“Richard, it is such an honor, such a pleasure,” my mother said, shaking his hand.
Richard was appropriately charming and kind. He was one thing that my mother and I most certainly agreed upon: he was a great guy. And not just a great guy, but a Great Guy.
The Great Guy’s advice for me to head to Atlanta to pursue my broadcast dreams was, like most things Richard did, solid. Within two years of starting work in the CNN Center’s illustrious veejay program, I was reporting on air.
My mother watched my move to the front of the camera with skepticism. I’m not sure why, but she always seemed to be more comfortable with my CNN career when I wasn’t actually on the airwaves. When I was behind the scenes, tailing House Speaker Newt Gingrich—with whom I was on a first-name basis for a pair of years—she was delighted. She loved tuning in to a CNN broadcast to hear the words he’d uttered when I’d asked a question of him from behind the camera.
But when I stepped in front of the camera, something changed. Instead of tuning in, she tuned out. I was given my first on-camera break in the summer of 1996, when Bob Furnad, a vice president of CNN, selected my audition tape from a stack of would-be reporter audition tapes and told me I was ready to go on air.
I began my on-camera career with a show called CNN Newsroom. The downside was that it aired in the middle of the night: four thirty A.M. The upside was that because the show was geared toward high school students, whose teachers would tape the show and later air it in homerooms and current events classes, it enabled me to gain access to all kinds of fun, kid-friendly story subjects. Once, I was invited with my crew to climb up into the Statue of Liberty in the dark of night. Since we were the only ones in Lady Liberty’s crown, we had the fun of playing an impromptu game of hide-and-seek within the empty statue while a driving rain poured outside. I’ll never forget taking those narrow steps two at a time to get away from my soundman, who had been deemed “it,” giggling as I looked out the little windows in Lady Liberty’s headpiece at a dark and stormy New York Harbor.
I filed some sixty stories for Newsroom over the course of two years and additionally anchored the show at least a dozen times, taking my place behind the big news desk in the middle of the CNN Center newsroom. But, to my knowledge, neither of my parents ever watched or even recorded me a single one of those times.
There was always an excuse. My father was often on the road, or busy fixing up another investment property. He’d grown fond of buying houses in and around the Appleton area and renting them out as duplexes in the years since he’d left my mother.
My mother blamed her failure to watch on her discomfort with technology. “Honey, you know I don’t know how to work the VCR,” she would say. “I’ll watch you when you’re not on so late,” she’d add with a laugh.
Other times, she blamed her job. “What am I supposed to do? If I watch you, I won’t be able to wake up to go to work in the morning.”
I was crushed. I wanted her to see my interview with Ron Howard. I wanted her to watch me take a ride on a grand old riverboat as it made its way down the Mississippi River. I craved her feedback—and, more importantly, I longed for her approval.
I tried to fix the situation by sending her tapes of my shows. But when I would ask about them in subsequent weeks and months, she would grow testy, reminding me that work kept her busy. On a trip home one weekend in the summer of 1998, I found an envelope containing one of my tapes, unopened. It was in a laundry basket in a messy dining room, amidst a mishmash of bills and unused winter scarves that still bore Shopko price tags. I’m not sure if she got so overwhelmed by the mess of the house that she honestly forgot to open the envelope and watch. Or maybe the VCR had broken and she hadn’t managed to get it fixed. Perhaps she thought I wasn’t good enough—and feared she wouldn’t like what she saw. My broadcasts were transmitted to the masses in over one hundred countries. I even got fan mail. But for whatever reason, my broadcasts weren’t seen by the one person I wanted to see them the most: my mom.
If my mother wasn’t watching my every on-camera move, I could take some comfort knowing others increasingly were: men. After a seeming eternity of being ignored by the male gender, my fortunes changed considerably when I went to work for CNN. Some of this may have had to do with my slow but steady change in appearance. During college, I’d taken a roommate’s advice and lightened my hair. What had been dirty blond was now blond. I had lost weight, too. I was no longer a size 8 or size 10. Now I was a size 6. And my clothing had changed for the better. I had swapped out the big sweaters and baggy jeans that had been trends in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Now I wore clothes that were sleeker and, in the case of skirts, shorter.
