Jenna Bush Hager, Barbara Bush talk ‘I Loved You First’ and parenting
Sisters Jenna Bush Hager and Barbara Piece Bush talk with USA TODAY’s Ralphie Aversa about their new children’s book “I Loved You First” and more.
The end of Maria Shriver’s 25-year marriage knocked her to the floor, the way gut-wrenching heartbreak does. How can you stand when your very foundation has been washed away? Shriver, now 69, sobbed in a hotel room while grappling with Arnold Schwarzenegger’s infidelity and revelation he fathered a son during an affair that spurred prolific headlines in 2011.
Shriver fell for the Austrian body-builder-turned actor (who’d later turn Governator) at the Robert F. Kennedy Tennis Tournament in 1977. Mr. Universe became her world when they exchanged vows in 1986 at a Catholic church in Hyannis, Massachusetts, just a couple of miles from the Kennedy compound. The bride’s cousin, Caroline Kennedy, served as maid of honor.
Schwarzenegger and the daughter of Special Olympics founder Eunice Kennedy Shriver welcomed four children during their marriage: Katherine, now 35; Christina, now 33; Patrick, now 31 and Christopher, now 27. They spilt in 2011 after Shriver learned of her husband’s affair with their housekeeper which resulted in the birth of Joseph Baena, now 27.
Shriver remembers the collapse of her marriage in her latest book, “I Am Maria: My Reflections and Poems on Heartbreak, Healing, and Finding Your Way Home” (available now).
“Through my poetry,” she writes, “I’ve found, and am still finding, a woman who was terrified of not being able to live up to her family’s legacy — scared of not being big enough, scared of not being good enough, a good-enough daughter, a good-enough sister, a good-enough wife, a good-enough mother, a good-enough journalist. A good-enough human being.”
She also revisits the need to construct a new identity following her separation. In that hotel room, she encouraged herself, “Maria, this doesn’t have to be the end of you. It can’t be the end of you,” she writes. “Make it a new beginning of you.”
Naturally, the Peabody award-winning journalist began with questions.
“I started asking, ‘When did this start? When did you first feel heartbreak? When did you first feel lost? When did you first acknowledge that love was tied to accomplishment?’ And I just went back so that I could go forward. I tried to peel apart every single thing and make peace for it, try to understand it and let it go,” she tells USA TODAY.
She enlisted the help of therapists, shamans, mediums, psychics, candles, crystals, plant medicine and self-improvement books. She practiced meditation, Pilates and yoga.
“I was hard-working, diligent and determined to remake myself into a more tender-hearted, vulnerable, stronger version of myself,” she says. “I wanted to have a specific kind of relationship with Arnold. I wanted my children to have the relationship they wanted to have with him, separate from anything, my voice in their head. I had a specific idea of the kind of person I wanted to be, and I just worked towards that.”
Shriver’s poetry allowed her to trace the effects of her upbringing in a family in which, as she writes, “you didn’t sit around and talk about your feelings. You went out into the world and had an impact.”
“I certainly was raised with, ‘You have to go out and do something big and you better do it quick,’” Shriver says. She thought her broadcast journalism career would be the ticket. “But of course it’s not,” she says. Then she thought, “‘Oh, I’ll do the First Lady (of California) thing. That’ll be big, that’ll be powerful. Everybody will say that was the best first lady ever!’” But that wasn’t the answer, either. “What I’ve come to learn (is despite) whatever anybody else says it’s what you feel on the inside, do you feel seen? Do you feel connected? Do you feel good in your own life, in your own skin? Do you feel loved? These are the things that actually make you feel big, right?”
Today Shriver knows herself to be “kind-hearted, loving, fun, funny, strong, fierce, loved woman,” she says, “someone who wants to make our world better, to see others, understand others, have compassion for others, and have the same for myself. I feel my feet are on the ground. I feel grounded in the love of my children, my friends, my family, and I feel deeply, deeply grateful,”
That sense of self derived internally, Shriver says, is something she talks “non-stop” to her four children about, including Patrick, who’s gained fame as protein shake-pounding finance bro Saxon Ratliff on the current season of “The White Lotus.”
Because “even though he may be having a moment, everybody else at the table is, in their own ways, also having a moment,” Shriver says. “They are loved unconditionally, regardless of what they do in life, (it) has nothing to do with the love that is there for them. They are a priority. They are seen. They are distinct from one another but grounded in their loyalty to one another. Moments come and moments go. But what doesn’t is the love that is there for them. The joy that’s there for them. The friendship, the family, the certainty that they can come home at any time and sit on the couch and be enough.”
