Read Online Nicole Kidman: A Kind of Life by James L. Dickerson - Free Book Online
Authors: James L. Dickerson
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other family members and sought adventures that he could enjoy alone. Mary Lee was a little bit like that herself. Each time they moved to a new city, she sought out the local playhouse and volunteered to participate in any way that was needed. At one point, she even established her own dramatic group. Once she saw that Tom enjoyed a rich fantasy world, she encouraged him to mimic his favorite television characters.
By the time Tom got used to exploring his neighborhood in Syracuse, the family moved to Ottawa, Canada, where Tom got interested in sports, especially skating. Mary Lee was happy to see him engage in extracurricular activities because it became apparent soon after he started school that he was not going to be a good student, at least not academically. What the family did not know then—but later discovered—was that Tom had a learning disorder called dyslexia. Simple reading was a nightmare for him.
The Mapother family lived in Ottawa longer than it had lived anyplace else, thus allowing the children to grow into a comfortable routine with neighborhood friends and classmates, but what fate gave with one hand, it took away with another. When Tom was twelve, Thomas and Mary Lee set the children down and explained to them that the marriage simply was not working out. They announced plans to get a divorce. After that stunning admission, Thomas took Tom outside to play baseball, probably to distract him, but it only served to alienate him from a world that he no longer saw as safe and secure.
Tom was devastated, along with his sisters. Things had been going so well. He could not understand how his family could fall apart so quickly. His perception of family, indeed his perception of gender roles, was altered in an instant. What he remembers most about that year are the voluminous tears that flowed.
After the divorce, Mary Lee took the children and moved to Louisville, Kentucky, where she and Thomas had first began their life’s journey. It was not a glamorous homecoming, for she had little money and had to move her children into a low-rent house, the best she could afford on a sales clerk’s salary.
“After a divorce, you feel so vulnerable,” Tom told Christopher Connelly in a 1986 interview for Rolling Stone . “And traveling the way I did, you’re closed off a lot from other people. I didn’t express a lot to people where I moved . . . I didn’t feel like they’d understand me. I was always warming up, getting acquainted with everyone. I went through a period, after the divorce, of really wanting to be accepted, wanting love and attention from people. But I never really seemed to fit in anywhere.”
Growing up, Tom had male friends, but he later admitted that he found it easier to trust females. That attitude is due, in part at least, to the fact that after the divorce he grew up in a household in which he was the only male. When he needed comforting and understanding—and for a pre-teen boy that is fairly often—it always was offered by the females in his life. As a result, his adolescent concept of “maleness” derived from his still evolving concept of self.
By the time he was fourteen, Tom had some serious issues to resolve, both personal and educational. He was not doing well because of his reading problems and his mother did not earn enough money to enroll him in the type of private school where he could get specialized attention. In addition, he was having a difficult time envisioning where he would fit in as an adult.
The solution to all of his problems, or so it seemed at the time, was to become a Catholic priest. With that in mind, in the fall of 1976 he enrolled in St. Francis’s Seminary, a Franciscan order located near Cincinnati. There he would get an education and prepare for a vocation as a priest.
Life changed radically for Tom at St. Francis’s. Now, instead of being surrounded entirely by females, he was in a female-free environment. He slept in a dormitory with
By the time Tom got used to exploring his neighborhood in Syracuse, the family moved to Ottawa, Canada, where Tom got interested in sports, especially skating. Mary Lee was happy to see him engage in extracurricular activities because it became apparent soon after he started school that he was not going to be a good student, at least not academically. What the family did not know then—but later discovered—was that Tom had a learning disorder called dyslexia. Simple reading was a nightmare for him.
The Mapother family lived in Ottawa longer than it had lived anyplace else, thus allowing the children to grow into a comfortable routine with neighborhood friends and classmates, but what fate gave with one hand, it took away with another. When Tom was twelve, Thomas and Mary Lee set the children down and explained to them that the marriage simply was not working out. They announced plans to get a divorce. After that stunning admission, Thomas took Tom outside to play baseball, probably to distract him, but it only served to alienate him from a world that he no longer saw as safe and secure.
Tom was devastated, along with his sisters. Things had been going so well. He could not understand how his family could fall apart so quickly. His perception of family, indeed his perception of gender roles, was altered in an instant. What he remembers most about that year are the voluminous tears that flowed.
After the divorce, Mary Lee took the children and moved to Louisville, Kentucky, where she and Thomas had first began their life’s journey. It was not a glamorous homecoming, for she had little money and had to move her children into a low-rent house, the best she could afford on a sales clerk’s salary.
“After a divorce, you feel so vulnerable,” Tom told Christopher Connelly in a 1986 interview for Rolling Stone . “And traveling the way I did, you’re closed off a lot from other people. I didn’t express a lot to people where I moved . . . I didn’t feel like they’d understand me. I was always warming up, getting acquainted with everyone. I went through a period, after the divorce, of really wanting to be accepted, wanting love and attention from people. But I never really seemed to fit in anywhere.”
Growing up, Tom had male friends, but he later admitted that he found it easier to trust females. That attitude is due, in part at least, to the fact that after the divorce he grew up in a household in which he was the only male. When he needed comforting and understanding—and for a pre-teen boy that is fairly often—it always was offered by the females in his life. As a result, his adolescent concept of “maleness” derived from his still evolving concept of self.
By the time he was fourteen, Tom had some serious issues to resolve, both personal and educational. He was not doing well because of his reading problems and his mother did not earn enough money to enroll him in the type of private school where he could get specialized attention. In addition, he was having a difficult time envisioning where he would fit in as an adult.
The solution to all of his problems, or so it seemed at the time, was to become a Catholic priest. With that in mind, in the fall of 1976 he enrolled in St. Francis’s Seminary, a Franciscan order located near Cincinnati. There he would get an education and prepare for a vocation as a priest.
Life changed radically for Tom at St. Francis’s. Now, instead of being surrounded entirely by females, he was in a female-free environment. He slept in a dormitory with
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