“Family is everything. Family comes first. It’s not what I expected it to be, but nothing ever is.”

In the Name of a Mother

EVERY LITTLE GIRL wants to know what her name means. After I mastered writing the five letters that made up “Kelly” in kindergarten, I learned that my name meant “warrior maiden.” I tucked this information into my back pocket, and when life called for an extra shot of bravado—whether I was asking a boy to dance with me, taking the bar exam, or giving my first lecture in front of a crowded room—I could muster a silent whoop of a warrior cry, plunge in, and hope that through my name, the universe had given me better than even odds of coming out the other side.

Twenty years before I knew what “Kelly” meant, let alone how to spell it, Madonna was learning to write her own name. While the meaning behind my name stayed hidden, a fun tidbit I could share at my pleasure, hers wore its meaning like a vestment: the Virgin Mary, Mother of Christ. Those seven letters didn’t just identify her, they represented one of the most famous mothers of all time. Imagine being a little girl, and before you have even set foot in the neighborhood of imagining what motherhood might mean to you as a woman, your name holds you to the highest standard of maternity that Western Civilization has to offer.

In the Catholic faith, “Madonna” is a term the devout use when praying with reverence and endearment to “my lady,” or the mother of Christ. When little-girl Madonna walked into her family’s Catholic Church, she would have seen people kneeling and praying, asking for the religious Madonna’s intercession as they passed small beads through their fingers and meditated on her virtues: grace, favor, fertility, and mercy. The people in her pew would hear her name and think of the mother of Jesus before they would think of the little girl sitting next to them. In Catechism class, she would have learned that this other Madonna, though mortal, was the only woman who didn’t need a man to reproduce.

Now consider what it would be like for five-year-old Madonna to grow up in the Ciccone household. When she hears “Madonna,” she doesn’t just think of Christ’s mother, she thinks of her own mother, an attentive, loving woman named Madonna Louise Fortin Ciccone. Any awe or pressure little Madonna might have felt from her name was likely softened by the knowledge that she was named for her own mother—not Christ’s. Now imagine if this flesh-and-blood mother, who must have been more comforting to little Madonna than any rosary or marble statue could ever be, dies of breast cancer the same year Madonna learns to write her name.

Madonna’s family was Catholic, and her mother’s funeral Mass would have taken place in a church where a statue, a stained glass window, or a station of the cross would have depicted a scene from the life of Madonna, the religious icon. Months earlier, perhaps on Mary’s feast day, the priest’s sermon might have mentioned something about how the biblical Madonna was spared death, literally lifted up into heaven by her divine son, because he loved her too much to see her body fail.

How does a five-year-old reconcile this teaching with the loss she has just suffered? In Andrew Morton’s biography Madonna, the pop star recalls, “I saw my mother, looking very beautiful and lying as if she were asleep in an open casket. Then I noticed that my mother’s mouth looked funny. It took me some time to realize that it had been sewn up. In that awful moment, I began to understand what I had lost forever. The final image of my mother, at once peaceful yet grotesque, haunts me today . . .”

Madonna’s faith taught her that, in at least one case, a mother can be saved from death by the love of her child. Combine that understanding with the memory of her mother lying in a casket with her lips literally sealed forever, and perhaps Madonna made sense of the world by relying on the power of her own voice to ensure everyone remembered not just her name, but her mother’s name. In this way at least, she could keep her alive.

With so much meaning and memory associated with her first name, it’s no wonder that just one year before she starred as Eva Peron in Evita, Madonna told an interviewer that she was absolutely certain she wanted children. Why wouldn’t she want to recreate the mother-daughter relationship after grieving it for so long? Nonetheless, her self-awareness surprised me for its clarity. Despite having an already full and busy life, here was a woman who clearly knew she wanted children. Why did this knock me for a loop? Perhaps because when I held that mirror to my own life, the desire to have children wasn’t that clear. Yet I found myself walking a very deliberate and difficult path to do just that.

When I discovered that my husband and I weren’t likely to get pregnant on our own, the faint sense I had that motherhood might be “nice” became poor consolation. Maybe that’s because I had grown up hearing about my parents’ struggle with infertility. For six excruciating years, they waited for me. From their stories, I learned to fear infertility, not just because I might never have a baby, but because hoping could wear me down. Still, I went forward with infertility treatments believing the life I painted for myself was just around the corner. The “warrior maiden” in me also wanted the chance to defeat what had been a road block for two generations in my family. I would win, infertility would lose, and my life would continue without the same agonizing interruption my mother had endured. What I failed to realize was that I could not battle my way through an experience that has no real enemy lines, and pick up again where I had left off.

Before I stepped foot into a fertility clinic, I don’t think I was very different from women who imagined they would enjoy raising a child, would begin the adventure by waking up pregnant, feeling both a little nervous and a little excited to start rolling with the punches of motherhood. But when I started in vitro fertilization (IVF) treatments, I had to give up the idea of falling into parenthood. Every injection, sonogram, and blood test felt like I was verifying that yes, in fact, I really, really, really wanted to be a mother. If I didn’t know that for sure, why on earth would I be there? But I didn’t know anything for sure. To tell you the truth, I don’t know what motherhood is about. I’m an only child. I’ve had pets, and I wave to the friendly neighbor kids across the street—there’s my maternal instinct for you. Yes, I wanted to recreate the loving relationship I had with my own mother, but I also wanted to vindicate her struggle by loving the life she had helped win for me, as it existed, with or without children. I could spend my time trying to get pregnant, or I could be out living my life. Even if my own existence is proof that staying in the game can give you a happy ending, the more treatments I needed, the less I understood why I kept coming back.

When the hormones gave my thoughts the jagged edges of anxiety and depression, and when my body fought off rare reactions like “ovarian hyperstimulation syndrome,” a condition that almost landed me in the emergency room, I had to remove myself from treatments to assess what I was doing. I had only attempted three cycles and spent less than sixty days as an IVF patient. Taking a break was the right thing to do, but it felt early, and I was used to confronting obstacles, not walking away from them. I knew women who’d suffered multiple miscarriages during IVF, and they showed up for as many as ten cycles because they knew how much having a child meant to them. “Just remember what you are doing it for,” they would say, not to dismiss the physical pain and heartache but to help catapult me over it. But where they could push forward without flinching, I hesitated. For a moment, that hesitation begged the question: Did I even want children?

The answer, I finally realized, was a qualified yes. When my mind painted pictures of my future, I noticed that despite everything I’d gone through, a child with my husband’s dark hair and my blue eyes was still somewhere in the frame. However, no matter how hard I tried, no one could guarantee this child would ever exist. Without that real infant in my arms to make me slip into the heady cocktail of motherhood, I didn’t know if the struggle was worth it. I found myself trying to hang on to who I was as Kelly, the person beyond the blue exam gown, while the desire to be called “Mom” started to lose its hold on me. Some women suffering through infertility envy women who can get pregnant easily. That has never been my problem. I envied women who wanted motherhood without a doubt. It turns out I was a little too successful at convincing myself that I didn’t “need” a child. But I also never imagined walking away from parenthood forever. My warrior maiden was vexed, and I was left with a tattered war cry caught in my throat.

I have always appreciated Madonna’s ability to play among the gray tones rather than choose black or white, especially as it relates to motherhood. If you take a sampling of her work from 1985 until her daughter Lourdes’s birth in 1996, you will find both the subtle and the obvious attempts of a woman teasing out the mingling identities of Madonna the religious icon, Madonna the departed mother, and Madonna the girl who became a powerhouse on stage, eventually contemplating her own shot at motherhood. For most women, including me, it’s harder to distinguish between the images of motherhood we cling to in our heads, and the reality we are offered.

