Mommywood (2 page)

Hollywood is a glittering, glamorous, superficial land of dreamers, wannabes, and stars. Mommywood takes place on the same set—the palm trees and eternal sunshine of Los Angeles.

But casting is difficult and requires nine months of faithful commitment to rocky road ice cream, plus labor and delivery.

The lead roles are played by stars who are finicky, in need of nonstop coddling, and around two feet tall. My own Mommywood life is full of drama (an awkward encounter with a former costar at a children‘s birthday party), tragedy (the death of a diva pug), horror (when poo meets pool), and farce (being the only one in costume at a Halloween party), but at the center of it is the greatest love story I‘ve ever experienced, greater than any love story on the small or silver screen, the same amazing love story that all mothers go through with their children.

This is the story of my definitely amateur, sometimes serious, often bumbling, never-to-be-finished attempt to make it in…Mommywood.

Life in the Fishbowl

I
f a parent‘s job is to present the world to their children, then I had to think hard about how the choices I made for my life were affecting my son, Liam. If anyone‘s upbringing defined a Hollywood childhood, it was mine. Now Dean and I had a reality show, which meant our lives were a spectator sport: even our son‘s birth was part of the ongoing series. Like me, Liam was literally born into a world of television.

Granted, there were some differences between our childhoods from the very beginning. Liam didn‘t live in a mansion with a butler or a driver. His mother wasn‘t wearing diamonds the size of a chestnut to do her two-finger daily inspection of the maids‘ dusting thoroughness, and nobody was joking about renaming a network after me and Dean the way they called ABC ―Aaron‘s Broadcasting Company. Every night my father left his TV shows on the studio lot, whereas when we‘re shooting
Tori & Dean
there are cameras in our house and following us around. There were no paparazzi trailing us when I was growing up, and even if there had been, they would have been stuck way down my parents‘ driveway at the gate. Now not only are paparazzi cameras clustered outside our house almost constantly, but when Liam flips through magazines in doctors‘

offices he says, ―Mama? Mama? as he turns the pages. Doesn‘t matter if it‘s
Us Weekly, Time,
or
Highlights
. He expects to find a picture of me in every issue.

This will sound a little crazy, but (actually, save me a little space and just assume lots of the details of my life are prefaced with the phrase, ―This will sound a little crazy, but…) Liam actually prefers the weeklies to the cute board books and picture books we buy for him. I guess there‘s something that Britney and Angelina deliver that Babar and Horton just don‘t do for him. If I‘m preparing Liam‘s breakfast and he gets quiet, I look up to check on him. More often than not I find him sitting on the floor, turning the pages of a
People
or
Us Weekly
magazine that he‘s grabbed from the table. Some days our baby nurse, Patsy, and I take the kids on a walk to the nearby Coffee Bean. We stop at the corner newsstand to pick up the new weeklies (yes, I‘m addicted). I buy Liam, now twenty months old, a no-sugar-added, coffee-free, chocolate iced blended and an English scone.

Then he sits in a chair, drinking his iced blended and looking at magazines like a big boy. If big boys are fascinated by who wore what to the Oscars.

One night Patsy had some family over—about five women—and was making them dinner. Liam was excited when they arrived. I saw that he wanted to show them his favorite toys, maybe his room, so I said, ―Monkey, show them your house. (Monkey is what Dean and I call Liam because he danced and bounced like a little monkey in his Exersaucer.) So Liam ran to the living room, his favorite room, and grabbed a weekly that was sitting on the table. He waved the magazine in the air, crowing, ―Oooh, ooh, Mama. I was a little embarrassed, but I figured they probably didn‘t get exactly what he was saying. Chances were they just thought it was odd that a baby was proudly showing them a magazine.

Then one of the women said to Liam, ―Are
you
in the magazine? Is there a picture of you? Liam got an excited look on his face, made some of those hyperventilating-like grunts toddlers make when they‘ve been understood, and flipped through the glossy pages until he found the inevitable photo. It was him and me. He pointed with his chubby finger and said,

―Mama, Mama! He was exceedingly proud. It was his big moment. The woman asked, ―Where are you? Are you in the picture? Liam beamed and pointed to himself next to me. Then his face got really serious. He turned the pages intently, looking, looking, until he got to a certain page and stopped. He pointed to a picture, smiled broadly, and said, ―Dada. Dada! We all looked down. It wasn‘t a photo of Dean. Liam was pointing at a picture of Patrick Dempsey. Boy, did the women love that. They were all like, ―Is your dad McDreamy? What a scoop!

