Celebrating Each Person's Unique Multiplicity
Part five of a six part series that I wrote this past Fathers Day as my sister’s death neared. She died the next day.
When I found my sister, Nan, sixteen years ago, I responded to her first loving letter welcoming me into her heart with deep gratitude. 
Now, unwilling to involve anyone else in our,”undisclosed family connection”, I proceed with caution as I try and tender my goodbye’s at her impending death.
It was Father’s Day 2012. My sister lay dying from her heroic battle with cancer. In this series of VI blogs I tell the story of how four generations of denial, secrecy and being the un-witnessed child led to the last forsaken phone call to my dying sister. In part III I share excerpts from my book, Ragdoll Redeemed, and the childhood obsession of meeting my father. I believed the meeting itself could redeem me from the bastard label.
Perhaps by now my book will be published. Actually, it was published and on the market for five days, when it was brought to my attention that there were grammatical and punctuation errors in the book (so like me) that far exceeded any acceptable mistakes, I took it off the market for additional editing. But before that happened, my plan was to write blogs that paralleled the stories, events, and people in my book.
There was a haunting scene in the movie, My week with Marilyn which showed a devastated Marilyn having just found Arthur Miller’s notebook where he wrote about his disillusion in their marriage. Mind you, they were still newlyweds. Shortly after her death, and much to the dismay of many critics, portions of that notebook morphed into Miller’s broadway play entitled, After The Fall. A review of the play in The New Haven Register stated, “It’s a universal experience that is significant to us all, that teaches us anew the duality of good and evil in man, that achieves a moving synthesis of truth and beauty.”
The article that I am writing is not about Arthur Miller’s arguable motivations for writing and releasing that play shortly after Marilyn’s death or about her feelings of betrayal. This article is about the making of gods with a small “g.”
others it’s that way, but not for me…” Marilyn MonroeFrom the research I’ve done on sexual abuse and the life of Marilyn Monroe, I understand that the quote above refers to the abuse that she suffered as a child. However, when speaking about childhood abuse and Marilyn, I am mindful of the difficulties of focusing on any one form of the multiple abuses she endured. She was born out of wedlock─a shameful event in Marilyn’s day─and raised in a series of foster homes. Her mentally ill mother who was diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic and whom Marilyn feared, occasionally visited her (for the first seven years of her life Marilyn didn’t even know the woman who periodically visited her in her foster home). Her maternal grandmother died in a state hospital laced into a straightjacket.
Considering the innumerable adverse circumstances surrounding her childhood, I think that the camera may have been the only “eyes” where Marilyn felt seen.
In chapter two of my book Ragdoll Redeemed:Growing Up In The Shadow Of Marilyn Monroe I write about the stain of the title “bastard”. How the dominate culture’s attitude imprinted a type of permanent deformity into the very soul of such children. I know because I was one of those children, as was Marilyn Monroe. “Shameful, embarrassing, defective,” became the standard by which everyone, myself included, measured me. After all didn’t the Bible say, “The bastard shall not enter the congregation of the Lord; even to his tenth generation” (Deuteronomy 23:2)
Young people of today have little if any of the stigma illegitimacy brought to bear upon the shoulders of children born outside of marriage. It was not until the early 70s that a series of Supreme Court verdicts eradicated the common-law disabilities of bastardy. For the most part, the term “illegitimacy” has been replaced by the phrase “born out of wedlock” or not acknowledged at all.
Recently, my husband and I were talking about aspects of love. What does it actually mean when we say we love someone?
Or more precisely, what does the word not mean. In our conversation, I referred to the brief marriage of Joe DiMaggio, the great American baseball hero and Marilyn Monroe as an example of what love is not. Why them, you may ask? And how do I know this?
In my soon-to-be-published memoir Ragdoll Redeemed: Growing up in the Shadow of Marilyn Monroe I talk about my marriage to Marilyn Monroe’s step-son, Joe DiMaggio Jr. I talk about what I learned about Marilyn and Joe from conversations with Joe Jr., and from what has been widely reported over the years about their infamous relationship.
In my soon to be published memoir, Ragdoll Redeemed:Growing up in the Shadow of Marilyn Monroe, I talk about how protracted silences affected me during my teenage marriage to Marilyn Monroe’s step-son, Joe DiMaggio Jr.
Joey withdrew into silence without notice and sometimes without apparent reason. These silences could last as long as twenty-four hours. So grateful was I when he began speaking to me again that I happily went along with pretending nothing out of the ordinary or hurtful had happened. Never realizing how my silent complicity was contributing to the eventual downfall of my marriage.
Bob & Marlene Neufeld, who based their work on Dr. John Gottman─a leading expert on relationships─offer examples of common silences that occur in relationships.
“It is the lost possibilities of Marilyn Monroe that capture our imaginations. It was the lost Norma Jeane, looking out of Marilyn’s eyes, who capture our hearts.” Gloria Steinem
As an adult, I was blessed, unlike Marilyn, with the opportunity to go to school, to learn about the psychological underpinnings of backgrounds like ours. It helped me to understand my childhood. I learned that in the presence of neglect and absence of consistent parental care, a child learns to depend on themselves even when that self-reliance means guessing or pretending to know how to be and how to perform the most basic of life skills. Numerous studies show that if a child does not successfully negotiate through each developmental stage, they are subject to deep-seated feelings of worthlessness, shame, and mistrust. These types of core feelings often lead to a fundamental desire to disappear which can be played out in more than one suicide attempt. Now it is more understood that early rejections by adults and childhood peers have lasting consequences.