It’s telling that Madonna, the woman who would go on to become known as “the mother of reinvention,” would not choose a stage name to launch her career. No one would have blamed her if she ran as fast as hell away from the memories and expectations that came with her birth name. Instead, she self-titled her first album and faced a wave of criticism. The controversy suggested it was blasphemous to invoke a divine figure’s name on a pop album, and not just any divine name—the virgin mother’s. I was seven years old when Madonna came out, and I remember many adults around me were shocked by her moniker. Who uses that name and sings about losing her virginity?

On her third album, True Blue, the song “Papa Don’t Preach” describes a young girl who is very similar to a modern-day Virgin Mary. She’s a teenager, she’s pregnant out of wedlock, and she is going to keep her child no matter how scandalous it seems to the outside world. Madonna didn’t write this song, but she chose to include it on the album, and she chose to answer the wave of criticism that came after it. Some listeners thought she was advocating that teenage girls go out and become mothers. She was also attacked for alluding to abortion. It’s never mentioned explicitly in the song; instead, people latched on to what was implied in the lyrics, “But I’ve made up my mind, I’m keeping my baby.” In a 1986 New York Times article, Madonna commented on the song and its meaning:

“‘Papa Don’t Preach’ is a message song that everyone is going to take the wrong way. Immediately they’re going to say I am advising every young girl to go out and get pregnant. When I first heard the song, I thought it was silly. But then I thought, wait a minute, this song is really about a girl who is making a decision in her life. She has a very close relationship with her father and wants to maintain that closeness. To me it’s a celebration of life. It says, ‘I love you, father, and I love this man and this child that is growing inside me.’ Of course, who knows how it will end? But at least it starts off positive.”

Four years later, Madonna released the album Like a Prayer. The slow, bittersweet track “Promise to Try” (“Will she see me cry when I stumble and fall/Does she hear my voice in the night when I call?”) was a departure from her usual up-tempo pop beats and was written to honor her mother. Twelve years and a stream of hits later, Madonna took on the role of Eva Peron. Known as the “Mother of Argentina” to a devoutly Catholic people, Evita was revered in a way that’s very similar to the Virgin Mary. She was a woman who carved out a place for herself in politics, not content to merely be the wife of the man in power. Evita died of uterine cancer after refusing a hysterectomy because it might have interrupted her political work.

Before shooting began on Evita, Madonna was interviewed by Forrest Sawyer for ABC’s Primetime Live. It was an introspective and moving interview. The conversation began with Sawyer asking Madonna about the life of Evita Peron. At first she replied in a slightly aloof, even sarcastic tone, mocking Sawyer’s attempts to psychoanalyze her character, but when the discussion turned to the similarities she shared with Peron, the interview grew serious. Asked if, like Evita, Madonna had been hurt by life, Madonna gave a poignant answer: “Losing my mother at a very young age was a devastating experience, and I really did feel completely abandoned . . . I’m sure that has influenced every decision I have made, and left me with a feeling, a hunger, a longing, a feeling of emptiness . . . afraid to love things because they are going to leave you.”

The interviewer pressed on, asking if there was any place she felt safe at all. Tears welled up and Madonna answered quickly, “No, not really.”

I am fortunate that my mother is still alive. I’ve never felt abandoned the way Madonna must have felt. But when she talked about a hunger, a feeling of emptiness, and a fear of loving things you can’t hold onto, my heart ached. I have gone through enough IVF cycles to know the grief of loss. The bruising reality of a negative pregnancy test has stayed with me even as I try to pick myself up and hope again for something I barely understand. I don’t want to say goodbye to the beautiful mystery of having a baby, but I don’t want to cling so tightly to that idea that I wear down my body and spirit.

Eventually, the Primetime Live interview turned to whether Madonna wanted children of her own, and her answers were emphatic. “Absolutely,” “definitely,” and “it’s time” came without hesitation as her porcelain face lit up with a beaming smile. For those who wonder if Madonna was trying to one-up Angelina Jolie by adopting two children from Malawi, it’s interesting to note that in this interview, she mentioned the possibility of starting her family by adopting one or two children. The interview took place on December 6, 1995—when Angelina was barely an adult, burning up the screen as the crop-haired computer whiz in Hackers. Madonna’s first daughter, Lourdes, was born less than a year later, followed by Rocco in 2000, and her two adopted children, David and Mercy, in 2006 and 2009. By then, Angelina Jolie was an active humanitarian, and Madonna’s struggles to adopt from a foreign country brought awareness to the odyssey hopeful parents experience as they try to find their family.

I take comfort in the fact that this woman, who started life with a name intractably tied to her own mom’s tragic death, found a way to not just accept and understand the idea of motherhood, but to rush toward it with open arms. Early in her career, Madonna told The New York Times, “I think people are named names for certain reasons, and I feel that I was given a special name for a reason. In a way, maybe I wanted to live up to my name.”

I hope for a similar type of resolution: to live up to my name as a warrior maiden, soldiering on through frustration to get my baby, whether biological or adopted; or, equally brave, to walk away from motherhood all together.

Mother Madonna

Sarah Sweeney

I TOSSED MY pink felt coat across my unmade bed and took off my pajamas. Nude, I slid into a pair of leather pumps I’d sneaked from our front closet. It housed the ’80s glamazon wardrobe my Aunt Gayle had left behind when she died of breast cancer. Aunt Gayle was my mother’s sister, and unlike her, she’d been a fashionable head-turner. I would open the closet late at night when my parents were getting stoned in their room and my brother was hooked to cartoons. I would be wide awake, bursting with wanderlust, as I rifled through Aunt Gayle’s old business suits, shoulder-padded blouses, lingerie, and shoes.

My tiny feet swam inside her size-9 ostrich heels, and I stumbled a bit as I shrugged the coat around my shoulders. I stood in front of my dresser mirror and stared at my tiny breasts. I touched the soft domes of skin and then hit rewind on my portable tape player. Inside was my secret weapon: a cracked cassette of Like a Virgin, its holographic spool twirling out my pre-pubescent dreams of escape, stardom, and happily ever after. I was eight. It was a ritual, this: dressing up in my dead aunt’s clothes. It was the closest thing I had to glamour, and I would dance in the mirror, half nude, to “Dress You Up,” singing over Madonna’s whale-sized voice, our house quaking as I posed and pretended, my bedroom door locked behind me.

It was 1989. Madonna was busy promoting “Like a Prayer,” and everywhere I looked there she was—blonde and writhing in fishnets, black eyeliner, and makeshift Marilyn-mole; the next day brunette, muscular and bustier-clad, part dominatrix, part drug addict. I wasn’t sure which incarnation I liked best, only that she was the most beautiful woman I had ever seen, and everything I wanted to be.

I lived in North Carolina in a brick house with a maple tree in front and a white cement driveway. My father sold electrical equipment and my mother was an x-ray technician. Both were ex-hippies still grappling with their lives of responsibility and childrearing, and our upbringing was loose, strange, and embedded with music, the soundtrack of my parents’ glory days. When my mother cooked dinner she played Fleetwood Mac and Steely Dan’s Aja; my father loved Led Zeppelin and the Allman Brothers Band. We were what most people might call dysfunctional—my parents loathed each other and my brother and I were heathens. We stole from nearby stores, snuck out at night, and took to drinking early, raiding the poorly hidden liquor cabinet during Saturday’s after-midnight extravaganza, when we had no bedtime and our parents slept.