It‘s not just that Liam thinks family photos arrive in glossy magazines with the Friday mail. He‘s also completely obsessed with the paparazzi. When he sees them he screams in delight and smiles for the cameras. There‘s no trying to block them by holding him inside a jacket or pulling up a stroller blanket to create a shield. Even when he was only one year old he seemed to know exactly what I was trying to do—ruin his shot!—and would get mad.

One time I was shopping in a store and a swarm of paparazzi appeared from out of nowhere. Maybe I‘d stepped on one of their nests or something. There must have been fifteen of them with huge cameras lined up to snap pictures through the store window. This happens sometimes. I normally suck in my stomach, try to remember not to pull my underwear out of my ass, and otherwise pretend they‘re not there. But Liam doesn‘t exactly have the same instinct. His round tummy is cute and he knows it, his diaper is usually firmly in place, and he hasn‘t quite grasped the concept of pretending. This time I looked away from Liam for one moment, and when I looked back I saw that he was standing face-out in the window display, staring at the crowd of photographers. They were all going crazy, taking picture after picture of him, and he was totally mesmerized by the flashes of light. I couldn‘t resist pulling out my own (much smaller) camera to take a picture. In it you see Liam from the back and (I have to admit) a rather pretty meteor shower of flashes in the window behind him.

Cameras have surrounded Liam since the day he was born.

They‘re both mundane and fascinating to him the way lamps or doorknobs are mundane and fascinating to other babies. When we moved into our first house, a tech company came to install top-of-the-line baby monitors that let you watch the baby on video online. Why such fancy monitors? Well, because we got them for free on condition that we let the company film the installation. Such is the world of celebrity perks: it‘s not all handbags and high heels. So the tech company had their film crew in the house, with cameras and lights. When Liam saw them he got so excited you‘d think it was Christmas morning. At first I thought,
Oh look at my son, the budding filmmaker. He’s
excited because he thinks they’re lining up a great shot
. Then I realized that he thought the cameramen were
our
cameramen.

We‘d been on hiatus for a month, and he thought the crew for our show had returned. You could see it on his face. He was thinking,
They’re back! Everyone’s here! Finally, my family’s
all together again!

Okay, so that‘s a little weird. My kid expects to be surrounded by cameras. But (thanks to another celebrity perk) he also is accustomed to remote control toilets. And if my husband worked for a dry cleaner maybe Liam would expect his T-shirts to be lightly starched. Or if I were I hairdresser he‘d request a trim every other day. Lots of people have jobs that affect their children in one way or another. As far as these things go, I don‘t think we‘re inflicting major trauma. Thanks to the reality show he‘s very socialized. He‘s not scared of people. Or large cameras. Or electronics. Or sudden flashes of light. Take this kid into an alien spaceship and he‘ll feel right at home.

I don‘t worry about the cameras per se. The part of leading a public life that I worry about the most is something I can‘t really change and that‘s this: people know who Liam is. People on the street in our neighborhood. People who see us when we travel.

People we run into on vacation. Liam will grow up being recognized, and as his parent I have to think about how it affects him.

This hit me recently when Dean and I went on a tour of a preschool for Liam. We were in a classroom watching five cute little kids in a yoga class. (Pause for laughter. So Los Angeles.

We‘re all hippie health nuts. Okay, resume playing.) As those kids worked on their downward-facing dog poses, I looked around the classroom and noticed little cubbyholes with names on them. The name ―Deacon jumped out at me. How did I know that name? Then I realized,
Oh, that’s the name of Reese
Witherspoon’s son. Deacon.
Looking back at the kids, I saw that, indeed, one of them was Deacon Phillippe. I recognized him. How weird is that—to be able to identify a four-year-old?

