The thing that I was scared of the most was actually bathing my son, because—little-known fact—you cannot get prosthetics wet. Metal, water, not good. So I’d avoided it.
But after about ten days, my mother very lovingly looked at me and said, “You must bathe this child. He’s filthy.”
So I decided, Okay, I can do this. I can do this.
I prepped the sink area. I had a towel on the floor for any splashes. I had a towel off to the side to wrap the baby in. I had the washcloths, the soap, the shampoo, all right there—hypoallergenic, of course. And then I had the little slant that you put into the sink so that he can lie there comfortably while he’s getting bathed. All I had to do was get the baby in there and bathe him without getting my arm wet.
So I took the baby in my arms, and I placed him in the sink and took off his diaper. And as the water was getting ready, I could see my son starting to get a little anxious. He’d never been through this before, he didn’t know what was happening to him. I slowly moved the faucet over so the water hit him, and he started to get scared, because this was a totally new sensation for him. And I was panicking, because I was trying to hold the baby in place with my hand and at the same time trying to grab the washcloth and soap.
He starts freaking out and crying, and he’s looking to me to help him. The one person that he could trust, the heartbeat he listened to for those ten months, he needed me to say, “It’s okay. You’re okay.”
And he looked at me, and all I was doing was crying. I was freaking out that I couldn’t do this. I couldn’t take care of him because I was so afraid of getting my arm wet and doing it wrong.
And as I looked at my son in that moment, something clicked.
I took off my arm, I threw it on the ground, and I just took care of my son. And we were together, me and my son, discovering our normal. This is how it was going to be for us. Nobody else.
As time went on, I really never wore my arm when I was taking care of him, because everything went a lot better without it. Like, I didn’t have to rest his head on the metal or wood of my arm while I was feeding him.
I wore my arm so little that when he was two years old, we were standing in my kitchen, and I put my arm on, and he turned and looked at me and said, “We going out?”
I know that there will still be more questions. He’s only four now. And there will be times that he might be embarrassed. He might be ashamed. He might not know what to say.
I also know he’ll look at other moms who can do things that I can’t do. You know, like give a high ten. (You will always get a high five from me, kid, a high five.) Or play patty-cake. Or he’ll see other moms hold their kid by their fingers and pick them up with both hands.
I can’t do that.
But maybe one day my son will look at those other moms and go, “Wow. I’ve never seen one like that before.”
* * *
MARY THERESA ARCHBOLD lives by her family motto: “ ‘Yes’ leads to adventure!” It has taken her down many exciting paths, like when she took a Moth Community Workshop with Larry Rosen, her former sketch-comedy director. That led her to The Moth Mainstage, Radio Hour, podcast, and now book. She’s also told some stories from her life with NPR’s This American Life, Risk!, and her own storytelling podcast, Funny Parents. Other adventures she has said yes to include TV (Law & Order: SVU, Bull), film, Off-Broadway (working with Pulitzer Prize–winning playwrights), and creating her own work. Her duo sketch show, Jazz Hand: Tales of a One-Armed Woman, began at Fringe NYC (Outstanding Actor Award) and eventually got her invited to perform it at the Kennedy Center. Her short dance-comedy film, Jazz Hand, was a finalist in the NBC Shortcuts Festival (Best Actor Award). Her upcoming adventures include a number of projects devoted to dance comedy—the intersection of two of her favorite things. Hands down her favorite adventure is as mom to two wonderful boys who make each day brighter, full of laughter, and who make her heart happy. Find out more at maryarchbold.com.
This story was told on September 24, 2015, at the Players Club in New York City. The theme of the evening was Flip the Switch. Director: Larry Rosen.
So you may or may not know that for a while I was the very public face of Jenny Craig weight loss. I lost a lot of weight, which was great. But then I started to put the weight back on, which wasn’t so great.
And I got a call from the publicist, and she said, “Darling, I’ve had a phone call, and the paparazzi have got some shots of you on Bondi Beach in your bathers.”
Now, I’m not an especially vain woman, but there are not too many women I know who would feel completely comfortable with having candid, unflattering pictures of themselves in their wet, clinging bathers splashed across every newsstand in the country. And for just a moment, I felt so vulnerable that I wanted to cry.
Because I knew what was in store. I was about to be Kirstie Alley–ed. I was going to be publicly shamed for my failure to keep the weight off. And that was not a prospect that I relished.
But there was a deeper and a far more disturbing fear. I felt as though a cold hand had reached deep into the depths of my soul and was rattling the cage of a long-buried fear that I’d completely forgotten I had. And that fear was a fear of the mob—that somehow I would do something unwittingly and that people would turn into an unreasoning, nasty, irrational mob that would attack me.
It must seem strange to hear me say that, because I’ve been famous in this country for a very long time. And I have a great relationship with the public—people are very nice to me.
In fact, one of the nice things that people say is, “Magda, you’re so brave with the comedy characters that you portray in your performance. You’re so brave.”
I think often when they’re saying that, what they’re saying is, You’re so brave because you’re prepared to let yourself look unattractive on national television. And I can’t really relate to that, because, to be honest, willingness to look unattractive has never, ever entered into my calculus of what it means to be brave.