My father was sick with Crohn’s disease and my mother was bitter about how her life had turned out. They were so busy sparring that my brother and I became lone renegades in a house with no government or structure. When my father did make a play for power, putting his foot down, we were often shocked and fearful of his demands. His maniacal moods and heavy drinking led to bizarre outbursts of Puritanism, nothing at all like how he ran his own life—like the night at dinner when he informed me that my new idol, Madonna, worshipped the devil. I was eight.

“She worships the devil,” he said, forcefully chopping my steak into bite-size pieces. He was angry, looking at my mother for input on his wish to ban MTV from our household.

“The devil?” I asked.

“And little girls who worship Madonna worship the devil, too,” he said. “She’s a whore. And what you’re doing is idolatry.”

“What’s a whore?” I asked.

“Someone who has sex with a lot of people.”

This was a lot to process at the dinner table. “What’s idolatry?” I asked.

“When you love someone more than you love God,” my father answered.

We never went to church, never said grace before meals, and Christmas held no mention of Christ in our home. With his comments, my father had introduced the immense gulf between my terrestrial life and heaven, which could never be paved as long as I cherished Madonna.

I had seen the video for “Like a Prayer” at least a hundred times and though there was something about it that told me I shouldn’t be watching, I didn’t dare look away.

I had no idea at the time what the song or video meant—the tonguing with a black man (something I had been told was taboo, especially in the South) and the symbolism. So each time it aired, I studied it for clues: the stigmata, the inmate-turned-Jesus, Jesus sexualized, the crosses flaming as Madonna danced down a grassy knoll. These images floated in my mind like the huge question marks I had toward the world—especially at night, when my father’s words echoed and my shadowed room held me, and I feared the devil was closing in.

Madonna’s religious fixation and my father’s veiled comments and successful ban of MTV sparked something inside me that lasted for years. During late 1989 and early 1990, I watched news segments about religious groups persecuting Madonna for cross burning, as well as some more farfetched reports that claimed she had AIDS.

One afternoon, I asked my father if Madonna did indeed have AIDS.

“Probably,” he answered, and tears welled in my eyes. This was my father speaking, and I took his word as gospel. How could I have known any better?

It was another assault against Madonna, but I couldn’t manage to un-love her. I was an idolater, and my love for her thrust my life into limbo with both my parents and a God I was now so acutely aware of. I believed I’d volunteered myself into the world’s relentless witch hunt against Madonna, and we were in it together.

When my father wasn’t around, I watched MTV as much as I could. Madonna was on every fifteen minutes and my clandestine viewing made me even more guilty and anxious.

I had asked my father what kind of name “Madonna” was. I had never heard it before and it seemed bewildering to me.

“That’s another name for the Virgin Mary,” he told me.

“The who?” I asked.

“The Virgin Mary—Jesus’s mother.”

Madonna exuded all things religious and yet she worshipped the devil, I thought. I knew this was complex stuff. In my unkempt room at night I hardly slept. Instead, I propped my battery-powered tape player on my pillow, played Like a Virgin, and succumbed to deep bouts of prayer. I asked God to save Madonna, to save me, and for nearly two years I prayed fanatically—for freedom from the world, from the devil. I really did believe he was chasing me: that Madonna had been his entryway into my life, that he was gnawing at my soul, and only consistent prayer would rid me of him. On my worst days, I prayed tens of times in my bedroom. Sometimes during playtime with my brother or friends, I’d be overcome with worry and obsession and slink off to the bathroom for a meeting with God. I prayed for my family, for Madonna, for the other girls out there obsessed with her and tormented by the devil—“Free us all!” I begged, my voice a muffled cry into my pillow.

During these years, while I prayed and grew older, I led my double life of dancing that rattled the windowpanes at night as I leapt around my room and twisted in the mirror, lip-syncing into a hairbrush. I posed seductively in Aunt Gayle’s satin chemises and tripped in her four-inch heels as they pierced our dingy carpet. I was leading Madonna’s life, I told myself, a life of sexuality and expression. I was only a provocateur in my bedroom, alone, caressing my body the way I’d seen Madonna do, her hands sliding down her breasts and hips.

Sometimes I stared out my window facing the backyard and watched our neighbor Russ wash his car in the hazy evening as smoke from our grill wafted up through my room. I don’t know what drew me to Russ, but he became a short-lived figure of my veneration. I knew that in order to be more like Madonna, I needed a boy toy, and Russ fit the bill. He was late thirties, early forties, not particularly attractive, but in my fantasy world I was a performing diva and not a little girl. Outside of my fantasies, I was not in love with Russ; but inside them, we admired each other from afar, watching, waiting.

I could see Russ in his kitchen window some nights, washing dishes underneath a halo of light. When the sky was grey, I’d flick on a lamp and parade in front of my window, stark nude as the moon that streaked yellow beams through the lawn. I don’t know if Russ ever saw me there, but it was my first exercise in being a seductress, a woman of zero inhibition.

I spritzed myself with Love’s Baby Soft, the pink perfume my parents had bought me that Christmas, and sometimes sneaked a spray of my mother’s sultry Nina Ricci inside my cotton nightgown, the spicy scent burning my nose.

I lay down in my bed and touched my body, the soft hairless spot between my legs that Madonna grabbed during performances, a move that prompted my mother to make noises of disgust.

“What? What is it?” I remember asking her.

“Look at her,” she said, shaking her head, “grabbing her crotch like that.”

I had a name for it—a crotch. Nothing particularly romantic about the harsh sounds it made leaving my mother’s mouth, but I knew Madonna was as close with her crotch as a girl could be and that I had catching up to do.

I touched my crotch and looked in the mirror and dreamed of bleaching my hair blonde and shaving my legs. I asked my mother if I could do both and she said I could not, that I was a kid, and there was plenty of time for that.

I felt stifled by time, unmoved by her suggestion that my life had just begun and there was a swath of endless highway ahead of me. Madonna was living my life, the life I wanted that was incubating inside of me, and I was trapped. I watched Madonna and begged my mother to move me to Los Angeles; I had become enamored with the idea of making it on Star Search. I practiced night after night in the mirror to all of Madonna’s songs; I knew the words by heart, every additional ooh and ahh, every backing harmony. I had no fear of dancing, of exposing myself to neighbors; I was ready to grow up, to be an outspoken woman and make my own decisions the way Madonna had, as though she had pioneered those two very things. The more Madonna accomplished, the more enthralled I was, and the more left behind I felt.

Before I was banned from watching MTV, I viewed the “Justify My Love” video during its brief airtime in 1990. It was late at night and everyone was asleep but me. I sat on our living room carpet, stunned and paralyzed by what I was witnessing. I had viewed the soft-core porn highlights of HBO after dark, but nothing like this. It was erotic and dangerous and real and so typically Madonna and I loved it. My crotch tingled like it never had before. Something was happening, and I knew this was the reaction Madonna lived for. Madonna tingled nonstop.

From our local drug store I pilfered razors, hair dye, lipstick, mascara, magazines, tampons, and sultry summer paperbacks from the magazine aisle. I scrolled through the pages looking for standout words that would give me a tingle: breasts, thighs, desire, climax.

In the summer of 1991, my mother divorced my father. We stayed in the brick house and he moved into an apartment not far away. After he left, my mother reinstated MTV. I could watch all the music videos and Madonna I wanted.

