Mommywood (6 page)

The Family Curse

N
ow remember, Dean and I were sure I was pregnant with another baby boy. Dean had already fathered two boys. But also during season two of
Tori & Dean,
before I was pregnant, I‘d brought Dean to visit Mama Lola, the voodoo high priestess who once cleansed me from a curse. Mama Lola said, ―You‘re going to have more babies. Liam was only four months old. I said, ―How many do you see? She said, ―Three. Dean and I smiled at each other. That was what we had been thinking. Then I said, ―I‘d love to have a girl. Mama Lola looked down at the cards and studied them for a moment. When she looked up she said, ―Well, you want a girl but what if you have all boys? That seemed to settle it. Baby number two would be a boy.

As far back as I can remember, I‘ve always wanted to have a baby girl, but my relationship with my mother—have I mentioned my mother yet?—was so fraught that I couldn‘t help feeling nervous about how I would do with a daughter. To some extent all parents act and react according to how they were reared. Some people might model their parenting on what their parents did. I wanted to model my parenting on something more abstract—what my parents
didn’t
do. But maybe having a girl was too close to home. What if I brought all my confusion and trouble with my mother to the relationship? I‘d rather not have a girl at all than be a bad mother to a daughter. So when I found out Liam was going to be a boy, I thought,
Okay, maybe that’s
what’s meant to be. Maybe I’m meant to have all boys
. I got comfortable with that idea, and I started to like it.

At one of my regular checkups, Dr. J said it was too soon to officially call it, but he thought I was having a girl. Dean and I were shocked. What? Impossible. We said, ―No, no, no. It‘s a boy.

Dr. J said, ―I would go on record saying I‘m ninety percent sure it‘s a girl. After that there was a seed of hope, but neither Dean nor I really believed that it could be a girl. Later, at twenty weeks, we went to a different doctor for the quadruple screen sonogram. This time we knew we were going to find out the gender. As the nurse was doing the preliminary exam, Dean said, ―Do you see what I see? I did. We both saw a penis between the legs. When the doctor came in, he said, ―What do you guys think you‘re having? (He must do this to torture all his patients. What fun. For him.)

I said, ―We think it‘s a boy.

The doctor said, ―Really? Why do you think it‘s a boy?

Dean pointed at the ultrasound and said, ―That‘s a penis right there! The doctor explained to us that we were looking at the labia of our baby girl, but we still didn‘t believe him. He practically had to pull his degrees down off the wall to convince us. Even when we had a detailed ultrasound again later in the pregnancy, we asked, ―Are you sure it‘s a girl? Is that stuff between the legs still girl stuff?

Okay, so Mama Lola doesn‘t have a perfect track record.

Voodoo‘s an imperfect science. At the doctor‘s appointment when we found out that I was pregnant with a girl, I was so shocked and overjoyed that I completely forgot to worry about the size of her nose or any other superficial concerns. A daughter! I‘d longed for a daughter for so long, but I never really thought I‘d actually have one. My—our—own little girl.

In the car on the way home I started to think about the relationship I wanted with her. I would strike the perfect balance between mom and friend. I would never judge her. I would always tell her she was beautiful. I would give her all the emotional strength I could, the confidence and optimism to do whatever she wanted to do. The list I went through was all the things I felt I hadn‘t gotten from—you guessed it—my own mother.

As the pregnancy went on I started to get scared. Nothing was more important to me than to be a good mom. What if I was even more disastrous than my mom had been with a girl? What if all my hopes and intentions backfired and the past repeated itself tenfold? What if with a girl I became my mother all over again? What if I
was
cursed? Liam was so daddy-focused. What if the girl was the same way? What if both kids loved their daddy more and there was nothing we could do to change that?

What if Dean was just a person kids love more than kids love me? Would I feel excluded? Would I pull away to protect myself? Is that what had happened with my mother—I was so attached to my father that she resented it? Then I remembered my first wedding and thought, no, she created our dynamic.

I don‘t want to go on at length about my relationship with my mom, but I want to explain how intense and destructive our dynamic was. It‘s a formative part of who I am and what I want to avoid as a mother. My pop-psych theory is that my mom couldn‘t stand the idea that I might have more in life than she did. At my first wedding she said, ―I didn‘t have a big wedding.

