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Chapter Eighteen
Regret

THE 2010 WINTER
holidays were upon us, and, as holidays sometimes do, they made me think about what might have been. Thanksgiving dinner itself was too small for words. It was just four of us at the house of a friend from AA: Emily, who was spending her Thanksgiving break with me, Sean, my friend, and I. My father was down the street at a friend's. Kevin couldn't get time off work, so he was with his dad in New York.

Years ago, I had made the decision that I would never force family holidays. I wanted to make it clear to my kids that they had no obligation to be with me on major holidays. This is an all-too-common problem in divorces—the children feel like they should be in two places at once. So I left it up to them to decide how they wanted to spend holidays. If Kevin felt like staying with his father for Thanksgiving, I knew that he'd be able to balance it out and do what was right for him.

That Thanksgiving, I felt grateful to be with my family. A family. That was my goal, before I was even old enough to think about such things in clear terms. As a child, all I really knew was that I wanted to be rescued. I wanted my life, as it was, to shift. I didn't want to be teased in school for wearing dirty clothes or tell tall tales about myself in a misguided effort to fit in. I wanted to be nurtured and loved.

Lo and behold, I found early and unheard-of success as a child actor. The attention and accolades presented an amazing opportunity, and maybe if I'd been loved and supported, I could have taken all that opportunity and thrived. But it wasn't what I was after. It wasn't what I needed most. I just wanted the close, stable family I'd never had.

Over the summer, Sean and I had gone out to dinner with my father's onetime girlfriend, Anjelica Huston. Anjelica told a story from when I was a kid. I had come to her crying. I said, “My mother called and said she's going to drive the Corvette off the Santa Monica pier.” For hours, the household was up in arms, making calls, trying to figure out where Joanna was. Anjelica remembered staring worriedly out the window at the ocean, her mind filling with gruesome images of my mother's body floating to shore. At some point, I walked over to stand next to her.

She pulled me close and said, “Are you okay? Are you okay?”

Apparently, the shock of the initial phone call had worn off. I was perfectly calm. I said, “Of course I'm okay. Don't worry. Trust me. My mom's not going to do it. She just wants to upset everyone.”

At dinner, Anjelica, reflecting on the moment, said, “You were like a cunning adult.” I was twelve.

As I look back on those days, I forget how much I could take. I forget how many hugely traumatic things were happening to me on a daily basis and how resilient I was. Today, it astounds me. But that resilience belied what was lying underneath. I was always in a state of semi-shock. Getting that kind of phone call from my mother was run-of-the-mill.

Only during my twenties, in therapy, did I begin to realize that I'd held on to those feelings. I lived in pain until I met cocaine, which briefly brought relief, and it was a completely new and deceptively wonderful sensation for me. The rest of the time I spent in a constant state of apprehension, waiting for the other shoe to drop. I lived in fear that someone was going to yell, accuse, hurt, crash, or die.

And then I met John. I ran into John's arms because I loved him, and in his world I found an oasis of calm and a reason to be on the planet. He was my protector. I cut off contact with my family. It is easy to remember a failed marriage as an unmitigated disaster, but I also realize that it was the most stable time of my life. We had the kids. We had a structure. We created a family. John loved me. He couldn't abide my father, and when he kept me away from him—or tried to—I knew that he did so out of anger for the past and a desire to protect me. I have no doubt he loved me in all the best ways his heart allowed.

Despite the love we had for each other, it soon became clear that John was threatened by my spirit and opinions. I was only nineteen when we met, but as the marriage progressed, I started to come into myself. As I approached thirty, I was finally in great physical shape. I felt popular and confident. John didn't like that I went to social events by myself when he was busy. My self-assurance seemed to threaten him. Some of the mothers at Trinity, the kids' school, said, “Who cares what he's doing to you? You've got five houses and anything you want.” But I cared about more than money. Eventually, I wanted out of my marriage. It just wasn't working.

I wish that I hadn't left John in such an abrupt way. After having been married for nine years, I was done. I refused to work on the marriage. Had I not endured so much with my parents, I believe we could have worked through our problems, or at least given the marriage the effort it deserved. But by the time John got me, I'd been pushed so far that my threshold was close at hand. Anything that made me feel attacked, assaulted, or vulnerable made me flee. I didn't have the resilience that marriage requires of both partners.

When it came to the divorce and custody battle, I didn't anticipate John's training as a competitor. I was blindsided by the ugliness that ensued. Oh, John McEnroe is a formidable opponent. He absolutely refused to lose. That custody battle took everything out of me.

Leaving John meant spending time apart from my children, something I had never imagined from the day Kevin was born. One time it was my weekend to have the children, and John was away on a trip. John had married the singer Patty Smyth. I said something that Patty didn't like, and she kept the kids for the weekend. It was a Friday night at seven p.m. There was no way to get a judge or lawyer at that time of day.