“Mom,” I asked her one night. “Dad said Madonna has AIDS.”

She paused over a fry pan to look at me in horror. “He told you that?”

“And that she worships the devil, too.”

My mother heaved and sighed and, visibly angry, took this as evidence that divorcing my father had been the correct thing to do.

“Honey,” she said, turning once more to the stove. “Your father is crazy. Now go watch TV.”

And I did. My mother’s response signaled that my father had been untruthful all along, and I was vindicated and relieved. I could finally stop praying.

In the fall of 1992 I turned 10. My breasts were swelling, and in the eyes of the mirror I could envision the years ahead of me; I might’ve even seen my childhood evaporating.

During that time, Madonna’s book Sex was also released. I’d heard the press surrounding its publication and wondered where I might steal a look. It was promised to be some unholy tome, largely criticized, which made its secrets all the more compelling to me. I was ignorant and thirsty; I had to see the book somehow.

My mother’s foray into a sex talk was, simply, “You won’t do it until you’re married.” One command, and I knew nothing else for years. Early on, I believed sex was sleeping part-to-part all night, a meticulously constructed act that resulted in a child being born sometime in the future.

A summer after Sex’s release, another of my aunts drove me to a bookstore and let me wander around alone. On a display table in the back of the store were sealed copies of the book. I sneaked one away and opened it on an empty aisle. The iconic photograph of a nude, hitchhiking Madonna resembling Marilyn Monroe was the first image that seared into my brain: Madonna cheekily smoking a cigarette with a thumb lifted to traffic. I slammed the book shut, the slick pages heavy and thudding, and began to cry. I felt suddenly blinded by self-awareness. My heart pounded, and all at once I knew that I was a child, would be a child for a while, and that becoming Madonna was impossible.

In the 1992 film A League of Their Own, Madonna played the streetwise and sexy ballplayer Mae Mordabito, a character much like herself then, but her character also showed a softer, more human side by falling in love with a G.I. in the movie. This role provided a dimension to Madonna I’d never seen before: Even if it was just acting, she could be womanly, coquettish; not just brazen, but rounded and complex. It was a critical turning point for how I wanted to be as a woman. I wanted to have it all, while being it all.

As I grew older, Madonna did too. And my Madonna religion waned. I loved her but didn’t need her as much. I was still with her in 1993 when she released “Rain.” My cousins stayed with us that summer and we snuck out to the neighborhood cemetery at night and smoked cigarettes in the woods. It was my favorite song of the 1990s, a powerful ballad about catharsis and letting go of love.

Madonna’s music videos were instruction manuals, and in so many ways Madonna was my true protector, best friend, confidante; I listened to her when nothing made sense and crucial relationships and beliefs in my life dissolved at a rapid pace. Always untouchable, Madonna withstood years of condemnation, but I believed I understood her the way no one else did. Madonna emblemized happiness, a life without limits, and I knew I wanted that and not my parents’ humdrum version of living: their tired bodies dragged out of the house each morning, the gruff churning of the engine, the invisible desire to flee.

Even more of a quandary for me than Madonna’s supposed pact with Satan was that she only had one name. I was blithely naive to the idea that Madonna was anyone’s child, that she was birthed as routinely as any infant in a local hospital. Before Madonna, I had never envisioned myself without my parents; we were one body, an entity, but with just her name Madonna showed me independence; she was whole and alone and was seemingly born that way.

She was with me in 1994, when the blood pierced my panties on a Sunday morning and I called to my mother for assistance. I knew something had finally happened, and I was finally transitioning into a woman.

And as I aged and changed and began crafting my own life, my feelings toward Madonna changed. Where I had once worshipped an idealized version of her—youthful, sexual, beautiful—I now see much more, even fault. How I now view her is entirely unlike my childhood idol. I look back at those years with a sad fondness for us both, the struggling girl and the female on top, both bemused, giddy, exasperated; and I think of her as a mother of sorts, the person who taught me not everything I needed to know about being a woman, just a lot of the important stuff.

Marrying Madonna

Christine Bachman

I WAS SEVEN years old, dressed in sparkly plastic heels, my mother’s slip, my father’s fake boobs (yes, that’s right), and makeup clumsily caked on my face: It was my wedding day.

Actually, it was my wedding day almost every afternoon when I played “house” with my next-door neighbor, Lucy. We would solemnly hum “Here Comes the Bride” as we walked slowly down the red-carpeted hallway and approached my stuffed monkey, Coco, who would momentarily join us—Madonna and Michael Jackson—in holy matrimony. And while the focus was on the ceremony itself, the game didn’t end there. We would play on, simulating the consummation of our marriage, which would then result in the birth of the couple’s first child. And as we, Madonna and Michael Jackson, managed our successful careers, we also found happiness in all the mundane chores of a “normal” middle-class life: cooking dinner, tidying the house, and teaching our children proper table manners.

Years later, as I look back on this well-rehearsed performance of my childhood, I attempt to make sense of the freakish union of the King and Queen of Pop, two of the biggest queer icons in pop culture. Why was this union—with marriage being the epitome of het-eronormativity—which places heterosexuality as the foundation of normalcy and all that is socially acceptable—such a focus of my young life, and why was Madonna, in particular, my leading lady?

As my father’s fake boobs suggest, my childhood was a little unusual. I was raised by a German mother and a gay father; one parent uprooted from her country, never to fit into the cookie-cutter suburbs of America, and the other an escapee of Salt Lake City, who ultimately ended up living among a chosen family of gay men. I was the product of their marriage (and later, when my father came out, their divorce), and believed for years that everyone’s father must be gay, and that all mothers revert to speaking German whenever they are counting or cooking. I grew up in an impossible family, a family that made no sense compared to the heterosexual, two-parented families around me, but I felt loved, supported, safe, and happy. Maybe that’s why, when constructing my fantasy family, I chose another impossible couple. The make-believe romance of Madonna and Michael—the parents of my idealized world—married the normative and the queer, allowing my seven-year-old brain to make sense of the contradictions that I experienced in my everyday life.

My youthful obsession with Madonna herself, however, was a much more superficial idolization. I was surrounded by gay men who knew her songs, her dances, her history, and her gossip. Through Madonna, they shared a language and a borrowed identity—one Madonna appropriated, in part, from gay and black culture—to express their own. To be part of their world, I learned this language and grew to identify with the perspective of my gay adult role models, who looked up to this icon of “fabulousness.” Yet I also grew to identify with Madonna herself, as the only woman in the room, the model of idealized femininity, whose performances simultaneously glorified enforced, and then destroyed the rules of gender and sexuality. In this way, my make-believe games blurred into my reality and the creation of my own identity, shaping the way I would understand my place in a world of gay men.

There is a growing community of children and adults that have been raised by queer parents. Some of us call ourselves “queerspawn.” We queerspawn are familiar with living between the dominant heterosexual world and the often less conventional world of our parents. We inhabit both of these worlds as insiders and outsiders. It’s quite a powerful position to occupy, having access to the safety of socially acceptable rules and codes, and also to a universe that transcends traditional boundaries, giving us a passport by birth to explore a more radical and imaginative territory.

Unlike me, Madonna was not lucky enough to have a queer parent, though a community of gay male fans adopted her early in her career. And as a gay icon, a sexually provocative pop star, a rule-breaker, and a privileged white woman from a traditional Catholic family, Madonna has also spent most of her life straddling both worlds as an insider and an outsider. This “hybridity” permeates her work, merging elements of both worlds into her performances, as she evokes Marilyn Monroe (the iconic heterosexual ideal of feminine allure), while indulging in a variety of illicit sexualities and ambiguous genders in her banned 1990 music video “Justify My Love.” In this video, and in so many of her performances that borrow themes from the mainstream and the queer worlds, Madonna exploits both realms to gain access to new levels of cultural relevance and power.