My parents couldn‘t afford it. When I told her how happy I was with Dean, that I‘d found my soul mate, she congratulated me, but in the same email she gave me notice that she and my dad were selling the condo that I was renting from them right out from under me. After my father passed away, she said things like ―I never had friends. Your father wouldn‘t let me. It seemed like something was missing from her life and she blamed me.

The way this dynamic played out was subtle but ongoing.

Even when I was in my early twenties, instead of bonding we were competing. Beanie Babies—those little stuffed animals filled with ―beans instead of stuffing—were a big fad. They became collectors‘ items, with people trading them on eBay for exorbitant amounts of money, depending on how rare they were (or how rare people thought they might one day become). A few years later everyone suddenly realized at once that they were worthless, and the market crashed. They were like the tech stocks of the mid-nineties, except that everyone knew they were beans and fluff from the start. But during their peak, my mom and I got obsessed and started buying Beanie Babies on eBay.

I‘d bring my laptop to my dressing room at
90210
and be intently bidding on one animal or another. When my five-minute warning to be on set came, I‘d be furiously clicking to add five dollars to my bid. Then I‘d hurry out to stage cheering, ―I just won the crab! I had books cataloguing the world of Beanie Babies—how many of each were manufactured, what colors they came in, what they were worth. I received the Beanie Babies newsletter once a month and was a member of Beanie Babies of America. Eventually my business manager included my Beanie Babies in my monthly report. Under assets.

My mother was doing the same thing. She‘d send me an email saying, ―So, I was just wondering whether you‘ve gotten Slither yet. I‘d say no, and she‘d respond, ―Oh, I just got mine.

I won it on eBay. I‘d go online and see that Slither the Snake was going for $2,500. Some of the Beanie Babies were only released to small stores in certain areas. Once I found the coveted Princess the Bear, a special release for the Diana of Wales Memorial Fund, at a small store in New York where nobody thought to check. When I wrote to tell the big news to my mother, she responded, ―Oh that‘s great. I have five. My mom‘s Beanie Babies were all tagged, numbered, and carefully sealed by her staff. I had piles and piles of Beanie Babies filling my apartment. Was collecting Beanie Babies a shared interest that my mom and I enjoyed pursuing together? It didn‘t feel like it. It felt much more like a competition. And I have a thousand worthless Beanie Babies in Ziploc bags in storage somewhere to show for it.

I imagine that in some way my mother thought we were bonding over the Beanie Babies. But again, it felt like she couldn‘t stand the idea that I would ever have more than she did.

My mother may have loved me, but although she was able to give me things that she had missed—whether they were emotional or material—I think she felt angry at letting me have them. Was it because her mom hadn‘t made her feel good about herself, so she didn‘t want me to feel good about myself? If she didn‘t get to have a doting mother, why should I? That was my greatest fear. I hadn‘t had a doting mother; what if I passed the same resentment on to my daughter?

As my pregnancy progressed, Dean and I had long talks about my genuine fear of having a girl. I always told Dean that I felt like my dad had a hand in creating the competitiveness, the jealousy between me and my mom from an early age. He had doted on my mother, but when I was born he turned his attention to me. I worried about this with Dean. He‘s always dreamt of having a little girl. And I‘m Dean‘s world. Were we set up for disaster? Even with both of us doting on Liam, I still felt like his focus was all Tori, Tori, Tori, but what if he stopped showing me that affection? I hoped that I would just be glad to see my children being loved, but what if something came out in me that I couldn‘t predict or control?

I made Dean swear to protect us all from this dynamic.

When our girl came he had to make sure to love us both. He was like, ―Of course, I would never love you any less. I knew that‘s what he would say, but it helped to hear it. I think it‘s important to talk about these tensions in any family. I saw an interview that Heidi Klum and Seal did on
Oprah
. Seal said that his priorities were in this order: wife, children, career. That made me stop and think. My first instinct was
Wait, kids don’t come
first?
Then I realized that in a way he was right. People have children and they‘re so dependent (and cute!) that the focus naturally turns to them. Children need more protection. They need more care. But you can‘t sacrifice your relationship as a couple.