When the children and I were apart, in that unexpected emptiness, all the trauma I'd suppressed exploded like a volcano. I was in total despair, and I was utterly vulnerable to a numbing chemical like heroin, which quieted the sadness, hysteria, and all the feelings that had been hiding under the surface all that time.

I was very alone during those years in New York. If my ex-husband had called me and said he wanted to sit down and talk to me about my substance abuse, I would have listened. He knew I had nobody, but he couldn't or wouldn't do it. He just wasn't that kind of guy. My addiction was not John's fault, but our legal battles definitely didn't help.

There came a time when I ran out of fight. I hadn't been with my children in seven months. I moved from hotel to hotel, to the Venice house where they sued me for installing too many locks, then to a bungalow in West Hollywood. In that bungalow, I wrote a note to John. I was angry at him for ruining my life. Blame, blame, blame. I scrawled the note in a fury, then took an enormous shot of coke. I remember falling down, hitting my head on the floor, and seeing my life flash before me: the past I couldn't change, the choices I regretted, the years I'd missed with my kids. I realized that this wasn't what I wanted to do with what was left of my life. When I came to, I ripped up the letter I'd written to John. To blame him for my life seemed to strip me of the option to change it. I didn't want to give him that power. I called a friend and he came with me to a treatment center to start the process of getting well.

My New York sponsor, Sandy, saw the tug-of-war between me and my ex-husband and said, “Let go of the rope with John. He will fall down and you will be in a place to have the time and space to work on yourself and your addictions.” She was right—tug-of-war is horrendous. (Especially if you're playing it with a world champion sportsman who can't lose.) I needed to fight the battle within myself, with me and my demons, my addiction, my self-hate—not with him. From then on, I stopped fighting. I said,
Test me. Put someone in a room with me when I pee. I will do whatever it takes.
I let my kids know that I was in a battle for my life, and that it wasn't about them or their father. I let my kids be angry at the fact that I had problems, but I didn't let them see my problems as permission to treat me badly.

It's obvious to me now that my addiction was not John's fault. But I think it's fair to say there was a battle, and I simply was not up to the challenge. Ultimately, the only good answer for me was to get sober. Sobriety and time brought an end to the saga of drug testing and acrimony.

John won many of our legal skirmishes. But on that Thanksgiving in L.A., looking at my son and daughter, I felt like, in the long run, I had won the war. I had won back my life and my sense of self. For all my regrets, I had what I wanted: relationships with my three children, collectively and separately. I had their respect and love. They genuinely wanted to spend Thanksgiving with me. They chose to do it out of love, not guilt. And that is the best reason of all.

THE DAY AFTER
Thanksgiving, Emily, Sean, and I went to Urth Café in West Hollywood for lunch. Emily was wearing a black coat with a brown faux fur collar, which had belonged to Farrah and that my father had given to me. She looked beautiful. Out of the blue, she said, “Mom, I guess you don't remember my final Choreo-lab. It's really too bad, because it was my best one.” I knew what she was talking about. Choreo-lab was a modern choreography and dance class that Emily had taken in high school. Every year they had a recital, during which each dancer had a brief solo performance. I went every year. While I attended her final show in 2009, I was on Ativan, an antianxiety pill that had been prescribed to me prior to my neck surgery so that I wouldn't clench my shoulders and tighten my vertebrae. It had been prescribed, but it had been problematic.

Then came the hardest part. Emily told me that when she went onstage, she had tears in her eyes. She could tell that I wasn't myself. When she said that to me, tears sprang to my own eyes. It broke my heart to think that she walked on the stage at her school for her dance recital knowing that I wasn't well and feeling unhappy because of me. Oh, why couldn't I go back in time? Why couldn't I have been the woman I am today with these kids? Every moment of their lives was important. How could I grieve this loss, endure it, and trust that she wasn't broken forever in the way that I had been broken by my parents' behavior?

Emily had been up there alone. She had needed me. I hadn't been there.

Sean, who saw how Emily's story about Choreo-lab had affected me, said, “Oh, Emily, Mom's trying.”

But I said, “It's okay, Sean. I want Emily to be able to tell me what she was going through her senior year.” I didn't defend my behavior or make excuses. I agreed with Emily. It was sad. At the same time that it pained me to no end to hear what Emily had to say, I saw that it was an important step for us. What a triumph for her to tell me how she felt, to revisit the loneliness of that moment and, with hope, to let it go. She believed in my sobriety. Mom's addiction was done. It had run its course. That confidence allowed Emily, like Sean, to be vulnerable in her own way. She knew she could share and vent, and I would take it as my own and we would move forward. I didn't want her walking around with resentments. I was strong and capable enough of hearing whatever she had to say.

Emily said, “I've forgiven you. I'm so glad I have you now.”

Through the nineties, when I was in and out of sobriety, at times I thought,
Someday, Tatum, you're going to regret this situation right here.
I'm there now, full of regret, wishing I could have that time back with my daughter and my sons. Sean, at twenty-three, lives down the street from me and often comes over for dinner. We both feel a need to compensate for the time we missed. As the oldest child, Kevin bore the brunt of my and his father's divorce. My guilt about that will never go away. Kevin knows my regrets and I know his.

