It's This American Life. Act One-- The Wedding Zinger. So let's start today with a story that is both intergenerational space and time travel. When Courtney Maum was 18, her mom got remarried. Courtney despised the guy, did not want the marriage to go through. But she was her mom's maid of honor, and she gave a speech at her mother's request.
And the speech she gave at 18 years old, her mom never forgave her for it, brought it up for years after. And then recently, after three tumultuous decades, her mom's relationship with this man fell apart. For Courtney, this was the opening, the chance to finally ask her mom across the divide between them about this marriage she never understood, and to try one more time to lay this infamous wedding speech to rest. Here's Courtney.
At 18, I thought I was kind of hot stuff-- a writer in the making, a die-hard feminist, a student capable of bringing freedom to Tibet. Here's how my mom Linda saw me.
What I remember is at that point in your life, you were extremely selfish. And you didn't want anybody else in my life. You asked me not to even date until after you went off to college, and certainly not even think of getting married before that.
Is that true? I'm sure it's true. The thing is, I loved being with my mother. Everybody did. I didn't want to share her.
She was fun, beautiful, stylish, like a woman out of Knight Rider. She had a Harley-Davidson and a boating license. We were always on adventures. In the summer, I loved to watch her steer our little Boston Whaler, wearing these massive dangly earrings that sparkled in the sun. It was a fairy tale existence, a childhood of privilege, growing up like this in Greenwich, Connecticut, with parents I adored.
But when I was eight and my brother Brendan was three, my father asked my mom for a divorce. My mother was devastated. But like I said, she was a hot item. So the suitors came a-calling.
I can't say I was a fan. One laughed like a hyena. One was so heartsick with love for her, his longing made everyone embarrassed for him, my mother included. There were others, also memorable.
Do you remember the man who whipped out a ventriloquist doll at Benihana's?
Yeah. Who the hell was that? But that was one date.
We go into the Benihana's, and he's already seated. And this is family-style seating. So we're sitting with strangers. And we sit down.
And course number one-- you know when they do the little joke and they flip the shrimp into people's mouths? This guy pulls a ventriloquist doll from out under the table, and he's like, give me some of that shrimp! Remember? Brendan was, what, six years old. We were dying. The whole table was like, no. No, this isn't it.
Brendan liked it. He liked it.
Well, he probably stopped liking it once I rained on everyone's parade, but you know. And I remember going to the parking lot with you, and I was like, never again. Mom, that guy, never again.
And it was. Never again, never again.
There was one final suitor, the man my mom would marry when I was a senior in high school. My mother has asked me to refer to him as Mr. X in this story. I didn't trust Mr. X from the start. He seemed to show up out of nowhere with no comprehensible backstory, like he was born out of the ether.
One day, he pulled into our driveway in a rundown car and never left again. The old suitors had been annoying, but they were innocent. Mr. X was different. He put me on edge. He claimed he was an architect, but he never seemed to have any work. And he appeared to have no friends.
I bugged my mom about his past. She explained she'd met him years before when she was pregnant with me, that he'd been part of a crew working on a renovation to the house my parents lived in. Whenever she told this story, I imagined my unborn self kicking from within her body, kicking in his direction, saying, no, not him, no. But I'd never heard the full story of their meeting until now. It happened back when my mother was still married to my father, Bob.
So I was just redoing the house, and I hired him as an architect or a builder, or whatever I thought he was. So here I was. I was pregnant. And he came into the driveway for me to interview him.
He drove in in an old, beat-up car, but he was so adorable, and he was also six years younger than I was. So at that point, that's a big difference between 30 and 24. That's a huge difference. And I interviewed other people, and I decided because he was cheaper, for one-- and I had a little-- he's so cute-- never in my life ever thinking I'd ever cheat on Bob, but you know, imagining.
So I remember in this one point, there was a bathroom in one of the guest rooms. And we were debating putting a skylight in it. And I got in the bathtub to show how high the ceiling had to go, and he got in behind me.
Oh, boy. We're going to have a Ghost moment here.
No. And I just remember thinking, why did he get in so close to me? I don't remember. Why did he do that?
Anyway, the end of the story is that he got in a car accident. A car hit him. He almost lost his leg. So obviously, he took off with the money.
The money she'd already paid him.
Oh, God. I didn't know this part of the story.
So I had to go to court and prove that he had indeed been paid. So that put a very bad taste in my mouth.
When my producers contacted him, Mr. X remembered the story differently. He said the car accident happened before he met my mom and that he didn't run off with the money, that he doesn't know what happened to it. There was no financial grift. He also said he didn't do anything untoward in the bathtub. Still, my mom got a bad feeling from their first interaction. There shouldn't have been a second one, but there was, after she was divorced and had all these suitors peacocking around.
