Spelling It Like It Is (8 page)

I said, “Now,
this
is our dream house.”

Dean said, “Good, ’cause I’m not moving again.”

After we shot the scene, the crew took a look around our new digs. They commented on how magical our little bungalow was. In the nicely groomed grassy yard were the fig tree, the pomegranate tree, and a blood orange tree. Beyond the yard was a tangle of weeds and tightly matted brush. Everyone kept saying how different it was from what they had expected. I knew what they meant. Encino was all marble and ornate details. This was dramatically smaller, simpler, and rough around the edges. We’d gone from one extreme to another.

“This is the real me,” I told them, and I felt a surge of pride.
That’s right,
I thought,
Tori Spelling lives in a California bungalow in the wilderness in Malibu
. I liked the sound of it.

OF COURSE, THERE was a bit of a learning curve to life in the wilderness.

The house, which was so charming with its tidy built-ins and green lawn, was in other ways as rustic as you could get. There were ants and spiders, which were to be expected. There were windows up high on the house that were hard to reach and covered in dust. Well, we were in the country, after all.

Then, on our second night, the heater broke. This didn’t seem like an urgent problem until the third night, when the temperature dipped. As I lay in bed listening to the high-pitched howls of a pack of coyotes, an icy draft came through the window frames. I burrowed my feet under Dean, trying to keep warm. I finally drifted off, dreaming of icicles and ice-fishing, but it seemed like only moments later when the early-morning sun burst into the room. I got up to tie a T-shirt over my eyes and climbed back into bed thinking longingly of the silk drapes we’d left back in Encino. They were remote-controlled blackout drapes. I’d never taken the time to appreciate how dark they kept our bedroom. Boy, I’d been living the life.

Other kinks presented themselves. A few nights after the heater broke, the carbon monoxide detector went off. The hot water heater wasn’t venting properly. Tori-style, we moved to the Hotel Bel-Air for three nights while we waited for it to be repaired. Then—I’m not even kidding—the refrigerator, washer, and dryer broke in quick succession, and their respective repair people deemed them irreparable. As a special bonus surprise, the air filters were caked with mold. Note to self: always have house inspected no matter what the seller’s Realtor says.

The blackout curtains weren’t the only past luxury I finally appreciated. It wasn’t until we had to buy a new refrigerator that I realized how lucky I’d been to live in houses that came with fancy appliances. A new Viking refrigerator like the one we’d had in Encino cost nine thousand dollars! We couldn’t begin to afford it.

One of the few upgrades we’d made to the house before we moved in was to replace the bamboo floors with reclaimed wood. It was expensive, but I was head over heels in love with the look of wide, unwaxed barn-house floors. It never occurred to me that the damn floors would be splinter factories. They were worse than the jumping cactus. The kids kept getting splinters in their feet. Even after we made the rule that everyone had to wear socks or slippers all the time, they still got them in their fingers.

We did remove the man-eating cactus, but the gardener who took care of it bore more grim news about the state of our backyard. I told him I was hoping to clear some space for the kids and animals to run around. He strode across the lawn to examine its overgrown perimeter. When he came back to me, he was shaking his head.

“Well, this is a lot of work you’ve got here,” he said. The grounds were full of huge, dead trees that were fire hazards, he explained. He told me it would be one hundred grand to clean them out.

“Okay,” I said. “Can we do it gradually?”

“I don’t know, he said, continuing to shake his head. “This is a big job. This is a really big job. I don’t know where to start.” Wow, even a person who did this for a living had no interest in tackling our yard. It was probably for the best. We couldn’t afford it anyway.

Dean and I weren’t the only ones who had to make some adjustments. When we told Liam that he and Stella were going to share a room, he was devastated. The former owners had two kids, a boy and a girl. One of the kids’ rooms was green, and one was purple. When my kids first saw the house, they figured they’d each have one of those rooms. They hadn’t factored in their soon-to-be-born sister. I gently broke it to them that one room would be a nursery for Hattie and Patsy to share, and that the two of them would share the other bedroom. Liam had an insta-meltdown. “I don’t want to share a room with Buggy!” he protested. “I want my own room!”

Oxygen was there, filming this moment of disappointment. Later, one of the network executives said to me, “That was so relatable. That was the most relatable you’ve ever been.”

