Discover Top Posts Tagged with #maureen

Im convinced that anyone named Maureen is destined to be either a cutie patootie or insanely cool. I've never met/heard of a Maureen who's neither; look at these icons

#maureen #maureen tucker #moe tucker #maureen o'sullivan #maureen starkey #maureen cox #maureen o'hara #maureen mcgovern #maureen smith #maureen swanson #maureen daly

Just a note on your post and the line "It seems obvious to me that John subconsciously engineered the situation with Cynthia". That may be true but I'm inclined to think it was also the other way round. In one of her books Cynthia claims they never used contraception yet somehow she never got pregnant till 2y in? I think it she engineered it too, possibly semi-subconsciously, to try + keep him. I'm not judging her, ppl do crazy things when theyre in love & that kind of "babytrapping" (I hate that misogynistic term but u know what I mean) was v common in places like Liverpool at the time. There's evidence Maureen may have done something similar to Ringo. Consider the timing: Cynthia told John abt her pregnancy just weeks after Paul definitively dumped Dot. The band was getting famous & she feared she'd lose John if she didn't do something big. Peter Brown is a snobby asshole but he does call Cynthia out on that in his book in a pretty convincing way imo. I don't judge her & I suspect she never admitted to herself that that's what she was doing. She was an interesting mix of woman-of-her-time who was v concerned with respectability (she used to fudge dates to imply she wasnt pregnant when they married) & a new woman who followed her desires (she had sex with John not long after meeting him which was VERY not done for a middle class girl in the late 50s. I dont judge her for that either btw, not fucking teddy boy John would be insanity haha).

In the long run I think she regretted her ploy. The marriage really traumatised her & it's interesting that she never had any more children. She says at the end of her bio that if she had her time over she wouldn't have married John.

I really love this ask and have been rolling it around in my head ever since it came in. Yes, I agree with everything you said.

The truth is that Cynthia had a great deal of spunk to her that's not super obvious on the surface. She admitted in her book John that she would have sex with John in semi public spaces like alleyways and hidden doorways of street buildings and it sounds like it was frequent. I also found it interesting that she straight up said that she bleached her hair and wore short skirts of her own accord in order to get John's attention. When she was brunette he didn't look twice at her; when she bleached her hair suddenly he was interested. After years of claims that John "forced" Cynthia to bleach her hair to look like Brigette Bardot, Cynthia said "No, I did it because I wanted to." And she kept it up after they divorced so she definitely liked the look. Good for her you know?

Cynthia and John had a lot in common. They were both denigrated and disrespected by their opposite-sex relatives which seriously distorted their ability to relate to men and women in their every day lives (Cynthia's father made her eat bone rinds instead of feeding her properly because he was so stuck on her older brothers), they both wanted to create a family so that they could finally feel loved without understanding what that would entail, they both kept the illusion going way past its expiration date because they wanted the trappings of a family more than they wanted the reality of it. They both wanted to be people who could sustain a nuclear family model but it turned out they weren't suited to it. John was bisexual with a strong preference for men, Cynthia ended up in a series of unsuccessful marriages with mundane and uninspiring men until she met her late husband Noel Charles, a Barbadian nightclub owner who was successful in fucking Canada of all places (so you know he had a set of steel balls on him.) The happy marriage to Noel is interesting to me because I think it shows what Cynthia really wanted in a man: someone with a sharp set of teeth but was self possessed and very successful.

I think a lot about the fact that Cynthia was prepared for the single mom life if John turned her down. Like she found out she was pregnant and decided she wanted her son which is so sweet. But she was brave enough to go for it herself which is incredible to me. If she had taken a newborn Julian and gotten on a bus out of Liverpool, I wonder what would have become of the two of them. She had grit and gumption and she had to raise Julian on her own anyway. He's turned out to be a very interesting human being with a good set of values and a lot of personal success, has done some activist work I think. She must have been so proud of him.

I had not known that Maureen may have engineered a pregnancy situation so that she could get Rings to marry her. Definitely not uncommon especially then. I think for her it worked out better, they had a good connection (even if Ringo was a fucking turd in his 20s, that was all four of them though) and even after they divorced they remained close and even dated for a little bit before she died. Their relationship changed and grew but I always had the impression that they remained involved in each other's lives except maybe when Ringo was going through the wringer with his substance issues. I wish there was a biography about her.

It's hard to say about the marriage traumatizing her. I think it did to a certain extent but, well, Cynthia did what millions of women have done over the course of human history. When her man abandoned her and their child, she dusted herself off and kept going. She raised her son and loved him, and everything about Julian reflects what a good mother she was. Cynthia dug deep and found a lot of strength to survive John and her up and down love life until she married Noel. That ain't nothing. She would have gone back and done it differently but we all have moments where we would have done that.

I do think that if Cynthia were alive as a 21st century woman than she would have gone the "single mom by choice" route. She seems to have been much happier when she didn't have to manage a moody cretin for the sake of being married. She raised a successful young man on her own which is one of the most challenging family set ups known to mankind.

When it comes to Cynthia not having more kids...this is very tinfoil hatty but I very much suspect that Cynthia realized that John was not a good guy to have more children with. So I think she got her tubes tied with his money while he was away touring and never told him. He would have been gone for months at a time, plenty of time for her to heal up and blame the scars on something else, if there even were scars. Cynthia was relatively smart with money (or at least as good as any layperson would be) so I think that she saved up and got sterilized or had some other procedure done to ensure she didn't get pregnant again. At least that's what I would have done in her situation!