B00AEDDPVE EBOK (21 page)

Before I was born, my father had worked many, many types of jobs, often two full-time jobs: raising chickens, taxi driver, box factory carpenter, shoe salesman, railroad brakeman, radio ad salesman, real estate broker, cattleman, door-to-door salesman, and then finally an entertainment businessman.

During his army service in England during World War II, he was a sergeant responsible for the construction of aircraft runways. For a time, he was stationed in a shipyard that was close to being bombed out on numerous occasions. My father was a witness to mass destruction and death and returned home with what we now call PTSD—post-traumatic stress disorder. There was no diagnosis or support for the aftereffects of wartime traumas at that time. He had to find his own way of dealing with the memories and repercussions of his years of service. On top of being on “the move” throughout his entire childhood, the stress disorder made it hard for my father to feel settled and safe anywhere. It seemed that he was always aware of potential dangers that might harm his loved ones. Like me, he was always the most at peace when he had all of his children nearby.

The most noticeable long-term effect of all of his early-life responsibility was that my dad was uncomfortable with any unstructured leisure time. In my mother’s journals of 1998, the year my father turned eighty-two, almost every entry contains a mention of the work that filled my father’s day:
“pulled the weeds,” “planted tomatoes,” “cleaned out the basement,” “fixed the VCR,” “painted the hallway,”
and on and on.

When my brothers and I were still children, my father’s “fun” days consisted of teaching us to round up the cattle, weed and plow a garden, repair the dock on the pond, paint the house, or mend barbed wire fences. My parents often used the age-old saying “An idle mind is the devil’s workshop.” Both of them made sure that our minds weren’t left to “idle” for very long. We were encouraged to pursue our interests as individuals, but almost always under the watchful eyes of at least one of my parents.

For my father, sitting on a porch and just watching the world go by rarely happened until he was in his late eighties and only because someone would insist that he slow down. The most inactive he would ever be is when he would sit in a boat or lakeside to fish for an hour or two. The silver lining of my father’s tough childhood was that he developed a skill that he passed on to me and my brothers: being self-reliant through understanding our resources and through lots of hard work. Thank you, Dad—and I mean it!!

I made my first paycheck at age three, singing on the
Andy Williams Show
with my brothers. That was about the same age I started doing the “unpaid” chores that were expected of us at home. In our house, if you were tall enough to reach the table, then you could set the table or clear the dishes. If you were old enough to catch a fish, then you were big enough to learn to clean it and prepare it for dinner. If you could toast and butter your bread, then you could also make it and bake it. The fresh vegetables we had with dinner were the ones that we had planted, weeded, and harvested in the garden with our hands.
No task was ever done halfway. Every single one of my brothers would tell you that my father’s motto for life was the gardening-themed “Hoe to the end of the row,” or as we would probably say today, “If it’s worth doing, it’s worth doing well.” To my dad, “good enough” didn’t equal “well,” and that also applied to our performances. A song didn’t belong onstage until it could be performed well: the harmonies, the choreography, and each musical instrument coordinated in perfect order.

Dad’s idea of “to the end of row” also meant that after the show, you took care of your own costumes, packed up your own gear and instruments, and helped to load the tour bus to the next destination. On many days the rehearsal process seemed endless, and there were very few spare hours to ride a bike or play ball. All nine of us worked really hard to do shows. My mother worried about it and would have sleepless nights over how
“hard my kids work.”
She wrote of this in her journals quite often. Yet she was also the role model for the word “effort.” She had fifty projects going on any given day and almost never sat down for more than fifteen minutes to eat a meal. I have very few childhood memories of seeing my mother sleep. Even when we toured in a shared Airstream trailer or tour bus, she would be working away when I went to bed and working away when I got up the next morning. And I slept very little!

