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Second: Love yourself enough to know that as a woman, and especially as a mother, you have to take care of yourself first, before you can take care of others. We can get swept up in tornadoes of activity, trying to conquer the storms in our lives. Instead, I’ve had to learn for myself that I need to go to the eye of the storm, the quiet center, to be able to see clearly and get perspective on why everything is spinning out of control around me. This usually means really taking the time to try to still your mind and listen to your intuition. For most women I know, as it was for me, this seems like a selfish approach to life. We can get caught in the trap of feeling guilty
about not putting the needs of our children, our husbands, or even our employees or boss before our own. It’s not true that it’s “selfish.” It’s called “self-love.” It took me two crises to accept that ignoring my intuition and suppressing what I knew to be true for myself only resulted in a drawn-out and painful process for myself and for my children as well. The biblical golden rule directs us: “Love your neighbor as yourself.” What I forgot about that powerful scripture is the part about loving “yourself.” You have to love yourself to truly know how to love others. It’s how you learn to love.

Children need a healthy mother to create a healthy home. The airplane-emergency metaphor holds a deep truth: “First put on your oxygen mask and then assist your child.” I once asked an airline attendant why this was the direction. She told me that if the airplane ever lost altitude quickly, it would only take seven to fifteen seconds to lose consciousness. Obviously, if you have blacked out, your ability to help your kids is zero.

When it comes to looking back, clarity is painful, but it is the only way to healing. It takes forgiveness, as well. I wish so much that my sweet Michael had been able to give himself the chance to look back to see with the clarity that only comes with some time.

Michael went through another rehab program in the fall of 2007. It was leaked to the tabloids about a week after my divorce papers had been signed and while I was commuting from my Utah home to LA to be on
Dancing with the Stars
. I felt devastated and worried that Mike had to have his private life revealed to the public. Somehow, my son found out about the
tabloid report and was horribly humiliated. I missed two rehearsals to go to be with my son. We talked for hours, through the night. He said he wasn’t sure he could ever deal with some of his problems, but he promised that he would try. The hardest thing for me to do was to go back and finish my weeks on
Dancing with the Stars
. Learning the quickstep seemed so trivial, considering that my son was in pain. My mother would always tell me, “A mother is only as happy as her least happy child.” And she was right. I had to strive to appear happy on almost every show. I would drop to my knees and pray that God would see me through. All I wanted to do was call it quits and gather my kids around me, but I had to follow through on my commitment to my contract with the show. I managed to smile, but my heart was splintering day by day in my chest. One of the obligations of making it into the finals on the show was that all three couples were to fly to New York and appear on
Good Morning America
the next day. The producers gracefully let me out of that red-eye plane trip and appearance so that I could be with my son again following the competition.

My son had a couple of clean and hope-filled months in early 2008, after his release from his rehab program. I was so happy to have him back home with me. He found a job that spring with a music event planner. One afternoon he was working to
lift trusses and hang lights and pulled the muscles in his back. A coworker drove him to a doctor, who checked him out and sent him away with a prescription for painkillers. He filled the prescription before I could even get home that evening. I took them away from him, but he had already taken two. That was all it took. A month later, I could tell my son was hooked on prescription medications and had found ways to get them. My brothers and I were committed to doing an Osmond fiftieth anniversary tour to sold-out venues across the UK and some of Asia. They had already included my name in all of the advertising. Mike was going to go with me to help out onstage and to keep an eye on the younger children, but I knew in my heart I couldn’t have him go. One afternoon, I arranged for a rehab center to pick up my son at one of our rehearsals. I had a strong feeling that he would run away if he thought I knew he was using drugs again. Crying, I gathered all of my brothers before the rehearsal and asked them to help me. When Mike walked into rehearsal that afternoon, all eight of my brothers formed a circle around him. Mike knew instantly what was going on, but he respected his uncles enough to not fight his way out of the circle.

One of my brothers spoke for the rest. “Michael, you’re our nephew. We love you, but you are lying to your mother about your addictions. We know that you’re using drugs again. We all want you to get better. You’re not going to be going on tour with us. You’re going back to rehab today. There is a car here waiting to take you.”

I could see the anger in my son’s eyes as I hugged him good-bye.
He didn’t hug me back. I wasn’t sure how I was going to leave, but I knew he would be safe. I wouldn’t have been able to protect him if he had gone with us. There would be too much danger with so many opportunities and so many strangers around who could possibly facilitate his addictions. My daughter Rachael offered to stay home from the tour to be close by for Michael, and I checked in daily by phone from the road. Every day, the news of progress seemed better and better, which made it a little bit easier for me to be away. After a couple of weeks out of the country, I returned to a son who looked so much more like the healthy boy I had known. He was working out with free weights, studying with a tutor, and talking to a great counselor he had there.

A few months later, Donny and I performed a limited-run show at the MGM Grand Hotel in Las Vegas. With the overwhelming success of that show, we were offered a two-year run at the Flamingo Hotel. It was a change that I was ready to make. My life in Utah had run its course, and since both of my parents had passed away by then, I had no strong reason to stay.

When I was growing up, we would always have a family meeting to discuss big life changes that would affect the whole family, like moving to a new location or home. Every family member was allowed to cast a vote as to whether they thought it was a good idea. In the same way, I held a family meeting about moving to Las Vegas with the kids. There wasn’t one “nay” vote in the bunch. Everyone wanted a fresh start. The older kids were done with high school, except for Michael. Jessica and Stephen were already out of the house, with apartments
of their own, and Rachael wanted to work on the Vegas show, so she was happy about the move. The younger four were nervous but excited about the change and living in a whole new area.

Michael was finishing his rehab program in Utah, and when I visited him there one day to get his opinion about relocating to Las Vegas, he made a mature plea to me.