By the time I entered young adulthood, power was much more interesting than sparkly plastic heels and pretend weddings, though Madonna was still my leading lady. As an undergraduate, I chose to write my senior thesis on Madonna and her successes and failures in disrupting, or “queering,” some of our most seemingly stable binaries: sexuality, gender, race, class, and age. My thesis provided me with a legitimate excuse to throw myself headfirst into a thorough examination of Madonna’s career, and my academic quest to understand Madonna and her relationship to queerness and power became a fierce obsession.

Ultimately, I was in it to discover how this gay-male icon—this legend of pop-star greatness—claimed access to untethered power. Desperately I read between the lines, committing every Madonna lyric, movement, and performance to memory. What did these performances mean? How did Madonna, a character that had played such an integral role in my coming of age, move between traditional and queer spaces so successfully? And how could I, a queerspawn born in the age of Madonna, channel my insider/outsider status to question, resist, challenge, and ultimately celebrate access to both conventional power and queer power? Madonna was the key to understanding one more piece of this power puzzle.

As a college student, when I wasn’t poring over hours of Madonna music videos, I was testing the new limits of my world as a young adult, discovering my passions and learning how to act on them: from coming out as a queer-identified straight woman, to creating an institutionally supported space for queer studies on my college campus. Madonna had guided me through my early childhood, providing me with the tools I needed to communicate with my world of gay men, while opening my eyes to the rigid rules of femininity as well as the strength she found in breaking them—seemingly just for the fun of it. As a college student, she guided me again, taking me through each of her performances until I was finally satisfied with the knowledge that I had had all along: Our real strength is our ability to move, adapt, change, grow, be part of and separate from the worlds which we inhabit. My childhood fantasy, in which I, Madonna, married Michael Jackson, was not just a mockery of a heterosexual ritual, it was also exactly where I felt most comfortable and powerful.

Thus, it is ironic, informative, and fitting that I am now recreating this duality in my real life as I prepare to get married. Though my partner is neither Michael Jackson nor the clueless neighbor that grew to know her part so well, he too understands the life of an insider/outsider. As a competitive triathlete, model, and all-around privileged white man, he is a poster boy (literally) of mainstream America; but as a feminist and queer-identified man committed to exploring the limits of gender-bending, he feels more at home at a drag show than at a football game, though he can easily pass in either arena. Our partnership has always balanced the thin line between the queer and mainstream worlds, and exists as an anomaly in both: We look like your typical heterosexual couple, but we subscribe to the ideologies and values of the queer world. Thus, as our relationship has grown, so has our shared commitment to challenge our conventional facade in order to identify with and reveal the radical, queer position we take in our communities, our politics, and our sexualities. To shake things up, as it were, Madonna-style. What would she think, I wonder, of our “Save the Date” cards, complete with a photo of me in a tuxedo and my blushing groom in a white wedding gown?

As a composite creation, I have much fear about this “next step” in the script of conventional heterosexual romance. Will I lose my membership to the queer world that has raised me? Will I gain permanent acceptance to a heteronormative world and become a straight girl? These thoughts terrify me. Struggling with the idea of entering—’til death do us part—a world of mainstream heterosexuality, I find myself trying to signal my disapproval and resistance. But doesn’t Madonna teach us that the most effective way to change the rules is not to resent them or ignore them, but to upend them and make them your own?

Embracing her many contradictions, Madonna does not shy away from celebrating ambiguous genders and sexual identities, nor does she refuse to champion the myth of heterosexual romance. Rather, she marries elements of her queerness with traditional ideals of conventional sexuality, experimenting with drag and gender-bending, as she did during her 1993 tour The Girlie Show. Performing “Like a Virgin,” Madonna mimicked Marlene Dietrich with a low voice and thick German accent, but also evoked Cabaret’s “Emcee,” dressed sharply in a tuxedo and presenting the audience with a deliberately confused masculinity. Her ever-present bright-red lipstick undermined her claims to manhood, and as she slipped into the Detroit accent and persona of a working-class male in “Bye Bye Baby,” her character was aroused by three androgynous dancing girls—exotic for their gender-bending as well as for their racial ambiguity. Madonna’s performance throughout the piece emphasized the ways in which she borrows cultural cues from queer staples, and from traditional heterosexual scripts. And with this unexpected combination of the mainstream and the queer, Madonna brings something new to her audiences, tapping into a power not limited by conventional rules or the rules and expectations attached to carefully maintained queerness. I relate to that.

She reminds me to find strength in the insider/outsider identity that has defined me since my make-believe weddings to Michael Jackson. As a queer-identified woman with a queer-identified male partner, our marriage will be just as freakish and fun as my imagined childhood weddings. So, I owe her thanks, for reminding me from childhood onward, to always “express yourself, don’t repress yourself!”

Come July, dancing down the aisle to Madonna, I will embrace the creation of my own impossible family, marrying the traditional and the queer in a perfectly imperfect union.

Into the Wilderness

Soniah Kamal

I WAS STANDING before my full-length mirror holding bloodstained cotton balls to my ears when my mother barged into my room and gazed at me in despair. Like all good Pakistani girls, getting my earlobes pierced was a traditional rite of passage, but I was seventeen years old and I had just plunged a sewing needle into my cartilage six times in each ear. It hurt, but I felt good.

“Do you think you are Madonna?!” my mother yelled.

I stood before her in fingerless blue lace gloves, black rubber bracelets, red leggings and a white shirt over a black bra. My mother eyed me with sorrow and worry. Good Pakistani girls did not dress this way, not if they wanted to fulfill their parents’ dream of making a decent respectable marriage. I felt my mother’s pain as she yelled again, “Do you think you are Madonna?!”

Madonna came into my life when I was fourteen years old. At the time, we lived in Jeddah, a hot, dusty, port city with a brilliant blue cornice alongside the Red Sea in Saudi Arabia. I attended an international school that apparently provided the best education. But because it was co-ed, my parents constantly reminded me that good Muslim girls did not speak to boys, under any circumstances. And as long as we were good girls, all was okay.

One afternoon I was visiting a school friend, Shannon. I was allowed to go to Shannon’s house because she had no brothers and she was Irish Catholic. My mother believed Irish Catholics were just like Muslims: appropriately strict with their daughters. My mother would have been appalled if she’d seen Shannon prancing around her house in a skimpy tank top and underwear. The only Western clothes I was permitted to wear were loose, long shirts, jeans, and dresses and skirts, as long as they were paired with knee-high socks. I felt foolish and ugly in those socks. But I couldn’t even take them off at school because I was not allowed to shave my desperately-in-need-of-a-shave legs. Nor was I allowed to grow my nails or wear makeup. I couldn’t figure out what being a good Muslim or Pakistani had to do with hairy legs, short nails, and zero makeup.

On this particular afternoon, we lounged in Shannon’s bedroom, sipping chilled cans of Vimto grape soda and listening to music. Shannon had bought a new audio cassette. The girl on the cover reminded me of Pakistani singer Nur Jehan. They shared a plump, sultry, victorious mien, as if they’d just eaten the creamiest pastry in the world.

“Tell me what you think?” Shannon said as she pressed play.