Whatever the reason, men, it seemed, were everywhere now. And many of them were interested in getting to know me. There were the video journalists I worked with. All were in their early twenties and all, with virtually no exceptions, were funny and sweet. We went out drinking and dancing on our days off and enjoyed more than a few fierce make-out sessions.
There was the meteorologist fifteen years my senior who watched my every move and took me out on my first grown-up dates. There was the airline pilot I met on a flight from Atlanta to New York who subsequently squired me about to Atlanta’s hot spots and CNN parties when he passed through town on his nonstop travels. There was the chef who came over after his shifts at an Atlanta restaurant and picked through the measly contents of my bachelorette cabinets to make me savory late-night dishes. And then there was Steve, the tall, dark, southern audio director who would become my first real boyfriend.
I met Steve not long after moving to Atlanta. He patiently and doggedly courted me for months before I agreed to go out with him. Four years older than me, he hailed from Columbia, South Carolina, and introduced me to a family that was as solid as mine was fractured. While my childhood home was cold, drafty, and piled high with debris and grime, his was a pristine southern gem on a refined street that positively shone. Its beauty was a result of the exceptional homemaking efforts of his mother, Ruth, a wonderful woman as kind and generous as she was dignified and ladylike. She whipped up homemade southern sweets with ease and was an expert at making all of her guests feel at home, including northerners the likes of me.
“Oh, Mary,” she was forever asking. “What can I get for you?”
When Steve took me home to Ruth’s house, I wanted to stay forever.
I loved the attention of the men in my life and the stereotypical gifts of flowers and chocolates that they bought for me. Steve wrote me heartfelt poems, mooning over what he called my “spun-gold hair.” Another suitor, in a fit of fixation that bordered on obsession, once followed me when I flew back to Wisconsin—driving through the night, all the way from Atlanta, to see me. A sweet young associate producer constructed for me handmade cards.
But while I was showered with gifts by the men in my life, it wasn’t because of any sexual favors I was granting them. On the contrary. I was a chaste girl, seldom granting any man, even those who begged loudest and longest or who spent the most money on me, much more than flirtatious smiles, good-night kisses, and, on occasion, some fiercely fun dry humping. To be crystal clear: I was a virgin. And I wanted to remain a virgin.
The men in my life liked to playfully call me a tease. But more than a tease, I was a good Catholic girl who was still trying to live by my mother the former nun’s rules, even when I lived a thousand miles from that mother. From the time I turned thirteen, my mother had begged me—commanded me!—to wait to give it all up physically to any man until I was a bona fide adult.
“Giving yourself away too soon will only create problems,” my mother insisted. “You have enough to worry about as a teenager without worrying about that.”
I don’t know why I listened as carefully as I did—or for as long as I did—but I did. It’s not that I wasn’t curious. I most certainly was. But my mother seeme
d to have a point. Her advice had always been solid, and it seemed to be in this case as well.
My career was going well. I was having fun. And I wasn’t ready to settle down. Why complicate things, potentially irrevocably? So after long good-night kisses, lengthy petting sessions, I politely asked the men in my life to leave. Many were incredulous at my strict rules of conduct. A few were left near tears as they told me about a horribly painful physical condition called “blue balls” that my kisses coupled with my refusal to sleep with them had driven them to.
“Can’t you—just this once?” they would ask. But I was fortunate. Almost without exception, the men I dated were gentlemen who seemed to accept that putting out—at least putting all the way out—was not something I was ready or willing to do. My burgeoning career and my mother’s approval meant too much to me.
