Not everyone loved her later phases, like her 2012 hard dance album “MDNA,” probably best experienced at a foam party on Ibiza, but as a middle-aged mother who liked shaking off the week in the club from time to time, I remained by her side. And she poured deep emotion into those songs too, whether she was in love or angrily out of it. Relationships proved hard for her. “I found myself as a wife, in both of my marriages, being as I think everybody is: You try to please another person, and sometimes you find you are not being who you really are,” she told me. “That’s the struggle, I suppose, of being in a marriage or a relationship, especially as a woman. We often think we have to play down our accomplishments or make ourselves smaller, so we don’t make other people feel intimidated or less than.”
As she grew older, she had young lovers, sometimes 30 years her junior. She experienced joy and wild abandon with her children. But she had two biological children and adopted four from Malawi, one of Africa’s poorest countries, amid a media frenzy; the country’s rules required foreign parents to live there for a year, which she had not (the country’s Supreme Court decided in her favor). Her youngest two children are 6-year-old girls, whom she adopted in 2017. She was aware of the doubling effect of children, the way they reflect back your strengths and deficiencies. “If somebody said, ‘O.K., you’ve got to give one thing up,’ I would say, ‘O.K., I’ll stop working,’ ” she said. “But they like that I work. They love to come visit me and watch me work. My older children, my son, he’s a painter, and my daughter’s a dancer and choreographer — I can see how my work has influenced them, though they probably wouldn’t like to say so. I like it. It makes me proud.”
This was a pleasant conversation, a moment of bonding. We were both older mothers devoted to our very young children, and managing to do it all despite the challenge of constant messiness and too little time (and with the benefit of hired help). She said: “I couldn’t survive if I couldn’t be creative as an artist, but in the back of my mind, I’m always thinking, O.K., what is my son doing right now? What is my daughter doing right now? I haven’t spoken to David yet. I’ve got to be there for them. When is her show? I’ve got to make sure I don’t have things planned. My head is in a whirl.” More professional women were choosing similarly — sow oats early, build a career, have kids as late or later than nature intended — but mothering six kids at 60 and, you know, being Madonna, took the trend to an extreme. She liked hanging out with other moms who had little kids, like her friend of 30 years, Rosie O’Donnell, who also has a 6-year-old. “She’s much, much, much more strict than I am,” O’Donnell said. “They could really be nightmares, and her kids are lovely, wonderful, beautiful kids.”
Madonna was determined to be the best mother she could be, but because she was Madonna, sometimes she could be hard-core about it. She took the responsibility seriously — it was almost a matter of reversing the historical record, making good on the promise of her own mother before she was snatched away. Madonna’s mother, also named Madonna, died from breast cancer when she was 5, sparking her survivor instinct and fathomless ambition. In her songs, she returns again and again to the loss. I noticed that on the cover of “Madame X,” she resembled Frida Kahlo, with arched eyebrows and a thin smile, and the title was written over her lips in black handwriting. The writing looked like stitches, and reminded me of an indelible autobiographical image from a 1989 Madonna video: a little girl attending a funeral and walking up to her mother’s corpse, then realizing that the mortuary had stitched her lips together — a ghoulish final silencing.
In “Truth or Dare,” Madonna lay on her mother’s grave and swooned for the camera; she was later attacked for exploiting the death. Today she talked about owning a particular Kahlo painting, “My Birth,” which was hanging upstairs. Kahlo was being born to a mother from whom she felt disconnected, and you could see Kahlo’s face coming out of the birth canal while her mother threw a white blanket over her own face to avoid bearing witness to her daughter’s birth. Kahlo made the painting after her mother died of breast cancer, too. “I love it,” Madonna told me. “I love how honest it is.” She liked showing it to guests. It helped her push some of them away.
from Best News Viral http://bit.ly/2WPGJ9S
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