He told me that he wanted to finish his high school education in a real school and not get a GED in the rehab program. I conferred with his counselors, and they felt that Mike would soon be ready to go home anyway. Michael made a promise to me that if I even suspected him of ever doing drugs again I could kick him out of the house and he would live with the consequences of being on his own. It was something we never even had to contemplate because my son made good on his promise.

At age seventeen, Michael came home to become the “man of the family.” He flew to Vegas to help me pick out a house for us to rent until we decided where we would buy. After a full day of looking, we both agreed on the same one, a house in a Vegas suburb about twenty minutes from the Flamingo Hotel, where our show was. When Michael and I opened the door
with my key to the new place, I was overwhelmed with something I had not felt in twenty years. I was free! I was free in a home that I looked forward to making my own, for me and my kids.

Despite the stress that came with moving and starting a new show at the Flamingo, I loved it all, and so did Michael and the other kids. I rented a U-Haul trailer to pull behind the car for the move from Utah to Las Vegas. I told the kids, “Whatever fits in this trailer is what moves with us, so only bring your favorite toys, sports equipment, clothes, books, and things you would miss.” My ex-husband decided he wanted to keep the Utah house and so most of the furniture stayed. I packed some cookware, a big-screen TV for our family room, some furniture that had been passed down from my mother and grandmother, and my favorite books and works of art, which I had collected over the years, including my rare dolls from my collection.

With the help of a couple of my close girlfriends and Rachael, we drove two cars, one towing the trailer, to the new house in Las Vegas. We arrived after midnight and, exhausted, camped out on the floor of one of the kids’ bedrooms on blow-up mattresses. Listening to their sleepy voices talking about how they wanted to set up their bedrooms and how cool the new house was going to be for having birthday parties made me feel so happy and comforted to my core. I knew I had made a wise choice. The next morning, we unloaded the U-Haul before everything baked in the July sun, and took off to the furniture discounters to buy new furniture for our house.
Mike had brought with him his favorite futon couch for his room, but I insisted he have a regular bed as well. The room that we converted into his bedroom was originally a recreation room that came with a sink and a refrigerator. Mike loved this room. It was like his bachelor den, and everything about it made him smile.

He was always the tidiest of my kids, even as a young child. When we were on tour, he would line up his toys on the edge of the bus window. At around age eight, he started collecting exotic insect specimens, from metallic beetles to Malaysian water bugs, which had been preserved and mounted in various shadow boxes. He was fascinated by the bugs’ intricate eyes, their fuzzy pinchers, and the patterns in the design of their wings. You’ve never seen a more artistic display of something so nasty. I was just grateful that they were no longer moving around.

Now, in this room to call his own, he was thrilled to have a refrigerator in which he could keep a carton of juice that no one else had drunk out of without pouring it into a glass. His room was always the only one that was kept in immaculate form. Whenever I would feel overwhelmed by the clutter of four kids under age twelve, I would go and sit in Michael’s room for a bit. His guaranteed neatness would always calm my mind. Mike applied to a performing arts high school in Las Vegas and was accepted for his musical skills, but then he decided that a regular public high school would be better. Even though he loved music, he never thought about making a living as a musician. His first love was textiles, design, and fashion marketing.

It’s not easy to be the “new kid” for your senior year of high school, living in a new city, and focusing on staying clean every single day. He also got a job at a frozen yogurt store. He thought he would be running the register, but he was relegated to mopping the floors, wiping down tables, and sanitizing the handles on the machines. It was humbling, but he told me that it made him really think about how many things go into keeping a business running. Interestingly, he started helping out at home more often, too, doing household chores without having to be asked. He became an excellent influence on the younger kids, often helping them with homework, playing with them in the pool, guiding them through their chores, and even reprimanding them if they spoke to me in a sassy tone of voice.

His next job was at a very trendy clothing store in the Forum Shops at Caesars Palace. He saved his paychecks, only using some of the money to buy clothes to wear to work. On his own, Michael decided that if he was going to have a career in design, he needed to learn to sew. A friend of mine who is an excellent seamstress offered to start Mike off with the basics. Michael went to her home once a week, carrying one of my smaller sewing machines in a case, and worked on a project with her. He never missed a week, unless he was sick. I loved the huge smile on his face when he came home the very first week, showing me the pillowcase he made with perfectly straight seams.

Halfway through his senior year, Michael got in contact with FIDM (Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising) in Los Angeles through an inspiring guidance counselor, Gina.
With Gina’s encouragement, Michael completed all of the applications and the entry projects, letters of recommendation, and portfolio work needed to apply for admission. In his college entrance essay, Mike wrote: “College hasn’t been a goal for me my whole life. I actually laughed at the idea of college until I became a stagehand, setting up the sound, video, and lighting for music groups. I had to lift 200-pound trusses, which is basically a big hunk of metal that holds lights. That’s when I decided that I should do something better with my life. I thought about what I would do if I could wave a magic wand and become anything I wanted. I wanted to become a world-class clothing designer.”

On his eighteenth birthday, Michael and I flew to Los Angeles for his interview with the director of admissions. We talked in the car from the airport to the school as a way to rehearse how he would express his hopes and goals for his college career. He was amazingly eloquent, charming, funny, and focused, and they decided to accept him on the spot.

I sat next to this darling young man and realized all he had accomplished in one year and all by his own willpower. He was graduating from high school with a 3.9 GPA, had held three jobs, passed a driver’s test, and gotten his license, initiated his research into higher education, applied for the college he wanted to attend, and collected all the letters of recommendation, and here we were, with his dreams on the verge of becoming a reality. And, through all of it, Michael had stayed away from drugs. My son was a remarkable boy and on his way to becoming an incredible man.