When my career was first getting national attention, following the release of “Paper Roses” in 1973, the feminist movement in the U.S. was in full gear on the street, in office buildings, on the sports fields, in the schools, and in the halls of government and other institutions. The movement wanted
the world to know that women could handle any job a man could do and deserved equal pay for it, too. Their accomplishments changed the face of everyday life forever, but it was a life I was blessed to have already. By age fifteen, I had equal billing and equal pay with my brother on a hit television variety show on which I had set a new record of being the youngest female to ever host a national TV show. At a time when millions of women were renouncing their lives as homemakers to join the workforce, I had no idea what it was like to spend much time at home. My sense of home was wherever my mother and father were, which as an entertainment family often meant temporary living arrangements. Just as countless women longed to be identified by a job title, the one thing I knew I could already do was work. In fact, as a teenager approaching adulthood, I was beginning to crave what these millions of women were moving down their personal priority list: home, husband, children.

When I first became a single mom, I toured all the country music venues I could, up to three hundred days a year, to support my son Stephen and myself. Stephen took to singing very early on and was a natural performer at age three and a half. By age four, he would don a cowboy hat, boots, and a big silver belt buckle and go onstage to sing “All My Exes Live in Texas” with my band. It would bring the house down every time, and it gave me about four minutes to do a quick costume change. One evening he made a mistake, forgetting the words. He dropped the microphone and ran offstage crying. In my distress over the stage being left empty during a show, I remember
scolding him: “Never cry onstage. If you make a mistake, pick it back up and finish the song.” He wiped his tears with the sleeve of his cowboy shirt as I continued channeling my father’s words: “I’m going to be so disappointed in you if you don’t finish your song.”

My little son took a deep breath, put his hat back on, and went back out onstage. He not only finished—he nailed the song and got a standing ovation. But suddenly that didn’t matter to me anymore. I felt sick to my stomach that I had talked to him that way. I had applied my dad’s motto of “Hoe to the end of the row,” the same principle he applied to every aspect of our careers, but it didn’t feel right. I understand my dad’s perspective, because in television at that time, most of the shows were shot before a live audience. You couldn’t do three or four takes. You had one chance, and that meant no mistakes. There were no contracts, and you were invited back only if the audience liked you, one appearance at a time. To this day, crew people who have worked in Hollywood for forty years say to me, “We’ve still never worked with a group as professional as you guys were, even as kids. We called you the ‘One-Take Osmonds.’”

My father was our driving force. He did make us work hard. I know we wouldn’t have the career portfolios we have today if my father hadn’t applied his work principles to us. But it didn’t make for a carefree childhood, and that was what made me feel so upset after I scolded Stephen. He was only a small boy. I knew from personal experience the pressure he must have been feeling. I had to ask myself: Why was I making him
feel like he was there to work? It was this experience that changed my outlook on how I would raise my own children.

When I remarried and my family started growing, I couldn’t stand the thought of my kids working as hard as I had during my childhood. I hoped to give them more of a stress-free childhood than I had had and allow them to really be kids. Their chores were very minimal, and if I sensed that something felt like too much pressure or stress to them, I would give them support to get through it. They had fun birthday parties, Disney videos, popular toys and bikes, and long summer and holiday vacations without any responsibilities. At least, that’s what I thought at the time.

Because I worked so hard as the family provider, whenever I had Mommy time with my kids, I made up for my sense of guilt by using my credit card. That usually meant an excursion to get the newest video games on the shelf, the hottest trends in clothes and shoes, the “had to see and have” movies, toys, and treats. In reality, I probably gave each kid more money to spend on games at Chuck E. Cheese in one evening than my parents spent on all of their kids’ birthday presents. Most of the time, my kids wouldn’t even have to ask me for things. I would offer it all to them, hoping it made up for the hours and days I had to spend away from them to work. If I had to be away from home for more than a week, I took my children with me if I possibly could, and I almost always took one of the kids along if it was an overnight event. It gave me special one-on-one time with each child. I loved having these overnights with each child individually, but I would try to make it an even
happier time by stopping in at the local mall. Shopping became an activity we did together. It was easy, and it was available no matter where my work took me. And it seemed to always make my child happy, at least for that day. In retrospect, it was something that made only me happy. My children have very few memories of shopping excursions and the gifts they were given. What they remember most are the bonding experiences: the sights we saw and the stories that could be told about the adventures we had together. None of those stories ever started with, “That was the time Mom bought me a…”

While I was growing up, shopping was a favorite and safe activity for my mother and me, especially when the family was on tour. But our shopping was never a “spree” and was always preceded by long days of concerts or commercial shoots. My mother would take me to pick out just one special doll or outfit as a reward for the long working days I endured as a child. There’s a big difference between a child working to earn a reward and a child who feels deserving of anything he wants because he knows his parents have the money to get it for him.

