Mommywood Read online

  From the very beginning, whenever Liam woke up, Dean flew out of bed, grabbed the bottle, and went in to him. That was great, but it happened every morning, and I started to feel like I never had a chance to give my son his bottle. As far as Dean was concerned, it was no big deal. He heard the baby, grabbed the bottle, and went in. But in my mind, who would be the first to get to Liam became a race. I started calculating: if I have the monitor on my side of the bed and make myself wake up early enough, then I’ll see his head pop up before he makes a noise and I can flip off the monitor and shoot out of bed before Dean stirs.

  I know how ridiculous this complaining sounds: “Husbands, they’re always trying to do more than their share of the child rearing. Are you with me, mommies?” But it affected me because of how I was raised and how much I’d told myself that I was going to be there for my child at all times. Plus, Liam was getting older. He was changing from a blob (albeit a lovable one) into a baby who could express desires. As soon as he could speak, he started turning into a Daddy’s boy. When Dean walked into the room, Liam screamed, “Dada!” Meanwhile I walked in and…I could be the plumber. Not even—a plumber at least has cool tools. If we were in the car and Dean got out to pump gas or get a coffee, Liam got hysterical, even though I was sitting right there saying, “It’s okay, Liam. Mama’s here. Dada will be right back.” It bugged me. The doctors always said, “Oh, kids go back and forth. Today it’s the dad. Tomorrow it’s the mom.” My friends said the same thing. It was a phase. But for Liam, today was the dad, tomorrow was the dad, the next day was the dad…When was it going to switch to me? In the back of my mind I couldn’t help wondering if there was something he wasn’t getting from me. Maybe he wasn’t feeling the maternal connection. Maybe I was repeating the past.

  There were times when I was holding Liam and he’d scream and cry and lunge for Dean. I know this happens all the time: a baby wants his father. But when Liam gave the smallest sign that he wanted to be with Dean, I’d think I’d already failed. I’d hand him over, saying, “He hates me. My own child hates me.” I even had a moment when I decided that there was a maternal scent. You know how dogs can smell if people are dog people? Well, maybe there was a smell that babies recognized as coming from a maternal person and I didn’t have the smell. Or worse—maybe I had an antibaby smell! Maybe it ran in the family. Maybe it was the Candy Curse! I was so afraid of becoming her that I convinced myself I wasn’t meant to be a mom.

  Finally, Dean sat me down for an intervention. He said, “You have to stop saying Liam hates you. Ever heard of a self-fulfilling prophecy? You’re a really good mom. You just have to believe in yourself.”

  You don’t start believing in yourself because someone tells you that you should. You have to make changes. Maybe it was a phase, but even so I needed to spend more time with Liam—more alone time. I know I’m lucky to have a husband like Dean, but when you have such an enthusiastic partner you kinda forget how to function solo.

  One day it came time for Liam’s swim class and Dean couldn’t go with me. This was my chance. Operation Make Liam a Mama’s Boy had begun. I was excited to get some time to myself with my son, and I could feel reasonably confident that he wouldn’t lunge for Daddy’s arms when Daddy wasn’t anywhere in sight. But as I plunked him awkwardly into the car seat and fumbled with the straps I realized, Wow, I don’t actually take him in the car by myself very often. I was always with Liam, but how much of the heavy lifting did I actually do? Dean made everything look so easy. I felt like a new mom all over again.

  Liam’s swim teacher doesn’t work at a regular indoor pool with a locker room. She has wealthy clients who let her use their saltwater pools all day for lessons. Their properties (in Brentwood and Beverly Hills) are so large they probably don’t even notice she’s there. Once I got Liam out of the car and safely in the pool, I thought we were golden. Liam is a crazy-good swimmer. He’s, like, the next Michael Phelps. He just wants to spend all of his time in the water. So in spite of my prepool bumbling, he was having a great time, splashing and kicking and practicing blowing bubbles. Then his swim teacher said, “Oh, he pooped,” and handed him to me. Yipes. I was the mom. Naturally I’d change his diaper. I’d changed his diaper a million times by now (sorry, landfills). Except this was a swim diaper. And it was full of poo.

