Maria Shriver on meeting heartbreak with poetry

You might know Maria Shriver because of her famous family, or because of her famous former husband. Maybe you know her as a former first lady of California, a network news journalist, or a women’s health advocate. In fact, you may think you know all about Maria Shiver. But you don’t, she says, because until recently, she didn’t even know who she was herself.

“I got separated, and I found myself in my mid-50s thinking like, Okay, what do I do now? Where am I going? Who am I?” she said. “And I just sat down and looked out the window and started writing, and out it came.”

What came out? Poetry.

From “Fragments of Me”
They are everywhere.
The fragments of me.
In the closet, in the drawer, in the ceiling looking down.
The fragments of me are all over the land.

“People say like, ‘Oh, poetry … You know, I don’t know about poetry.’ And I’m like, why not? Just give it a chance!”

“I Am Maria,” out this week, is an unflinchingly public account of a very private journey. Reading it can feel like intruding on her innermost thoughts.

She admits that she makes herself vulnerable by making it public: “And I’m scared about it a little bit.”

She begins with her life as a child, in the Kennedys’ shadow. “I, you know, didn’t want to go through my life being asked which Kennedy I was,” Shriver said. “I wanted to figure out who I was aside from the hair and the teeth that everybody just kept pointing to.”

She was just 12 when her uncle, Robert F. Kennedy, was gunned down. She was even younger when her other uncle, President John F. Kennedy, was assassinated in Dallas.

From “Dallas”
That word pulls the trigger,
Rips through my house like the wind.
I said, one day I’ll go to you,
Yell at the air
At the building,
At anyone who was there.
Years passed,
The pain didn’t.

She said, “It wasn’t something that anybody really talked about, so I just didn’t talk about it, either.”

“Nobody asked how you were doing?” I asked.

“Not that I’m aware of. I grew up in a family that soldiered on. And I think there’s a lot that’s admirable about that, but I think there’s a lot that then you never get to know about yourself.”

It seems as if before she was running through the forest of her big life. And now, at age 69, she’s stopping at individual trees – moments, she writes:

From “Those Moments”
You look at those moments like little stones.
You turn them upside down and right side up.
You stare at them.
Look for what you saw, and what you missed.

One of those stones glittered with Hollywood magic: her marriage to Arnold Schwarzenegger, later California’s governor. “I had been with Arnold since I was 21,” she said. “I had gone straight from my parents to him.”

Years later, though, that once-glittering stone pulled her underwater when the two divorced.

From “The Public Square”
Shame filled my body
Humiliation filled my soul
Every inch of me being crumbled.

And that’s where she says she’ll leave it. “I don’t believe in kind of talking behind other people’s backs in public; it’s just never been my jam,” Shriver said. “And I’m in a good place with Arnold, and that’s really important to me.”

It’s been at St. Monica Catholic Church in Los Angeles where her faith has gotten her through many a challenge. “I’ve yelled at God – I don’t know anybody who hasn’t – so I just take my focus off of Him and move to Mary,” she laughed.

Maria Shriver, with correspondent Lee Cowan.

CBS News

She minored in Theology at Georgetown, and actually considered being a nun. “And then I heard that, you know, they didn’t have sex, and they had to take a vow of poverty. I’m like, I’m out!”

She eventually landed in the secular world of journalism … first here at CBS, then later at NBC. It was high-profile. In the late ’80s there weren’t a lot of female news anchors – certainly not pregnant ones. “And I was anchoring with Gareth Utley, esteemed journalist. And he had never sat next to somebody who was throwing up during commercial breaks,” she said.

Shriver forged ahead in a man’s world, much the way she says her mother, Eunice Kennedy Shriver, tried to do as well. “She was formidable. She was fierce. Yet she grew up in a family where the men were the focus – they were the first row, so to speak.”

I asked, “I got a sense that you just didn’t feel like you were kind of seen, truthfully, I guess?”

“Yeah. I don’t think – I think my mother, you know, was focused on her work, she was focused on her brothers,” Shriver said. “I have no doubt she loved me. I have no doubt she wanted to push me 24/7, and she did.”

“Did that experience change the way you decided to be a mom?”

“Oh, yeah, 100%,” Shriver replied. “My door was always open. I just hope that my kids know that they were – makes me cry! – but you know, the priority of my life. And I hung with them, and I had time with them and time for them.”

Eunice Shriver died in 2009; her father, Sargent Shriver, just a few years later, after a long battle with Alzheimer’s. Ever since, Shriver, who grew up in Camelot, found that that disease was the dragon she wanted to slay.

In a 2017 Congressional hearing on National Institutes of Health funding, Shriver testified, “Every 66 seconds, another brain will develop Alzheimer’s disease, and two-thirds of those brains belong to women.”

She founded the Women’s Alzheimer’s Movement at the Cleveland Clinic, and pushed the Biden administration for a comprehensive plan to fund research into all kinds of women’s health issues.

“We, as half the population, deserve answers,” Shriver said, “not just on Alzheimer’s, but on endometriosis, on menopause, on migraines, on osteoporosis, on MS.”

She has used her public voice for causes all her life. But her poetry, she says, is her private voice – and this time, Maria Shiver’s cause is herself.

“Life hasn’t turned out exactly the way I thought,” she said. “But I sit here today in love with my life, deeply grateful. I’m at peace. And I really spent a lot of years not at peace. Some people would say, who know me well, ‘You’re not at peace. You’re restless and you’re driven’ and all that sort of stuff. But I’m really content with my life and I’m proud of myself, finally.”

READ AN EXCERPT: “I Am Maria” by Maria Shriver

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Story produced by Reid Orvedahl. Editor: George Pozderec.