I worried about our family dynamics, and I also worried about the caregivers. I was raised by Nanny, an amazing woman who gave me the foundation for how I want to parent. Without Nanny I wouldn‘t be the person I am today. But from my earliest fantasies about being a mother, I was certain that I‘d never have a nanny for my children. Then we hired a baby nurse for Liam. We had to: we were going back to work full-time, and even if he was always nearby, we needed to make sure there was someone to hold him, to give him his bottle, and to put him down for naps when he was ready. We found Patsy, who felt like part of our family, but I still hoped I wasn‘t setting myself up for failure from the get-go by having someone come in to help me raise my child.

What I needed to keep reminding myself was that my situation was very different from my mother‘s. I didn‘t really have an option. I had to work in order to support my family. The same was true for this baby: I knew I‘d be returning to work less than a week after she was born! If I didn‘t have a baby nurse, what would I do? I wasn‘t afraid of my children or reluctant to spend time with them; I was working out of necessity. I had help because I had to earn money. Of course, my mom was busy too.

She had lots of Madame Alexander dolls (which I was never allowed to touch) to collect, label, and display ―for me. Wow, now I
do
sound bitter.

What I have to come to grips with is that there isn‘t one perfect way to raise a child. Maybe our bond is closer when we spend more time together, but it doesn‘t disappear when I work.

It‘s not the time, it‘s not the caregivers, it‘s not one interaction on one day. It‘s everything put together. Those hours and days, those choices we make as parents, little and big, they all add up.

My goal is to make them add up to the strongest relationship possible.

What was my ideal relationship? I hadn‘t lived it, so I had to think it through. I started by reflecting on what, specifically, from my childhood I wanted to change for Liam, but especially for my unborn daughter. I decided to write down rules for myself, so if having a girl ever made me lose my grip on reality, I had somewhere to turn.

Here are the guidelines I created:

1.
The Madame Alexander Rule:
Getting your daughter a present and telling her she can‘t touch it (like my mother did every year with those ridiculous Madame Alexander dolls) is worse than not getting her anything. So I‘ll never get her anything. No, just kidding. I‘ll always get my daughter presents she can play with.

2.
The Bonwit Teller Rule:
Along the same lines as above, I‘m not going to dress my daughter in clothes she doesn‘t want to wear. Especially not anything pastel. I don‘t know why my mother always made me dress up like a doll—especially when she had all of my dolls to play with. But as long as my daughter‘s clothing choices are within a range of acceptability, she can wear whatever she wants. Even (oh God, I can barely say it without gagging) pastel.

3.
The Rapunzel Rule:
If she wants shoulder-length—or ass-length, or floor-length—hair, she can have it. All I wanted growing up was long hair, and my mother made me get that same stupid bob for twelve solid years. (Are you picking up any sort of theme to these guidelines? Not that I‘m bitter. Stupid bob.)

4.
The Nanny Rule:
Dean or I will always be there at night when she‘s sick or scared, instead of relying on a nanny to sleep by her side. I know that seems like an obvious one, but I just had to say it.

5.
The Ed McMahon Rule:
I‘ll let her invite whomever she wants to her wedding(s), and I won‘t invite celebrities I barely know just because they happen to be on the invitation list of someone I want to impress. (Unless it‘s Kate Winslet or someone like that. Then all bets are off.)

6.

The

I-Paid-for-This-Wedding-and-All-of-Your-Furniture
Rule:
Gifts I give to my daughter will never come with strings attached. Or ropes. Or intricate pulley systems that require the recipient to dance the cha-cha while wearing lederhosen.

7.
The Lonely Rich Kid Rule:
I‘ll let her go over to friends‘ for sleepovers. Even if I turn out to have as many crazy fears and paranoias as my father did (and I‘m well on my way), I won‘t indulge them. I‘ll let her do what other kids do.

8.
The You-Must-Pay-the-Rent Rule:
If I ever buy a residence for her (as my mother did for me), I won‘t make her pay rent; at the very least, I won‘t raise said rent every year by having my money manager send my own daughter a notification by email.