Sigh. Was that the goal? We bought this tiny house, put ourselves in debt, and said good-bye to civilized life as we knew it just so we could be real?

Liam and Stella’s room was very small, but I found a way to satisfy them both. I split the room in two visually, putting in two separate carpets and two different wallpapers. Stella’s side of the room was pink and purple and white. Liam’s was blue, green, and orange. The result was adorable. But we still hadn’t answered the question of where Jack would sleep.

There was the trailer in the backyard. From the beginning Dean was convinced that it was perfect for Jack. He said, “When I was a teenager I would have been beyond psyched to have my own trailer.” I had my doubts. Maybe if the trailer had resembled the ones I’d grown up with—the double-wides that actors use as dressing rooms on movie lots. They are clean and new, and inside they look like apartments. But our trailer had old wall-to-wall carpet and brown sliding accordion doors. There were cockroaches and spiders. The rickety pile in our backyard didn’t fall into my definition of “trailer.” The word I would have chosen was “shack.”

Jack gave it a shot, he really did. He spent a couple nights out there, no doubt listening to the same coyotes that kept me up every night. After that he slept on a cot that we wedged in Liam and Stella’s room between their two bunk beds. They had to be very careful not to step on Jack when they got out of bed. Dean thought it was fine. “How do you think other people live?” he said. But I don’t think other people are crazy enough to downsize so dramatically with three children, a teenager, a baby nurse, and all those animals.

Part of why we’d moved was for the amazing Point Dume schools, but it was the middle of Liam’s last year at his preschool, and I wanted him to graduate with the rest of his class. If he was staying, Stella might as well stay too. So every day we drove them from Point Dume to Encino. It was a forty-five-minute drive each way. En route, both children would fall asleep. When we arrived at school, they were cranky and out of sorts. They never wanted to get out of the car.

Our prospects for the fall didn’t look much better. Liam could start at the Point Dume kindergarten. But there was no room in the local preschool. It had been booked two years in advance. We had no plan for Stella, other than to keep her at the preschool in the Valley. We were locked into this commute for more than a year.

We tried to make the most of it. One night Dean said, “All I want to do is sit in the back and appreciate the land.” He poured us each a drink, and we sat down on the porch.

Our land backed right against parkland. There was no view, just the dark shadows of dense trees. As the sun set, the packs of coyotes began to howl. It seemed like a tumbleweed might roll by. Dean loved it. I wanted the manicured garden that I pictured with a farmhouse in the Italian countryside. I wanted the meticulous grounds of Versailles. You can take the girl out of the manor . . . I looked at the wild bushes, weeds, and cactuses, and sighed.

Dean said, “What? You don’t like it?”

I said, “Do you really think I like this?”

Dean said, “I think it’s beautiful, but I can’t enjoy it if you’re unhappy.”

I said, “What are we going to do during the summer with no pool?”

Dean said, “I’m going to get an aboveground pool for them.”

I said, “What’s that? Like a blow-up pool?”

Dean tried to explain, but I had to Google Image it to understand. Understanding is not the same as accepting.

Dean said, “That’s what most people do.”

On November 16, the night of Dean’s birthday, the family went to dinner, and afterward Stella and Liam were in our bed, opening Dean’s presents. I was in bed too, wearing just underwear, no top. Dean and Liam started making funny faces and taking pictures of them with Dean’s phone. Dean tweeted one of Liam with a rolling-pin sticker from the gift wrapping stuck on his forehead. He captioned it “Pinhead.” What he didn’t notice was that in the background of the shot, in plain view, were my tits. Oblivious to the impending storm, we went to sleep. At seven thirty
A.M
. I awoke to our house phone and both cell phones going crazy. It was our publicist calling. My husband had unknowingly leaked (no pun intended) a pic of my milk-engorged nursing boobies to the public. My tits had gone viral.

Dean deleted the photo from his Twitter account right away, but the damage was done. Some people felt bad for me. Others criticized me for having my top off in front of my children. I pled that I was nursing Hattie. But the truth was Hattie had been fast asleep in her room for a couple of hours. I was just topless. Dean and I don’t believe in hiding our bodies. We don’t want our children to feel that their bodies are something to hide. Also, well, I’m lazy and sometimes can’t be bothered to go all the way to the closet to change into nightclothes.