I can’t really relate to that word “brave.” I can’t really claim it, and that’s because of my name.
You know me as Magda Szubanski. But the way my father would have said the name is Magda Szubanski [pronounces name with a thick Polish accent]. Because I’m half Polish. And that Polish-ness completely determines how I feel about that word “brave.”
When my father died, Mrs. Pietcek came up to me at the funeral and said, “Magda, you must understand. Only the bravest of the brave were asked to do what your father did in the war.”
In 1939, when my father was fifteen, Hitler invaded Poland, and the world as my father knew it ceased to exist. His world of boating, and skiing trips to Zakopane, and nights at the theater was over, replaced by six years of brutal Nazi occupation.
And in 1943, in possibly the darkest hour of that occupation, my father, who was only nineteen, was recruited to become an assassin in a top-secret counterintelligence unit. The chief job of that unit was to protect the high command of the Polish resistance. And the way they did that was to assassinate collaborators.
Just to make it very clear, my father was on the good side, fighting the Nazis. But the way he was doing that was by killing his own people. And the crimes that these people, these Polish collaborators, had committed were that they were telling secrets of the resistance to the Germans.
Some of them were telling the Gestapo where Jewish people were hiding. It’s important to know that Poland, under the Nazi regime, was the only country where the penalty for hiding a Jew was the death sentence. In fact, just even knowing of the existence of a Jew and not reporting it would likely get you killed.
And my father’s parents, my grandparents, hid many Jewish people during the war. Of course, I didn’t know that when I was a little kid. Nor did I know that my father was an assassin. I just thought he was an ordinary dad out there mowing the lawn in his terry-toweling hat.
And if
you’d known my dad, you wouldn’t have picked it either, because he was a very warm, affectionate kind of guy. But there were hints. It was like swimming in a warm river and suddenly you would hit an icy-cold patch that would just make your heart stop.
I didn’t really know an awful lot about the war as a kid, and what I did know was from TV and movies. Of course, in those movies it was always about American soldiers, occasionally British, very rarely French. But I never, ever saw any Polish people. And so I kind of came to the conclusion that my father must have been fairly peripheral to the war and maybe he wasn’t really there in a big way, in the thick of it.
Until one day when I was about eight or nine and I was sitting with my family in the lounge room of our home in North Crowden. We were watching a documentary, and it was about the Holocaust.
This was nothing like the war I’d seen in the movies. And as I saw those images of ordinary people, not soldiers—women, children, old people, little kids—pleading for their lives, gaunt eyes staring from behind barbed wire, piles of naked bodies being bulldozed into pits, I was beside myself, utterly beside myself with grief and despair and a kind of helpless rage. But also a kind of incomprehension. I couldn’t understand what could happen that could make people do that to one another.
And just at that moment, my father looked at the television screen and he said, “Ah, that’s the street where we used to live before it was rezoned as part of the Warsaw Ghetto.”
Suddenly I realized that that horror wasn’t out there—it was right here in our lounge room.
I looked at my father, I suppose for guidance and validation and comfort. But he was completely unaffected, completely impassive. And I felt then that there was a huge gulf that separated us.
As I grew older, I realized that the crucial difference was that he had been right there in the thick of it. And that immediate threat of the Nazis—of death, of torture, of being sent to a concentration camp—meant that he’d had to perform a kind of emergency emotional triage, and he had jettisoned absolutely every single feeling that didn’t support his survival.
But I hadn’t been there. And without that urgent imperative to disassociate, I had the luxury of having a normal human response to this horror.
And I was terrified.
When I looked at my father, I saw his fearlessness, and it was reassuring. But I saw something else that eviscerated me—I saw his discomfort with my feelings. I saw his subtle, almost imperceptible, but unmistakable complete contempt for my fear.
In that moment I vowed I would never feel fear again.
So began a kind of lifeline master class in the art of disassociation, as taught to me by my father, the assassin. But of course I hadn’t conquered the fear—all I’d really done was to drive it into the deepest, darkest corner of my unconscious. So that as I grew up and matured, the fear didn’t—it remained the fear of a nine-year-old girl, petrified.
So now, when the publicist was waiting for my response, in an instant my world has changed. What had started out as an innocent swim on Bondi Beach had become a moment of reckoning, and now the paparazzi had me in their sights.
That fear came screaming out of my unconscious, in my face, and I was reduced to being that nine-year-old girl again. I felt as though every irrational fear that I had about human nature, about what humans are capable of, was about to come true.
The publicist said, “So, darling, what do you want me to do?” And I could feel my world crumbling. I could feel the ground giving way beneath my feet.
But just as I was about to fall, something happened, and it was something I didn’t see coming. Something completely unexpected. And a voice that I didn’t know I have came out of me.
And I said, “Fuck them. Do your worst. Do your worst, paparazzi. You are not gonna shame me off the beach. I’m gonna go down to Bondi, and I’m gonna be a fat middle-aged lady, along with the supermodels and the musclemen. I’m gonna wear my wet, clingy bathers, and there’s not a freaking thing you can do about it.”