  Either you know this already or it’s too much information, but swim diapers aren’t rigged quite the same way as normal diapers. Swim diapers have a tough job. They have to keep in whatever comes out. Without them, babies would put the “poo” in “pool.” So they don’t have convenient Velcro openings. You can’t just untape, wipe, and be done with it. Instead, they’re like little pants. The load is kind of trapped in there. Good news for the other swimmers, but once I had Liam in my arms, I had no idea how to get that swim diaper off while adequately containing its contents. That is to say, I feared the poop.

  I must have looked as helpless as I felt because the teacher shouted over, “Some people do it over the trash can.” All the other moms who were there with their kids glanced over at me. The pressure was on. Now I was supposed to suspend Liam over the trash can with one hand while stripping him down with the other. Huh? Was that supposed to help me? How many hands did she think I had? I couldn’t get a visual on the midair strip-down, so I went back to basics. I laid Liam down on his towel. I pulled off the swim diaper. Again, either you know this already or it’s too much information, but when poo is exposed to that environment (pool water, a sopping swim diaper, a hyper child—the trifecta), it loses its structural integrity. There was no…cohesion. Just crumbles of poo everywhere. A horror show.

  I went in for the kill, but a few swipes later I was out of wipes and still facing a seemingly insurmountable mess. I swear, there was actually more there than when I’d started. Liam writhed and struggled to break free from my less-than-sure grasp so he could get back in his beloved pool. With the heroic sacrifice of his swim towel I managed to get him clean(ish), but when I was done, my operating table looked like a colonoscopy gone very, very wrong. I rolled up the diaper, the uncontained poo crumbles, the wipes, his bathing suit (he could finish the lesson in his clean swim diaper), and all other contaminated items and potentially contaminated items into his swim towel, picked it up—and stopped. Yes, there was a garbage can right there, but I could imagine what the other swimmers would be saying if they saw me throw away a poo-smeared towel. She can’t change a diaper and she throws away towels as if they grow on trees. The garbage can was not going to happen. I stuffed the whole thing into my diaper bag. I’d deal with it at home.

  I may not be the most graceful mom in the world, but grace isn’t the point. I don’t have to be a perfect mom. I can be bad at changing swim diapers or clumsy at stroller-to-car transfers. I just want to be there. To laugh with Liam. To watch him grow. To make sure he knows how loved he is every step of the way. I was a Daddy’s girl, and I always wonder how that affected my relationship with my mother. Liam might be Daddy’s boy for the rest of his life. There was no way I was going to let that—or a little poop—stop me from building my own relationship with him.

  Later that afternoon Dean came across the towel bundle in the hallway. He pulled back a corner and wrinkled his nose. “What have we here?” Oh. That. Yeah, Dean had a good laugh over that one.

  Is She or Isn’t She?

  When Liam was born I was happy. We were showing him off and celebrating at hotel restaurants across Beverly Hills. Having a baby didn’t make me want to diet. It made me want to indulge. And breastfeeding made me hungry. I knew I had some baby weight to lose, but I didn’t want to think about that right away. Some celebrities may be making life hard for other moms by showing up in magazines two weeks after giving birth looking like they’ve never had a bite of ice cream, much less carried a baby, but I’m not one of those people. But being in shape is part of my job. Every mom wants her old body back, but usually the harshest critic is the mom herself, looking in the mirror at the pants that used to fit but no
w have soft belly (sounds nicer than it looks) bulging out over the top. The weeklies are my mirrors. I knew that if I didn’t get to work and lose the weight, I’d be hearing about it from them, and they’d be much tougher than I’d be on myself. I dieted and exercised three times a week until eventually, when Liam was six months old, I hit my goal weight.