He‘s not a celebrity, and I don‘t have any personal relationship with him or his parents beyond occasionally being on the same page of magazine photos showing that we celebrities are just like you, but I recognized him in his preschool yoga class. I thought,
This is going to be Liam’s life.
He‘ll forever be recognized because of who his parents are. It could have been worse. We could have named him Blanket. (Just kidding.

Blanket—it‘s a lovely name.)

The truth is that Liam‘s life is already like that. We were walking into a department store and a mom looked at him and asked, ―Was he in my son‘s class? Then ―Is he a catalogue baby like my daughter? Then she recognized me, said, ―Oh, never mind, and hurried away, embarrassed. The same thing has happened to me ever since I can remember. People come up to me and say, ―Didn‘t we go to high school together? I‘m thinking,
Um, only if you went to the fictional school appearing
in
Beverly Hills 90210.

I‘ve actually always found it kind of sweet that when people recognize you from magazines or TV, they think you‘re an old friend, that you go back a long way together. It‘s like we all shared something, even if we were on different sides of the experience. But when I saw and recognized Deacon, for a moment it was like I was outside the fishbowl looking in. I was like those fans, like any mom anywhere recognizing Deacon or Liam, and I felt a little sad. These young kids are already being seen in a different way, and they have no say in it. Does it make their lives harder? Does it change the way people treat them?

Does it change the way they see the world? I wish I knew the answers.

I grew up in Hollywood, but like I said, I didn‘t grow up with the paparazzi—not like there are now. At each event there was maybe one photographer, a legitimate professional whose job was to capture the event, like a photographer at a wedding.

Now there are masses of people with cars and cameras stalking celebrities, shooting up your skirt as you climb out of a car and bombarding you as you enter or exit an event or restaurant. The pictures of me with my parents at events show that I was shy but used to that single flashbulb. Liam would think it was strange if we came out of a restaurant and there weren‘t four or five photographers with flashes going off in his face. This is the first generation of kids growing up with that.

In the outside world, like any mom, there‘s only so much I can do to protect my child. I shielded his baby carrier, but he‘s too old for that now. I‘m not going to lock him away. I‘m not going to put a mask on him. I don‘t want him to feel embarrassed about or restricted by who he is. There‘s a point at which the protecting can do more harm than the threat itself.

I can control the reality show—the cameras inside my house that expose Liam to millions of viewers every week. It‘s my choice as a parent to allow that to happen. But I love doing our show. I actually think it‘s changed the way people see us. Some of the people who recognize me on the street now treat me more like a friend than a celebrity. A couple will tell us that they had the same fight that Dean and I had, or a mom will tell me she has the same issue with her son that I‘ve had with Liam. It actually makes me feel more normal. The media puts celebrities up on a pedestal; even when they say we‘re ―just like you, one page later they‘re separating us again. The show is my chance to say that even though our world may be a little odd, we‘re still just people. I hope Liam will be proud to have been part of it one day. The show is my livelihood, and it allows me and Dean to spend more time with Liam. It keeps our family together.

I didn‘t choose my upbringing, but now I‘m making decisions about my own children‘s lives and that upbringing is the only personal experience I have. I skipped college to stay on
90210
. I worked on
90210
for a total of ten years—so long that when I finally walked out into the bright sunlight of the real world I couldn‘t imagine being anything other than an actor. I still can‘t. I have no other life skills. Entertainment is my life. I was born in it. I grew up in it. I‘m stuck in it. And I love it. I can wonder about taking Liam out of the spotlight until the end of time, but the truth is I don‘t really feel like I could support my family any other way.

I glanced back at the yoga kids, now rolling on their backs in happy baby pose. Deacon seemed fine. The other kids in his class didn‘t see him as different. They were all only three or four. School, I hope, will be a safety zone for Liam, where he can be himself without all the cameras.

When Liam is older, I‘ll try to give him options. I mean, I‘m a proud mother and I have to say that I think Liam‘s a natural-born entertainer. He is funny and outgoing and loves to be the center of attention. But I‘m going to make sure he has the college education I missed and the self-confidence I lacked. I want him to feel free to pursue whatever life appeals to him.