It was 15 years after the bathtub incident. She was picking up my brother from summer camp. Mr. X was picking up his son. She didn't recognize him at first.
I had seen Mr. X in the distance and thought, oh, he's so good-looking.
She learned from a mutual friend that he was going through a divorce. Still, she didn't recognize him as the man from the botched reno. He was just some handsome stranger.
I was so excited he was going to be available. And so when I left, I gave him my phone number. And I said, if you ever want to talk, because it is a very difficult thing to go through, call me. Of course, it's a line.
And he did indeed call me, probably within a week. And that's how we started dating. But I didn't know who he was at the beginning. I mean--
You didn't know that it was the same guy who snuck up behind you in the bathtub?
For a little frottage.
And you know why I didn't know? This is horrible to admit-- because he had a toupée on.
Wait. He had a toupée at the camp?
Yeah. So he had much more hair than I remember him having. And it was darker. He was blonde when I knew him.
And then he came over to me and said, I know who you are. And I said, you look familiar, but I don't know you. And he said, I'm Mr. X. [CHUCKLES] And I slammed him in the chest and said, Jesus Christ, I don't want to talk. I shouldn't want to talk to you. But that's what happened.
My mom told me that on their first real date, she did ask Mr. X why he never paid the subcontractors at my parents' house. She said he told her he'd been in a car accident, was on heavy drugs and hospitalized. She decided to forgive him. I'd never heard about that moment in the bathtub or the missing money.
Listen, what's surprising to me about hearing this full story, you remembered that and thought, you know what, this is the guy to pursue.
I'm going to let it go. Just forget about it. Yep.
No red flags were waving around?
Of course they were.
No further comment. [LAUGHS]
Before Mr. X, my mom was super social. When my parents were married, our house was like Studio frickin' 54. They had these awesome dinner parties where everybody looked nice, and my mom would serve this Martha Stewart-level cuisine with ease and panache that really impressed me as a kid. I remember going to sleep to the sound of people clinking glasses, enjoying each other's company.
When she got together with Mr. X, though, her life started to narrow. People didn't really come by our house much anymore. My sense is that Mr. X made people uncomfortable. Though he presented OK, in conversation he was gruff and socially awkward, a wild animal in deck shorts.
In public, he treated strangers badly-- barking at waiters, yelling at gas station attendants. In private, it was worse. He was clingy and possessive with my mother, cutting her down with hurtful comments.
The drinking stopped being social. Dinners were served on a tray in front of Fox News, the volume blaring, with him hollering for more. I graduated college still not understanding what the hell my mom saw in this man or why she'd let him come between us.
What were other positive things that drew you to Mr. X in the beginning?
I had a partner. I was up at Candlewood Lake, and everything was husband and wives, or boyfriends and girlfriends.
Candlewood Lake is where my mom was living at this point.
I had somebody that I was proud to be seen with, and he was a so-called architect.
OK, so he was handsome. He was available as a partner.
Good sex partner, good sex partner.
Sorry. It's true.
Let me just digest that. OK, but you just really didn't want to be alone, it sounds like.
I didn't like being alone, but I don't think I got married so I wouldn't be alone.
I drilled into my mom about this. She said it was as simple as her wanting someone handsome on her arm. Everyone was coupled. She wanted something for herself.
Why him, though? Because you had all these other offers. Why him?
Well, I guess because he didn't offer.
Well, how did you get engaged?
I told him we were getting married.
Oh, god, it was you? You were the motor behind this? My life is coming undone right here in the living room. You asked for his hand in marriage?
No, I did not ask. I told him that we might just as well get married, period.
Romantic. And what did he say?
So this speech I gave at my mother's wedding that made her so upset, I remember her complaining about it to strangers, people at the grocery store, airline stewards for over a decade. If a waitress said something nice about mothers and daughters spending time together, she'd be like, ha, you should have heard how she talked about me at my wedding.
I thought I was going to get a how wonderful my mother was growing up and how happy I was to see her happy, but what I remember about that speech is it was more about the negative things that I did in my life, like, i.e., smoking-- at my wedding. And I remember standing there, and my heart just sunk. And I just thought, oh, my god, she really hates me.
That's what she heard, but it's not what I remember saying. Here's where I admit that my speech was actually a poem written by me. I was super into poetry as a teenager, poetry as homage. When my best friend moved away, for example, I wrote her an ode that her mother had professionally calligraphied and framed, and that our school asked me to set to music and perform at assembly.
For better or for worse, my visions of myself as a great American writer were clearly being indulged. So when my mom asked me to say something at her wedding, I cracked open my diary and set about writing something major, something so revealing it would cause the ground to crack beneath the altar or inspire someone to rise from the pews and speak out against their marriage, to make the whole thing stop there and then. I really wanted that. In preparation for this conversation with my mom, I dug the poem out. Neither of us had seen it in 30 years.