So they published the photos. But because I’d refused to participate in the same game, the photos were unflattering, but the headlines said MAGDA SPORTS HER NEW BEACH BODY. It was quite crazy, but nothing terrible happened, and the Australian public were lovely to me.
But this isn’t about me saying, “Aww, gee, look, I was brave like my father would have wanted me to be.”
I’m the second generation. I have the luxury and the very great privilege of being able to feel the normal feelings that my father, poor bugger, couldn’t feel.
And finally, I was able to forgive myself for feeling that fear.
* * *
MAGDA SZUBANSKI is an Australian author and actress, best known internationally for her portrayal of Mrs. Hoggett, the farmer’s wife, in the films Babe and Babe: Pig in the City. Her bestselling memoir, Reckoning, relates her father’s activities as an assassin in Nazi-occupied Poland and is a story of intergenerational trauma, migration, and coming-of-age as a young gay woman in suburban Australia in the 1960s and ’70s. It won several awards, including 2016 Book of the Year, Biography of the Year, the Indie Award for Non-Fiction, and the NSW Premier’s Literary Award. It was shortlisted for several other awards, including the National Biography Award. Magda is a leading LGBTQ activist/thought leader, and after her involvement in the 2017 same-sex marriage campaign was named Australia’s “Most Talked About Person of 2017.”
This story was told on August 22, 2013, at the Town Hall in Melbourne, Australia. The theme of the evening was Guts: Stories of Moxie and Might. Director: Sarah Austin Jenness.
When I was a kid, I had a spark in me. I was a happy kid. I always had a little bit of a flame going, and nothing could really knock it out. I went to Catholic school, but even the nuns couldn’t extinguish the flame that dwelled inside me. (They tried.)
At the time of this story, I was twenty-eight years old, and I was living in West Palm Beach, Florida. I was in the Winn-Dixie supermarket shopping when this weird feeling came over me, and then I fainted, I blacked out. That had happened to me before, but it was on purpose, with drugs. This time it was a little scary.
I was in and out of consciousness. I knew something was wrong. I was put into an ambulance, and I ended up in the Palm Beach Gardens Medical Center. I had a tube in my nose, and I was in this incredible pain and couldn’t really move much.
It turned out I had pneumonia. I had double-lobal pneumonia in all five of the lobes.
So I was lying there, and for a minute I was really concerned about myself. This was weird. I hadn’t worried about myself for a few years, because at home my wife was dying of AIDS, and she was really sick, obviously. At the time they didn’t have diagnoses for women when they had AIDS—they just called it “wasting syndrome.”
All I could think about is, I’ve gotta get out of this hospital. I’ve gotta get home and take care of her. Because all I did was take care of my wife; that was my life, my job. And it wasn’t a problem, I loved it.
People would say, “How do you deal with it?”
How do you ask a question like that? Like, have you ever loved somebody? It was weird to me that they’d ask that.
So I was lying there, and the phone rang. It was my friend Jimmy, and he said, “Mike, Frannie was in a car accident.”
I said, “No. She can’t even fuckin’ walk. She’s on so much morphine, there’s no way.”
He goes, “Yeah, she got in the car.”
And I believed it, because I knew her. We were reformed drug addicts, recovering people. With drugs it’s like if you cut my leg off, I would be upset, but if you gave me heroin right afterwards, I’d be like, I can handle it, I’ll be all right, you know? So even though she was suffering with AIDS and going through all this horrible stuff, the morphine helped her feel better, like she would be okay, and she probably just thought, Hey, I can drive.
She tried to, and he told me the car flipped over s
everal times. I knew she was dead, so I laid back, and I was just like, Wow.
And I had these Buddhist rosary beads on the side table. I was sort of between religions at the time, if anybody knows what I’m talking about. I needed something, you know? Because, quite honestly, my life—the drugs and the tragedy and people dying that I loved, and most of all, my wife being so sick after being off drugs for so long and us really trying to get our lives together—it just seemed really unfair.
And all I knew about God was the one that I was told about as a kid, you know, God’s watching. He knows. So I figured that the god who’s doing this to me and my wife, I’m not gonna fuckin’ pray to him, you know?
What am I gonna say? Can you help me?
No. I’m gonna say, What the fuck are you doing? Get off the fence. Make a move. Kill us or help us. Do something.
That wasn’t really working for me, so I went to this Buddhist place, because I saw an ad in the paper.
I thought, I’m gonna go see.
When I got there, it was just a monk sitting there. They just sit there, these people, and there’s no nails or blood or anything.
I was like, I can do that. I probably can do that sitting stuff there. So I walk into this place, and they told me to take my shoes off.
I was like, “I’m from the Bronx. I’m not taking my shoes off!”
Then I saw everyone else had their shoes off, so I took my shoes off, because that was all they really asked. They were just nice people, you know? They were very sweet and kind, and they had a lot of compassion. (Here we friggin’ call that “codependency” and charge you money to get rid of it.)
Then this woman, a really sweet, kind, darling, she said, “Would you like to see the lama?”
I’m thinking it’s an animal they’ve got somewhere, like a sheep type of thing or whatever, so I said, “What’s a llama?”
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