians would come and hang out and play music at my mother’s bohemian spot “by the bay,” and I would jam with them. Live music was the best thing about living with my mother. I was surrounded by the love of music, but even more importantly, by the love of musicianship—the love of the craft, the love of the process. When I was a little girl, my mother introduced me to the world of sitting in with musicians: improvising, vibing, and singing.