You may be my lucky star, but I’m the luckiest by far . . .

The tune: catchy. The beat: like bubbles popping. The rhythm: joyous, cheery. Before we knew it we were jumping on the bed through “Holiday” and “Everybody,” yelling bits of the choruses we’d picked up. Finally we collapsed, and I passed my verdict: Madonna sounded like a squeaky mouse. Shannon laughed and agreed. Then she asked, “Do you want hear a really sexy song?”

“Okay,” I said with false bravado—in my home, “sexy” was a bad word.

“Like a Virgin” throbbed through the speakers. If Shannon hadn’t been sitting there, my mouth would have fallen open at hearing the word “virgin” out loud, but Shannon was belting it out as if it were no big deal. Perhaps it wasn’t. Shannon’s parents expected her to be a virgin until marriage, but dating, boyfriends, crushes, and first kisses were dinner-table fodder at her house. At my home, dating, boyfriends, crushes, and kisses were all bad words, and not only was I expected to be a virgin at marriage but woe betide I had anything to do with any male before my wedding night.

When the song was over, I said, “My parents think virgin is a bad word.” I rolled my eyes even as I asked Allah to forgive me for saying “virgin” and for speaking ill about my parents.

Shannon popped her gum. “My dad would die if he heard this song.”

“My dad would kill me if he even heard me hearing this song.”

A few weeks later, my mother allowed me to attend Shannon’s birthday party because she thought it was girls-only. Because I was the only Pakistani/Muslim at the party, I relaxed—my parents knew no one here, so nothing would get back to them. Streamers and balloons decorated the walls. Boys and girls stood at opposite ends of the room, finding refuge behind Pepsis and potato chips until Shannon’s mother shepherded us into the center and warned us to start having fun. “Material Girl” blasted through the room and everyone started to move.

“Who is this?” I asked Shannon.

“Madonna,” she said.

“The Mouse?”

“Yep. The Mouse. I like her.”

“Me too.”

Our movements intensified through “Borderline,” and by the time “Into the Groove” came on, we were all jiggling our butts off.

Then a slow song came on: “Crazy for You.” Amid giggles equally shy and coy, everyone paired up and began to slow-dance. I had never been in such close proximity to a boy. My parents would be mortified. Not that B, with his black spectacles and knobby knees, qualified in my mind as a “boy”; he was simply a classmate who happened to not be a girl. I felt guilty even as I consoled myself that if Shannon could dance like this with her mother in the room, then surely it couldn’t be such a crime.

Still, I felt I was letting down my parents and Allah. But if the Christian God and Muslim God were one and the same, then how could one religion deem slow-dancing all right and the other deem it bad? I squeezed my eyes shut and prayed for an answer.

The next day, I begged my father to drive me to a supermarket with a music department so I could purchase every Madonna song available. I winced as my father glanced at the cassette covers. Madonna’s curls were unruly, eyebrows brash, mouth bold, nose absolutely beautiful, but most of all, I loved her defiant gaze: She resembled a tigress that’d spotted her favorite meal.

My parents were connoisseurs of ghazals (a form of poetry that could be put to music and sung), as well as Indian film songs. Their small collection of English music consisted of ABBA, Boney M., and the Bee Gees. My father, inspecting Madonna on the covers, asked me who she was. I told him: “A new singer I heard at Shannon’s house.” He pursed his lips. For a moment I feared he would screen the songs. I could just imagine his heart attack over “like a virgin touched for the very first time” or “crazy for you, touch me once and you’ll know it’s true.”

As it was, my father presumed that all entertainers hailed from questionable stock. Whether this belief was unique to him or part of our culture, I had yet to discover. Either way, his disdain did not deter his own pleasure in listening to music or watching classical dances in Indian films. This dichotomy left me irritated and annoyed.

Eventually, my father handed me the bag. At home I whisked my mother’s tape player into my room. Door shut, volume low, I crooned along with Madonna for the rest of the evening. Even though I still felt guilty for having slow-danced, I kept playing “Crazy for You.”

At one point during the evening, my mother popped her head in to inquire if I’d prayed that day. I whipped out my prayer mat and a head covering (mandatory only while praying) before rushing through the ritual so I could return to the songs. I particularly liked “Live to Tell,” despite not gleaning the secret that was burning inside of her. And “Like a Virgin” thrilled me. It really was the sexiest!

Madonna, everyone at school proclaimed, was the Queen of Sexiness. I agreed, even though I wasn’t altogether sure what “sexy” meant. One day, B, the boy I’d danced with at Shannon’s party, passed me a note in class: “U R Sexy.” My face burned. I thought I was going to pass out. “Sexy” scared me. Sexy was in the same category as “shame-shame,” our euphemism for genitals. I felt ashamed and dirty, as if I had done something sinful.

And I had: I had slow-danced with B, and had thus inadvertently invited him to say such a thing about me. Guilt gnawed at me. I loved my parents and didn’t want to let them down no matter how annoying or unreasonable they could be. Red-faced, I crumpled B’s note and did not even tell Shannon.

Instead, I decided to take my mother up on her constant assurances that I could ask her anything. I ambushed her in the kitchen just as she was pouring chickpeas into sautéed onions.

“What exactly does sexy mean?”

My mother turned off the stove, led me to the kitchen table, and held my gaze.

“Why exactly do you want to know?” she asked.

I told her I’d overheard a boy at school say it to a girl. My mother sighed, muttering that this was what came of sending girls to co-ed schools. Sexy, she proceeded to inform me, was a very, very bad thing—it was a girl who wanted boys to want her in a shameful way, that not only should I never say the word but I should also distance myself from those who did. She ended with a kiss to my forehead and an order to pray to Allah to instill in me the sense to know right from wrong.

So I got down on my mat and prayed. Afterward, I continued to sit and talk to Allah, as was my habit. “Allah-mian,” I said, “if sexy is so bad and I am sexy then how is it my fault, since I have purposefully done nothing to be this way?” Allah did not answer, but rising from the prayer mat I decided to take a break from listening to the Queen of Sexy.

Perhaps Madonna would have truly disappeared from my life had another friend, Anya, not returned from her summer vacation in the United States with a VHS tape in tow: Madonna’s Virgin Tour.

One afternoon, while my father was at work and my mother recuperated in her bedroom after being on-call (she was an anesthesiologist), Anya and Shannon and I congregated in my living room to watch the video. We were three excited girls perched on the edge of a green velvet sofa, waiting for a cassette to rewind, not knowing that when the world changes, this is how it happens, in ordinary living rooms on ordinary afternoons.

When the concert began, Madonna’s silhouette appeared on the dark stage and she began to sing “Dress You Up.” The visual quality may have been grainy and the audio not perfectly clear, but strobe lights pulsed, smoke billowed, the crowd cheered, and there was Madonna—gliding, pirouetting, gyrating across the stage like lightning come to life. I was mesmerized; a strange energy engulfed me, my shoulders were sprouting wings, my stomach birthing butterflies, my feet growing light. I felt I was readying for flight.

Madonna was hypnotic—her voice, her body, her daring moves and attire: high-heel ankle boots, leggings that ended midcalf, black bracelets engulfing her wrists in lieu of the glass bangles favored by Pakistanis, and Christian crosses worn as pendants and earrings. (“Madonna is Catholic just like me,” Shannon informed us gleefully.) Each time Madonna lifted her arms—and she lifted her arms plenty—her transparent top rode up to expose her midriff and bits of her bra. I was embarrassed for her, but because she wasn’t embarrassed for herself, I felt stupid for being embarrassed.

