Michelle and Mary Kay's mother didn't hit it off because as far as Michelle could tell, Mary Schmitz cared more about herself and her husband's career. The kids appeared to be window dressing.
“A Rose Kennedy wannabe,” Michelle said later.
While that could have been true, it was also true that Mary Schmitz was not interested in any of Mary Kay's friends, especially Michelle, whom Mary Kay said her mother found “abrupt and crass.” Mary Schmitz was a righteous and busy woman with no time for children that weren't her own. She was the type of woman who would look past a kid in a room and address her own child: “Don't you think it is time for Michelle to go home?” She didn't say, “Michelle, we have some things we need to do. Do you need a ride home?”
It was something they didn't talk about at first. But in time it was the basis for the bond that only strengthened over time. From the darkness of a shared childhood trauma came the light of their friendship. Michelle and Mary Kay shared a common experience that ensured a unique closeness. Both had been molested by a relative.
“I think back on when we first talked about it,” Michelle later said. “[One of her brothers] molested her, but I don't think he actually had sex with her. I think for her it was the fear and the betrayal from somebody that she loved. It happened. I knew about it. I was ten or eleven years old and dealing with my own.”
Mary Kay told Michelle how as a nine- and ten-year-old she used to search for new places in which she could hide when their parents were away.
“Can you imagine her cowering in some closet praying to God that her brother didn't find her?” Michelle asked later. “And nobody there to protect her! Where the hell were her parents?”
On the campaign trail. Accepting an award. Appearing on television.
Michelle didn't fault John Schmitz as much as she blamed Mary Schmitz. A daughter needs a mother to talk to. John Schmitz was running around Washington, D.C., or Sacramento trying to change the world. Mary Schmitz was yammering on television about the virtues of taking care of children and keeping the home fires burning. The hypocrisy of it all still angered Michelle more than two decades later.
“She's never been accepted by her mother. Never. Mary Kay couldn't even tell her mother what her brother had done at that age. She knew how her mother would react. She knew her mother would probably blame her.”
Mary Kay would later describe Michelle's recollections as an “exaggeration” and dismissed the sexual abuse as nothing more than “fondling.”
“I don't even feel I was violated. Not my body. I was not forced into anything, but when I decided it was wrong, I said no. And guess what? It stopped.”
John Schmitz wasn't home much. But when he was, he always gave the girls a hug and a kiss. He joked with his sons. He made them laugh. He had a way of taking a song and twisting it around and making it his own and his children loved him for it. But no one in the family would argue that he didn't have a favorite. His first daughter, all blond and brown-eyed, was the apple of her father's eye from the first moment he held her. She could sit for hours still and quiet as he read, just to be near him. He called his adoring and most beautiful daughter Mary O'Cake, Mary Cake, finally just Cake. No one else in the family adopted the nickname.
“No one dared to,” Mary Kay said later. “It was something only for my father to say.”
In Mary Kay's eyes, her dad could do no wrong. Her mother was always in the way; always the killjoy.
When John Schmitz became interested in learning more about his genealogical background, he made several trips to Europe. An excited Mary Kay told Michelle one time that through her father's research, he'd discovered that he was related to the Romanian royal family through an illegitimate son of one of the kings.
“Mary Schmitz did not want the story out because it was too embarrassing to the family,” Michelle said later. “She forbade them to talk about it.”
Mary Schmitz was not a demonstrative mother. She was not hovering in the kitchen with a pan of brownies in the oven and a piñata to be finished on the table—not like her eldest daughter would grow up to be before her world would crash. Yet Mary Kay, like any young girl, coveted the attention of her mother. But few saw any.
“I never, ever, in all those years, saw her mother hug or kiss her or show her any type of affection in any way. Ever. I never heard her say I love you. Nothing,” Michelle said later.
To the outside world, the family was golden. John, the oldest, was the all-American, smart and good looking. Joe was overshadowed a bit by John, but he was also bright and political-brochure-ready. Jerry was intelligent, sensitive, and certainly the most caring and protective of Mary Kay. The girls—Mary Kay, Terri, and Liz—were cute, quiet, and relegated to the background.