I am looking at a piece of paper that has 1, 2, 3, 4-- like, seven stanzas on it. "Wedding Day Poem for My Mother."
She walks through realms of habituated darkness. And can you see the tumble stones that mar her rocky path? She is pushing, she is pulling, she is moving through the darkness. And oh, the road is long, and every breath feels like her last. O, Mother, Mother, Mother, behind my lids I see you smiling at the bow within a boat above the sea.
In retrospect, there's no chance anyone understood this fucking poem. I'll skip ahead a bit.
Other times I see you and often you are lonely, standing by our counter with a cigarette in hand.
There it is, the cigarette of my mother's discontent.
And in my head I hear you wishing body beyond boundaries, somewhere another place, another time, another land. Mother, the time has come for laying down roots.
Right here, halfway through the poem, something weird occurs. My tone shifts in a way I don't remember at all.
No longer do I see you glancing out beyond our window, wishing yourself other places very far from here. I think you found contentment. I think you've found belonging. I think you have found a refuge where safety subdues fear.
Why had my mom given me such hell over this thing? The poem wasn't incendiary, nor was it damning of my mother. If anything, it seemed to wish her well. Here are the last lines.
Look no more out the window. Look no more through the door. Look not beyond horizon. It's not foreign anymore.
You found what you've been wanting. Your roots grow deep and true. You found a soul to worship and someone who loves you too.
OK. The ending was good.
But I will say that at that point, I probably wasn't listening anymore. And that's why I didn't hear the positiveness of it. You no longer have to look. You can go out and be happy with this person that's going to smoke with you. I wasn't going to be alone in this dark age of sin. It's negative to me.
Yeah. Yeah, the beginning is definitely negative still.
OK, so for me that's painful to hear, because I was really acknowledging how much you were struggling. And to me, that was what I was trying to do with the beginning, was acknowledge everything that you were going through that was so, so hard.
I could see that. You tell me that, and I can understand it. I'm sorry that I didn't hear the positiveness in it.
I accept your apology. Thank you.
[CHUCKLES] [SIGHS] Oh, phew.
I probably owe my mom an apology as well. I mean, now that I'm rereading it for the first time since the wedding, I get why she was so upset and hurt. It's a pretty dark picture to present of someone on their wedding day. I also get how she couldn't hear the nice things I was saying. Frankly, I didn't remember at all writing the end with that much compassion toward my mom and graciousness toward Mr. X, but hearing it, I do remember feeling that way.
We were dealing with hard things as a family before my mom got remarried. My brother Brendan had gotten really sick. He basically moved into the Yale New Haven Children's Hospital when he was 10 years old because he was seizing uncontrollably. His heart would stop out of nowhere. It was a terrifying time.
Mr. X was intolerant of everyone, but he was gentle with my brother, kind. He helped calm my mom down. I know this meant a lot to her and also to Brendan, especially because our father was sort of checked out emotionally from what was going on. I do remember thinking, this is a thing to hold on to here. This is his saving grace.
I wish I'd made things simpler for my mom back then. I wish I could have said more clearly, I'm worried about you. But anger is the teenage version of worry, and I was very angry. My mom wouldn't tolerate me saying negative things about her partner, so I bottled them inside, which made me snippy and resentful.
I stopped being nice to my mom. I stopped being light and silly with her. And as it turns out, I had reason to be worried.
Two days after the wedding, at the age of 49, my mom had a massive stroke. There had been signs she wasn't well on her wedding day already. And in the days following her hospitalization I developed a theory that her body, not her mind, knew that the marriage was a mistake. I ran this by my mom.
I think that's true. I mean, why was I sweating so much? Why was I-- I think it's true.
I knew. I knew when I was buying my dress. I knew when I wasn't as happy. I do believe that I anticipated this awfulness ahead of time.
In your body?
In every fiber.
Oh, jeez. I mean, I think to me that's heartbreaking to hear, because that's what I thought was happening.
Oh, no. I'm just going to start crying.
That's all right. You can cry, Mom. It's all right.
OK, I'm crying, so put that in. OK, so I should have called off the wedding. And I knew that, because I was just overwhelmed with everything, end of story.
I entered this conversation with a bunch of questions from my mother, but it was coming down to one.
How come you didn't listen to your guts? I think there were a lot of moments where you could have, and you didn't. Were you raised to defer to men, or?
I was raised that I knew nothing. I mean, I was always wrong.
You were raised to believe you knew nothing?
Because you're a woman?
My mother told me this. So my mother was very domineering. And she made me believe that I was worthless and everything else. And so when I married Mr. X, I think that came back to haunt me, all my negativity against myself. And I think I didn't listen to myself because I couldn't be right. I couldn't be right.