In the end, I lost my virginity to Steve at the ripe old age of twenty-three. But only after two years of begging. I did it more as a means of putting an end to the constant badgering, I think, than anything else. There was only so much begging a girl could take. It was a relief in many ways. My mother’s insistence upon saving herself for marriage certainly hadn’t worked out for her. Unlike my mother, I knew at least the first man I’d slept with was straight and wanted me. That meant more to me than anything.
I said goodbye to Steve, and to Atlanta, in the summer of 1998, when I was reposted to Germany. The move came thanks to the Robert Bosch Fellowship program. Designed to advance the careers of young American leaders abroad while simultaneously enhancing the relationship between Germany and the U.S., the program offered to pay for me to live in Germany for a year. It was a win-win situation. I could continue to file reports for CNN, this time from European locations.
My mother was gobsmacked when I told her of my plan to move overseas.
“Are you sure?” she asked repeatedly.
“Have you thought this through?”
“Is this what you really want?”
Yes, yes, and I think so, I told her. “Mom, everyone who wants to be a serious journalist needs to go overseas. And besides, I should do these things when I’m in my twenties, right?”
“Right,” she said sadly. “It’s just that—”
“Just that what?” I asked.
“It’s just that I wasn’t doing anything like this when I was in my twenties.”
When she was in her twenties, she was at Oldenburg.
The move to Germany was among the wisest career choices I would make. The Europe-based stories I was able to file were nothing short of magical. For one story, I donned a ball gown to cover Vienna’s fairy-tale-like Opera Ball. For other stories, I spent time at the NATO and European Union headquarters. Just as important as the assignments were the new friends I made, the new men I dated. I was swept off my feet by a Royal Navy officer with piercing blue eyes who wrote me multipage love letters I kept beneath my pillow. I was wined and dined by a mysterious German businessman who loved to buy me designer dresses and airplane tickets “just because.”
Especially memorable was the time he decided to “cure” me of a case of homesickness by jetting me off to Venice for the weekend. After a series of gondola rides and late-night dinners, he took me to the Piazza San Marco, where he presented me with a bouquet of four dozen multicolored roses and a diamond ring from Cartier, situated in a beautiful red cushioned box.
I was stunned and met his fervent gaze with nervous laughter.
“What’s this?” I asked, hoping I’d misunderstood.
“Isn’t it obvious? Marry me.”
In my state of shock, I dropped the flowers.
“I can’t get married now,” I said.
“Why not?” he asked, his blue eyes looking both sad and surprised.
“I’m too young,” I told him.
What I didn’t tell him was that I was still trying to make up for lost time. Out on my own, reporting and producing for CNN, I had at last discovered a world in which plates weren’t shattered and mothers weren’t spending their summers in mental wards. I was living in residences that weren’t cold and drafty and piled high with debris. Life was no longer controlled by a pair of parents fighting all sorts of demons generated by their own childhoods and their own well-intentioned, albeit questionable, choices. For the first time in my life, I was in the driver’s seat. And I was relishing every minute of it. I wasn’t ready to cede that control to anyone. Not even rose- and Cartier-wielding gentlemen who declared their love in locales as romantic as Venice.
My favorite assignment during that first year in Europe came in the spring of 1999. CNN sent me to Malta, the tiny island country off the coast of Sicily. Malta was like no place I had ever been, a land of castles and ancient temples sprinkled in their own unique brand of fairy dust. The weather was pristine. It’s sunny there 360 days a year. The views were stunning: the rich blue of the Mediterranean stands in stark contrast to the bleached white rocks of the old megalithic temples that predate Stonehenge. The food was to die for: fresh octopus, yummy fish seasoned with capers.