WHEN THANKSGIVING ROLLED around, we still hadn’t settled in. Before we moved we had given away boxes and boxes of stuff. We put most of our furniture, which belonged in a much bigger house, in storage. Even so, we still had boxes up to our ears. We were so overwhelmed by the boxes that we put them outside, in a big pile leading down the hill, with tarps covering them. Boxes of toys, shoes, office supplies, files, pictures, and a collection of faux-fur vests that would disappear, never to be seen again. What would we do with these boxes? And when? We had no plan. Nonetheless, I boldly invited my mother to our house for a country Thanksgiving. I wanted to thank her for helping us with the down payment, of course, but part of me also wanted her to see the real me. Her daughter—raised in a mansion—had chosen a simple, small family life.

I was nervous for my mother to see the house. She’d loaned us the money to buy it, and I wanted her to think we’d made a sensible investment. But we’d only been living there for about a month, and the place was still in complete disarray. Even putting the clutter aside, this house was completely contradictory to how my mother lived. In the moments before she arrived I looked at our Thanksgiving setup through her eyes. The kitchen wasn’t more than a corner nook. Dean, Patsy, and I were all climbing on top of each other trying to cook. The kids were clamoring to help. I was photographing every step for my blog. It was chaos.

I watched through the window when my mother’s driver pulled up. The front yard was filled with weeds. There was a little stone pathway, with weeds on either side, leading up to a rickety old wooden fence. (It was the white picket fence of my dreams, but at this moment its gate was off its hinges.) My mother approached, holding a bunch of roses and a housewarming gift. She opened the gate, and Hank, the pig, nearly ran her down. The reality show producer in me took mental note. Perfect.

“Hi, Mommy!” I said, stepping out onto the front porch. “Welcome to our new house.” What would she say? Would she notice how charming the house was? Or what a big change this was for us?

“Oh my God, is that a pig?” she said. If she had any thoughts about the house and our move, I would have to wait to hear them.

“Yes, you know Hank.” I led her to the door, shooing the chickens out of our way. Dean was right there to greet her, as were the kids. There was nowhere else to be. There were still boxes blocking the hallway.

We had Thanksgiving dinner at the table in the kitchen, seven of us squished in on folding chairs at the breakfast table, which was probably designed for four. Dean made a turducken, a chicken inside a duck inside a turkey. We had stuffing, green beans, and sweet potatoes, and I made a few pies. It was a nice night, pretty close to my fantasy of a cozy, messy family holiday.

My mother left without ever saying anything about the house, and I suppose that was her way of being polite. But after she left I realized how much I’d wanted to hear that she was proud of me. Dean and I were leading a simple life, surrounded by our children and animals. We were cooking and doing everything ourselves. It was so different from how I’d grown up. Couldn’t she see? I’d turned into a real homemaker!

The next day my mother forwarded me an e-mail that she’d sent to her best friend. Her friend had asked about Thanksgiving, and my mother’s response was, “Let me tell you how great it was. They’re living their dream. Their own
Green Acres
. A pig greeted me at the door. They cooked a fabulous dinner.” The e-mail said everything I’d wanted her to say! She got it. I was a Beverly Hills girl who’d moved to a farm. (In Malibu, but still.) When I asked her if the e-mail was for me or for her friend, she said, “Both of you.” She was being supportive in her own way. That was enough for me.

For Christmas we went to Lake Arrowhead, to a house that we were renting for the second year in a row with Patsy, the Guncles, Simone, and Scout’s mother, Grandma Jacquie. It was a Tudor house right on the lake, with big open bay windows and a great gourmet kitchen with all Viking appliances. There were too many fake florals around the house for my taste, but the amazing huge fireplaces more than made up for that.

We went to a Christmas-tree lot and I decided to go for it—I bought an all-white flocked tree. We bought plastic ornaments and colored lights at CVS.

Usually it snows in Lake Arrowhead and we go skiing or sledding, but that year it was warmer. We didn’t do much of anything. We’d go into the village to poke around, or stay home, walking the kids down to the lake to feed the ducks, watching movies, and cooking every single meal. It was a big house—unlike Malibu there was plenty of room for all of us—and was really restful. A brief reprieve before a surprising curveball.