I can't change what's done. I can't go back and reclaim the time we lost. All I can do is take solace in knowing that I didn't lose my children forever. They understand that I never stopped fighting to get clean and sober, for myself and for them. After we finished our lunch at Urth, Emily went back to my apartment to do some schoolwork. Sean and I headed to Target to find him a space heater. I admire, respect, and adore these humans and try to be there on every level for them. I grieve over the lost moments, hours, days. I cry for them. One day I will get to the point where I forgive myself for being a junkie, but I'm not there yet.

Chapter Nineteen
An Unrepentant Ghost

AFTER EMILY WENT
back to college, I decided to go to the beach house to see Ryan. I needed to keep trying to get close to him. Our show went on a long break for the holidays, so I hadn't seen him for a couple of weeks and I wanted to check on him and to keep the relationship going.

I was in my gym clothes when I arrived, so I decided to work out for a few minutes on my father's exercise bike. Then my father poked his head in the door and said that a man I'll call “Gavin” was coming over.
Gavin.

Gavin is the same guy who, on a singularly devastating night, gave me drugs and molested me. I was twelve. Gavin was one of my father's oldest friends, and Gavin lived just down the street, and Gavin was on his way.
Good timing, Tatum.

I didn't waste time blaming my father for inviting Gavin over when I was there. I was too busy scrambling to prepare myself. If Gavin was already on his way, that gave me five minutes to decide what to do. Should I hop in my car and flee, or should I finish my workout? I felt a rush of certainty that I needed to get out of the house. But, for reasons I was too flustered to understand at the time, I stayed.

Anyone who has been molested has his or her own experience of it. The memories of when I was violated make me feel dirty. I feel like I had something to do with it. I thought it was my fault. I'm still battling that sense of all-encompassing culpability.

I was still upstairs on the bike when I heard the front door open and shut with a solid thud. Gavin was in the house. He had hurt me.

It's important to admit that, as I came down the stairs to face Gavin in the kitchen, I thought about the prescription pills for my father's injured back that I knew were in the bathroom closet. Molestation and addiction are frequent partners in crime, because one is an unbearably painful experience and the other promises to liberate you from it. When faced with the past, using is an obvious choice, a quick fix for the discomfort of the moment. Leave your body instead of reliving the damage done to it.

My addiction has the best intentions. It wants to protect me from feelings I can't deal with. Instead, I can be subdued. But addiction is just another molester in disguise.

I was about to come face-to-face with my assailant. Despite all the time I've spent in therapy, I haven't yet done all the work I need to truly accept my innocence in the matter. Since, to my mind, it's still my fault, the memory makes me want to obliterate myself. All the good work I've done to be the woman I want to be went out the window as I walked down those stairs because I blame myself for what happened to me when I was twelve.

I was in an environment that felt unsafe, but don't get me wrong. As I thought about the pills in that closet, I wasn't remotely close to using. Subduing those thoughts with drugs or alcohol is no longer an option for me.

A sober mind makes sober decisions. As I prepared to face Gavin, a little prayer came to me:
God, please relieve me of this moment and help me to survive. I'm with someone who abused me as a twelve-year-old. Help me get to the other side.
I knew I would get there. I put on a happy face and knew I could get through the moment.

When I reached the kitchen, Gavin looked up and nodded at me as if this were an everyday encounter. He and my father continued their conversation about whether it would be fun for Gavin to appear on our show. Oh yeah, that would be a blast. My stomach lurched and bile rose to my throat. I made a mental note to make sure that never happened. Still, inexplicably, I stayed where I was, an unchained prisoner.

When my father left the room to let the dog out, Gavin turned to me. Was he going to address our past? I hoped not. Instead, he said, “How are you, Tatum?”

“Fine, thanks,” I said, and that was all. I let surface words and emotions pass for a few minutes until I could make my exit. I chose to forgive him in my heart, but that didn't mean I wanted to be near him for a moment longer.

When I called Patty that night, I told her that I didn't know why I had stayed at the house. Patty said, “Give yourself a break. You don't have to be so hard on yourself. It's okay if you don't always make the right decision.”

When I am forced to face painful memories of my past, it helps to accept that whatever my journey is, it's not up to me. I remind myself that each of us has our own god, our own higher power, our own path. I believe that I have a god, ever-mindful and ever-guiding. And that's how I live with it.

Afterward, I stayed safe in my circle of friends, putting one foot in front of the other. I dealt with life on life's terms. I got through it and found that, once again, I was okay. I used to be so terrified to feel negative emotions that I would use before I let myself experience and process real sensations of desperation, sadness, and loss. They are not pleasant feelings, but in choosing to live through them, I am choosing to live. In forgiving even my worst victimizers, I was deciding not just to survive but to move forward.