But great though the weather and the food were, the highlight of my trip was Malcolm. He was the young movie producer whom I was assigned to interview for a story about Malta’s burgeoning film industry. Tall and lanky, Malcolm was a native Maltese with dirty-blond hair and a matching beard. He was also gifted with a keen sense of humor and palpable ambition. Malta had become the hot place in the world to shoot films, owing to its splendid weather and the great old Roman ruins that had gone relatively untouched for centuries, and young film producers like Malcolm were capitalizing upon the newfound attention the nation was attracting. Among the movies being filmed in Malta while I was there: Gladiator, the Russell Crowe period piece that would go on to win multiple Oscars.
After our interview, Malcolm invited me to tour the Gladiator set and later to join him for dinner and a nighttime yacht ride around Malta.
It turned out to be one of the most magical nights of my life, perfect in every way. I still remember the red sleeveless shift I wore, the strappy black sandals. Armed with a bottle of wine, Malcolm and I talked for hours on the deck of the enormous yacht, about Malta, and career paths, and dreams. And then, from the upper deck, as the yacht cruised around Gozo, we lay back and studied the stars and talked some more: about life and love and faith and the problems with the Catholic Church, of which we were both conflicted members. I told Malcolm about my mother, the former nun. He told me about priests he had known and feared. And together we looked at those constellations and at the lights of that ancient island nation.
“Where was this?” I asked him, giggling.
“Where was what?” he asked, laughing now, too.
“Where was all of this when I was growing up?”
“It was here all along”—he smiled—“waiting for you.”
I closed my eyes and breathed deeply then, wanting to savor the moment for as long as I could. How in the world, I wondered, could those wondrous stars above stare down upon two such different worlds: this wonderland of yachts and temples and Malcolms and that horribly sad world of Beaver Dam where my mother remained in a living room stacked high with decaying newspapers and broken appliances?
Repeatedly in my twenties, I tried to break my mother free of that world. Each time I returned home to Beaver Dam, each time she visited me in Atlanta, I encouraged her to move.
“How ’bout Colorado, Mom?” I’d ask. “You always say how much you love visiting Aunt Kathy. We could look for a cool condo for you there. Maybe right down the street from her.”
“What about Madison?” I asked another time. “It’s a college town, and you love college towns. You could get an apartment near the lake and take lots of interesting classes.”
“What about Indianapolis?” I offered on a third occasion. “You always talk about how much you loved living there. And the city h
as really grown. We could help you find a cute place, and you could visit your old stomping grounds.”
Always, she refused.
“I need to stay put for you and your brother,” my mother would say with a shake of her head. “I need to give you a home base to come back to. Just in case.”
“But, Mom,” I protested, “we’re grown now. And I don’t know that we’re coming back any time soon.”
“I said, Mary,” she said, narrowing her eyes as she looked at me, “I need to give you a home base. Just in case.”
When my mother refused to leave the house in Beaver Dam permanently, I tried to get her to leave temporarily. She had never been to Europe, so I made it my mission during my year in Germany to get her to join me on a European vacation. The mission was easier said than done. My mother’s reasoning for refusing to go abroad stemmed, she said, from a love for the United States.
“Why would I want to visit someone else’s country when I haven’t finished exploring my own?” she asked.
But the real reason behind my mother’s refusal to travel, I knew, went beyond patriotism. Age had not treated my mother’s body kindly. Increasingly, her knees—significantly damaged by all of those years of kneeling upon those cold, hard kneelers at the convent and cleaning all of those cold marble floors—caused her trouble, making it difficult and painful to walk. It was easier to stay home. But I was undeterred.
For Christmas that year, I took fifty thousand of the frequent-flyer miles I had painstakingly accrued on Delta Airlines and cashed them in for a round-trip ticket for my mother, which would take her from Milwaukee to Berlin. I wrapped the certificate up in a box, then presented it to her during a family gathering we had in Texas, where Anthony and Elise had gone to live as a newly married couple.
“Honey, I can’t go to Europe,” my mother had argued almost as soon as she opened the box. “I don’t have a passport. I don’t speak the language.”
“I’ll help you get the passport. And I’ll speak the language for you,” I told her. “You have to do this.”
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