I watched, riveted, as she went from costume to costume until she was dressed in wedding-style white lace with white leggings, white boots, crosses and rosaries galore, to sing “Like a Virgin.” “Will you marry me?” she asked the audience, and they roared back. Madonna was immorality and morality entwined like stripes on a candy cane. Madonna was magic. Madonna was madness. The concert ended with a man—Madonna’s real-life father—barreling on stage to drag her away as if she were a naughty girl. At that moment I felt akin to Madonna. I was Madonna. She understood my life, so I gave her my soul. No matter that it had been an act, and that she returned to the stage to do a curtsy.

When the concert was over, Anya, Shannon, and I peered bashfully at each other.

“That was great.”

“Greater than great.”

“It was the sexiest.”

Breaking into giddy shrieks, we rewound the tape and watched it all over again. The third time around, we rose to copy Madonna’s moves, and that was when my mother walked into the living room and found us awkwardly flailing about. We instantly stopped and sat down.

“It’s a Madonna concert,” I blurted out. And, as if sensing my nervousness, Shannon and Anya also began bombarding my mother with assurances.

“It’s the latest thing in the States.”

“She’s huge there. Like Michael Jackson.”

“Everyone’s watching this video.”

“And copying her dancing.”

“She’s Catholic,” I added sheepishly.

To my surprise, my mother sat down with us and watched for a while before announcing that her moves were more gymnastics than dance. But she didn’t tell me to turn it off. Instead my mother smiled and told me to move the glass coffee table to one side if we were going to dance. Then she left. I wonder if Madonna had mesmerized her too.

Before Anya left, I made a copy of the video. Each day, as soon as I returned from school, I’d switch it on for my daily dose. It was not long before the word “virgin” became routine and Madonna’s undergarments ceased to embarrass. They had metamorphosed into a symbol of conventional morality and tradition turned on its head. Her use of religious jewelry was particularly alluring to me. In wearing her religion, she included God in her sexiness. Either that, or God was sanctioning her himself.

Madonna’s name fascinated me, too. Madonna, Mother Mary: a good, virtuous woman. For Madonna, there seemed to be no schism between religion and sexiness, and I was a student eager to learn the same. To break the schism between my religion and my body and the bizarre moral codes of my parents, I shaved my legs, grew my nails, and applied whatever shade of lipstick a friend would share, once I’d arrived at school.

I finally understood what it meant to be sexy—it was only a four-letter word if you allowed it to be. Sexy was neither good nor bad; it just was. Sexy did not mean sleazy or slutty or of questionable stock. Sexy just meant that people found you sexually desirable. The fact that I was growing more comfortable with this idea, as well as the ability to say “sexy, virgin, crushes, kisses” no longer filled me with dread.

Madonna made my young heart flutter with endless possibility. I would listen to her on my newly acquired Walkman—a reward for earning stellar grades—on our frequent weekend drives to Mecca or Medina, holy cities for Muslims. When we’d arrive there, I would switch off my Walkman, don a hair covering, and joyously worship Allah; then, on our drive back, I’d remove the hair covering, put my earphones back in, and return peacefully to Madonna. I would happily lip sync to “Papa Don’t Preach,” not at all shocked by the song’s message. Mothers loved their kids, I concluded, whether unwed in the West, or like Hajra/Hagar in Islamic lore, desperately running in the barren desert in search of water for her thirsty infant. Incorporating Madonna into my Muslim self was beginning to feel as effortless as my being bilingual. I could balance revolving around Madonna one minute, and circling the Kaaba the next. The two didn’t seem at all contradictory. I had entered a dual universe, one I still live in, and Madonna was instrumental in my learning to create a symbiotic existence.

Ironically it was in Mecca, during ablutions before prayers, that my mother discovered my shaved legs. I had rolled up the long pantleg of my shalwar and was merrily pouring water over my feet and ankles, when she yelped, “Are your legs shaved?”

I shrugged.

“Who gave you permission?”

My mother remained silent on our return drive. I figured it was to spare my father news of my fall. But once we arrived home, she cornered me in my bedroom, enraged and even more upset when she learned I’d filched the razor from her own stash.

“You did it to attract boys, didn’t you? You did it to attract boys.”

I was shocked and angry that she refused to believe I’d shaved my legs only to avoid the girls laughing at my hairy limbs.

The shaving caused enough bad friction between us, but my mother found my expanding style of dress even more abhorrent. As the Jeddah stores began to stock Madonna-like clothing, we girls were fast transforming into mini-Madonnas, eager to rule the world in short skirts, leggings, and black bras.

My mother was lost as to how to discipline me. She kept saying I should pray for forgiveness. And pray I did, but only to complain to Allah about how my parents were ruining my life. Finally my mother began to blame Madonna for my transgressions, as if it were Madonna’s direct instruction rather than my own choice that had me questioning and discarding my mother’s—and my culture’s—principles.

In the end, it was my father who brought things to a head. One afternoon he arrived home early from work to find me glued to the concert—of course he walked in just as Madonna’s two male backup dancers were thrusting their hips at her. He was livid. As I expected, he called Madonna a prostitute. Now I was livid. For the first time, I found myself defending an entertainer from his damning evaluation. Shame colored me red, but I stood my ground.

My father asked me through clenched teeth if my mother was aware of what I was watching.

“Yes,” I said, “and anyway, there’s nothing wrong with this; she’s sexy and that’s not bad.”

My father immediately telephoned my mother at work and raged at her. I could hear my mother agree that I was no longer allowed to watch the tape. But I defied them both—I made it a point to keep watching the video, especially when my father was home. This went on until the day they told me we were returning to Pakistan.

I do not know how much of a role the Madonna tape played in our return to Pakistan, but when we got there we learned she had conquered that place, too. Posters of Madonna festooned video and music stores, bedroom walls, and even pencil cases. Her music and videos played everywhere, including at my aunt’s house, where I first saw the video for “Like a Virgin” while my admittedly progressive aunt, much to my mother’s chagrin, teased her for being old-fashioned. Indeed, if my parents brought me to Pakistan to take me away from Madonna, they’d miscalculated.

And so it was that one day my mother barged into my bedroom, found that I’d pierced my ears against her wishes, and asked me if I thought I was Madonna.

“No,” I said quietly. “But apparently you do.”

In the long run, Madonna did not inspire me to do any of the things my parents feared: become a prostitute or birth a child out of wedlock, become a drug addict or even an actress. In fact, to their relief, I ended up respectably married. Yet Madonna’s physical bravado was my spiritual mother. In having to repeatedly defend everything she symbolized, I gradually became a person able to see shades of gray, as well as a person who knew her own mind and spoke it.

Over the years, Madonna’s presence in my daily life has waned. But the fact is—will always remain—that Madonna made my “today” possible. Current musical acts are just that—acts—but Madonna was pure, unadulterated, raw sexual liberation.

What Madonna meant to me back then and even now: a guide through the wilderness, a soul mate, sexy, but beyond being sexy, she was Hope. Hope that sexy girls did not necessarily die bad deaths, hope that sexy girls lived to tell their tales, hope that sexy girls could rule the world. And do.

Ciccone Youth

Jen Hazen

PINK LEOTARD, PINK tights, ballet slippers. Since the age of five, I had wriggled into spandex after school two days a week to take dance lessons at Meeth Studio in Paw Paw, Michigan. My mother had trained for years when she was growing up, so even after her sudden death a couple of months after my eighth birthday, I chasséd in her footsteps with ballet, tap, and jazz classes.