In her journal of 1974, while we were on tour in Osaka, Japan, my mother wrote:

“
Marie and I went shopping with Kioko. We walked our legs off in a big Fantasy underground shopping mall. Three bodyguards for Marie went along with us. I bought slippers for George and a plastic cape for rain. Marie bought a sweater set and a scarf.

“We weren’t able to buy much because we already spent our limit!
”

My parents gave us spending limits until we were eighteen years old. Even when
Donny & Marie
was the number one show on ABC and I was the highest-paid child on television, I was given an allowance of three hundred dollars per month, but not until I turned seventeen years old. In 1977, that was a lot of money for a teenager. But it was expected that I would use it to buy any clothes or accessories that I wanted for myself. Before the
Donny & Marie
show, there was no allowance given out, at least not in currency. The only allowance we knew was what was expected of us: no allowance for laziness.

When people ask me how I survived being a child celebrity without the self-destruction that seemed to be the curse of many of my peers, I tell them that it was because my parents took their stewardship of their children very seriously. We lived by their rules, not our wishes. More than that, as kids, we never really had enough money to get into any kind of trouble. Once our spending limit was used up, we had to wait until the next month. It made me appreciate the value of everything. I remember being on an international tour, sometimes doing up to three shows in one day, and resisting any temptation to spend a dime until we performed in Paris, France. My dream was to buy clothes by a French designer. My mother wrote in her journal in May 1975: “
I went with Marie to do a little shopping yesterday. She has been waiting patiently to shop in Paris, and wasn’t disappointed. The cut of the clothes here seems to be just right for her so she got two outfits. And is she ever happy. She was up late last night trying them on and packing them just so.
”

I can recall almost every detail of those outfits. I’ve always had designer taste, and Paris was fashion heaven to me. I also remember the feeling of pride that came with knowing I had bought them with money I had budgeted and saved. I appreciated what I got.

On another trip, my dad bought me a gorgeous gold beaded necklace on the Champs-Élysées to celebrate and commemorate my first single, “Paper Roses,” when it went gold in numbers of records sold. My mom gave me a pair of her gold-plated earrings to go with it. They meant so much to me as a girl, and still do. I have them framed and displayed in my dressing room. It reminds me that work and effort is the “gold” of feeling self-worth.

Looking back, I regret not giving my older children that experience of appreciation that can only come through working to attain something you want. They might not have just expected that they should (and would) have what they wanted. I had robbed them of one of the most satisfying “rites of passage” that a young person can experience because of my own guilt at having to be away from them for work so often. I wanted them to have fun childhood memories that weren’t connected to having to work. Instead, I gave them a false sense of entitlement, which each of them has worked hard to overcome as young adults. I’m so proud of their accomplishments now, despite my early flaws. I know I wasn’t alone in allowing children to expect rewards. I believe our society is accelerating the speed of the runaway train of instant gratification. Recently I was at a child’s birthday party when the mother I was
standing next to questioned whether our kids should really get a “goodie bag” chock-full of toys at another child’s birthday party. She had a point. Wasn’t the idea of a birthday party to celebrate a friend and to “give” to them without receiving? I don’t think my kids need a certificate of accomplishment for completing every project they do, especially when it took only two or three hours of their time. Another friend of mine with young children pointed out to me at a recent soccer tournament where every single team got a trophy, “Not every team wins in soccer; so giving every child a trophy seems to take away their drive to improve.”