That's so wild to hear. Because when I was little, my mom was the most capable person-- physically, socially, financially, a total financial whiz, the best dressed, the best looking, the best driver, the most fun, all of these fantastic things. And she had a real reputation still among my friends in school. Yeah, it's emotional to think of. Among my friends in school, it was just like, how everyone looked up to Linda Maum.
Well, to me this is all very sad. Because, again, it goes back to my mother-- and I hate doing this-- going back to my mother and blaming my mother for some of the things I became.
And she was a huge smoker, if I'm remembering correctly.
Oh, giant, giant, giant. I was so angry at myself for being a smoker. I just didn't want to smoke, and then you made it a--
So I hit a nerve?
My mom also had one main question for me.
Why did you dislike me so much as a teenager? You kind of have answered that, really, with all the things that were going on.
But do you want to stop there and let me answer it?
Sure, if you have-- yeah.
I have additional--
I'm going to bristle at the word "dislike" because I actually liked you a lot, and I looked up to you in a lot of ways. What I could not stand was that you let yourself be walked all over by lesser men, by men specifically, but also men that either didn't seem to deserve you or were actually bad people that weren't respected. You really were such a strong-- you want to say something?
Yeah, I want to know what men they were. I thought it was just Mr. X. I mean, I don't remember anybody.
Out of respect for my father-- I'm still grieving. He just passed. I don't want to talk too much about my dad, but my father did not always treat you with a great amount of respect. So I do include him in some of the men that I feel you were subservient to.
What I saw growing up in Greenwich, Connecticut in the '80s and '90s when Greenwich was truly the bedroom town of Wall Street, what I saw was a lot of vivacious men who got to go somewhere else all day long and come home to children that were bathed and these beautiful women that were their wives-- put out fresh flowers, had dinner out. And the man just came and put his feet under the table, ate the food, and then got to go take a load off in a study. And so growing up, I was like, well, I'll be my dad. I'll be the man. I want to come home and have dinner at the table. I want to drive a cool car to work.
And so something I bristled against with you is at a certain point, you were taking on so much, and it didn't necessarily seem to be bringing you joy. And Mr. X came into the picture. And in the beginning, I think he did-- he seemed to really worship you. But certainly, as the years went by, I saw a man who demanded to be served and did not fetch as much as his own ice cubes. And that made me really angry at you. I wanted you to stand up for yourself.
Well, I think it's-- in my mind it was dislike of me because of the way you talked to me and the way you avoided me. I could never see it any other way. Your tone of voice, I mean, I don't know how it could understand that that was because of my lack of respect for myself.
Yeah. No, I don't think you could have. I mean, I was a B.
My mom's got a point here. I was sending mixed signals. I loved her. I was mean to her. I wanted her to be a feminist baddie who kicked out Mr. X, but I also benefited from her commitment to homemaking-- the awesome dinners, her driving me around.
It was confusing. I was confusing. But I was clear on one thing, Mom. You chose him over us. You kept on choosing him.
But one night last October, she made a different choice. In the kitchen of the house that Mr. X had designed to look art deco in style, but instead came out looking like a White Castle burger joint, my mom fell and broke her back. Though it was early in the evening, Mr. X was too drunk to help her. She lay on the floor for hours. Finally, he brought her her cell phone so she could call an ambulance herself.
When I was on that floor, I swore I was going to do everything I could to get rid of him.
She was hospitalized for months, unable to walk. Before the accident, I'd almost given up on my mom, but now she told me that she'd reached a turning point. She gave me power of attorney to fight in court on her behalf to evict Mr. X.
For months, I went everywhere with legal paperwork in case I was called into court. It was hard, and it was ugly. It was the hardest thing I've ever done in my life, actually. But we won.
Mr. X left the house in an unholy state. I spent weeks cleaning up after him, boxing up his possessions. My mom came home from the hospital. My brother and his wife moved in with their cat, who took a particular liking to my mom.
I didn't know how complicated it was going to be to get about. And at that point, I didn't know you were going to be so instrumental in doing it. Because of the amount of time you spent down here, I realized how much you cared about me. Until then, I really didn't know. I didn't.
Mr. X drove us apart, and kicking him out is what brought us back together. It's a strange thing to rally around, but this is where we are. My mom is 79. I'm nearly 50. We have the rest of our lives to catch up on what we've missed.
Courtney Maum. Her latest novel is called Alan Opts Out. Dana Chivvis produced this story.
We did reach out to Mr. X. And he told us he's designed hundreds of houses. He had lots of friends. He says he never left any house in any kind of disrepair in his life.
Coming up, a man goes back to the job of his teenage dreams to see what is the same and what is gone forever with the passage of time. That's in a minute on Chicago Public Radio when our program continues.