After my lesson I usually stayed late to watch my teenage dance instructors, Miss Cindy and Miss Lisa, practice their modern dance routines. I recall a day when ten-year-old me leaned against the bar and watched in awe as the girls pirouetted and jetéd across the hardwood floor in black cigarette pants and frayed gray sweatshirts that hung off one shoulder à la Flashdance. Their synchronized movements refracted in the mirrored walls as they slid to their knees and fanned their legs into languid poses like Solid Gold dancers.

After the rehearsal, I asked Miss Cindy the name of the song they’d been dancing to. “It’s ‘Lucky Star’ by Madonna. She’s from Detroit.” She handed me the album cover, which had a full headshot of a woman with bleached blond hair and dark eyebrows, like Marilyn Monroe. Her hands touched her face with a heap of chain jewelry on her wrists and neck. I went home that night and mocked Madonna’s cover pose in the bathroom mirror. We’re both from Michigan, I thought.

We didn’t have a turntable in my house, but we had MTV. The luxury of cable television magically arrived when my mom died. My dad, who’d worked second shift while my mother cared for me and my older brother, had no idea how to raise kids. I guess he decided that TV would be a good nanny. After the relentless rotation of Night Ranger’s “Sister Christian” and Kurt Loder’s music news, I finally caught what I had been waiting for: Madonna’s “Lucky Star” video. I studied her dance steps: pas de bourrée, dig step, turn, dig step, roll on the floor, show your stomach. I scrutinized her outfit: capri pants, short skirt, lace everywhere, tons of bracelets, and a floppy bow headband.

That year, I asked for a ghetto blaster for my birthday, and when the “Lucky Star” video aired again, I held it up to the TV and recorded the song. I danced to that crappy cassette recording in our family room for a year, mimicking Madonna’s moves in a getup consisting of torn black tights cut off at the knees, one of my dad’s black T-shirts knotted on the side, and about twenty gummy bracelets I’d scored from a gumball machine. I didn’t have a mom to tell me how to be, so Madonna would have to do. Besides, someone told me that she had lost her mom, too, and she turned out okay, right?

My idolization of Madonna ebbed and flowed as I grew up. My early teen years were tinged with the musical influences of my older brother, who had discovered leather pants, pierced ears, and “alternative” music. My dad was horrified and I was hooked. Cassettes of Siouxsie and the Banshees, New Order, The Cramps, and Sonic Youth ejected my homemade Madonna tapes straight into the garbage.

When all of the kids at school fell in love with Madonna thanks to “Like a Virgin,” I snubbed her popularity. Yeah, I was alternative now. Madonna wasn’t deep like Siouxsie Sioux, who used words like “lament” and “torpor” in her song lyrics. Besides, Madonna seemed tame, rolling around on concert stages faux-humping in a hacked-up bridal gown, while Lux Interior looked like a creature from Night of the Living Dead. Sadly, Madonna just wasn’t the outcast that I’d hoped for, so I dismissed her.

Or at least until tenth grade, when I saw the “Like a Prayer” video.

The uproar over this scandalous little number ignited a shit storm in my tiny, homogeneous high school. In the halls, kids were squawking about “Madonna kissing a black guy,” taking sides about whether that was acceptable, and probably regurgitating their parents’ opinions on the matter, whether they realized it or not. The controversy even made the local news—Madonna kissed a black man! In a church! Burning crosses! Pepsi yanked its sponsorship! She’ll burn in hell with the Devil!

My love for Madonna was rekindled with that kiss. It was the best “fuck your status quo” move by a woman that I had seen in my life. And she did it so stylishly—with wavy brunette locks, a strappy corset dress, and no shoes. Brilliant. I remember declaring to my gaggle of girlfriends at the lunch table, “Well, I loved it. So she kissed a black guy. Big deal.”

But it was a big deal then, which, frankly, pissed me off and made me rebel even more. So much so, that I went out and bought the “Like a Prayer” tape. I remember reading the liner notes. Madonna mentioned her mom. What would she think of her daughter doing all this? I wondered. And then I wondered if my mom had been proud of me.

Being raised in a male household often felt like being reared by wolves. Supper consisted of TV dinners, cereal, or popsicles most of the time, and the day I told my dad that I had gotten my period, he nudged a box of tampons through a small crack in my bedroom door. On the other hand, he taught me that I was just as strong and capable as a boy. But I quickly learned that liberation only existed within the walls of our home.

When I stepped into the real world, I felt an indescribable undercurrent of inferiority and dismissal. I began dressing in baggy clothes for fear that I wouldn’t be taken seriously, much like the girls in my class who prattled nonstop about clothes, boys, and prom. I studied to the point of exhaustion to prove my intelligence, with straight As and a high GPA.

Before long, I was dousing my baggy jeans with bleach for the “splatter” effect, ripping holes in my shirts and lining them with safety pins, and dyeing my hair every possible shade of red or black. I did it because I couldn’t tolerate the small, close-minded town I was living in, and because my dad had been diagnosed with cancer. The color of my hair seemed to be the only thing I could control.

In my early twenties, I cared for my dad in our home along with the help of hospice. After battling various types of cancer for five years, he had a stroke and was partially paralyzed. I would occasionally leave the house to attend college classes part-time or work at a hair salon at the mall, but I rarely left his bedside. Although it felt like I was serving a prison term in a tiny town where everyone was on lockdown for life, I stayed in that house until my dad didn’t need me anymore. When he died, I ran as fast as I could from that place with a population of less than two thousand, and I never looked back—“quicker than a ray of light.”

I graduated from undergrad and moved to Chicago. Although it’s been ten years since I left home, I still cry every time I hear “Ray of Light.” Not tears of sadness, but tears for the good memories of my parents that I packed into a suitcase to schlep along with me. I felt free for the first time in my life. I wonder if that’s how Madonna felt when she left Detroit?

I wonder how she felt when she lost her mom.

My mom had been fed up with my dad’s affairs. He was sleeping with so many women in our small town when I was a kid that the neighbors didn’t make eye contact when Mom and I went to the grocery store. I remember answering the rotary dial phone in the kitchen only to be hung up on, time and time again, by the woman of the week. I can only imagine how mortifying the ordeal was for my mom.

When she told Dad to get out of the house because she wanted a divorce, he refused to give her one, but he did move out. Mom had no idea that he would cut her off financially during their separation—no assistance with the mortgage, the bills, the expenses of raising two kids. How would she raise us on her meager secretary’s salary? Mom called her parents in California to ask if she could move us to the West Coast, but they told her to “stick out her marriage.”

She didn’t last a week after that.

She committed suicide instead.

In those days, women didn’t have the means to achieve financial independence as easily as we do today. And her heart was broken. And then rebroken. Over and over.

I was standing in a crowded Chicago bar the first time I heard Madonna’s “What It Feels Like For a Girl” in 2001. I was starting a master’s degree program, and I loved living in the city. As the song played, I listened to the lyrics. I thought of my mom, who wore a perfect poker face for me and my brother while my dad publicly humiliated her. I didn’t know what that felt like. I thought about her cry for help to her family—a cry that fell on deaf ears. I didn’t know what that felt like. I thought of how she felt so trapped that death seemed like the only way out. I didn’t know what that felt like.

But I did know how it felt to be loved by her. The eight years that I shared with her taught me that I can do whatever I want. I can be whomever I want. Just like Madonna. Who lost her mom, too, and she turned out okay, right?