  Now you may think that I was excited to hit my goal weight because it meant that I was healthy and fit. Nuh-uh. Because now I looked great? Nope. Because the weeklies wouldn’t have a field day? A little. But the real reason I was so excited to get back to this weight was that now I could shop. I love to shop, and—let’s face it—maternity clothes don’t count. There are some very cute ones out there, but you’re still making the most of a limited selection. Now I was back in the real world of clothes, clothes, clothes! I was so excited to shop again. I went to Fred Segal and splurged on a pair of skinny jeans. Okay, the truth is I splurged on four pairs of skinny jeans in all different washes. I was bad. It was wrong. Dean was shocked. You wonder why I went into debt after so many years on 90210? Fred Segal is on the list of reasons. But I was just nuts about those skinny jeans.

  When I stopped breastfeeding Liam, my ob-gyn, Dr. J, put me on the pill, but I didn’t like the side effects, so he phoned in another prescription. I’d never heard of this pill, so I read all the accompanying information carefully. Mistake. There was such a long list of side effects, I got paranoid. What if I got an aneurysm? Or breast cancer? I’d already taken the first pill, but the second night I was so nervous that I didn’t take it. That evening Dean and I had sex. Right afterward I said, “Baby, I didn’t take that pill today.” I know, maybe that information would have been useful to convey before the sex. But Dean just said, “Oh, it’s fine, it’s fine.”

  I flashed back to a phone call I’d gotten just a week earlier from my friend Jenny. Jenny, whose son Shane is two months older than Liam, had also had a bad experience with a new birth control pill. She’d stopped taking it. She and her husband, Norm, had had sex one time, and she’d said, “Norm, I think I’m ovulating.” She called to tell me that she was pregnant with her third.

  Suddenly I felt like I was starring in the Lifetime movie presentation of My Phone Call with Jenny. Just like Jenny I had gone off the pill. Just like Jenny I’d had sex once. Now, just like Jenny I went to the bathroom and said, “Babe, I think I’m ovulating.” I didn’t say, “Norm, I think I’m ovulating.” That would have been weird. “Watch,” I told Dean, “I’m sure I just got pregnant.” After that night I stayed off the pill, but we took precautions. Still, I knew how that phone call with Jenny had ended.

  Soon after the night in question I made an appearance with the Pussycat Dolls at their show in Vegas. I came out wearing a sequined black strapless dress that hit me above the knee. It had Velcro up the side, and after a few minutes I ripped it off to reveal an outfit rivaling Britney Spears’s outfit at the VMAs in ambition, but I don’t think I risked the same response. I’d known this night was coming and had been working hard. Two weeks earlier I hadn’t been sure I’d reach my goal, but in those last two weeks it was as if my body was like, “Okay, okay, I don’t want to embarrass you.” Everything tightened up. I introduced the different performers, doing little monologues and jokes. At the end I posed with the Pussycat Dolls and they said, “We hear Tori can do a trick on the pole,” so I went over and did a spin. I felt really good standing up there with my newly flat tummy. It was my big “back in shape” reveal.

  A month later I felt a little crampy and decided I really should take a pregnancy test. I had one left over from when I was trying to get pregnant with Liam. I took one of those tests where one pink line means you’re not pregnant and two pink lines means you’re pregnant. There was one line, definitely. And then there was a hint of a shadow of a second line. I showed it to Dean. He said, “No, you’re reading it wrong. That’s not a line.” Clearly I needed more tests. Lots more.

  I didn’t want to be seen (or, God forbid, photographed by the paparazzi) purchasing pregnancy tests, so I dragged my best friend, Mehran, to the drugstore with me. He and I have been best friends since high school, and every time Dean goes out of town, Mehran and I have a sleepover, staying up late to watch horror movies and eat piña colada Yoplait yogurt. When Dean does guy stuff, like scuba diving or motorcycle racing, Mehran is there to fill in. We go get pedicures and go shopping. Mehran was the natural recruit.

  I stood on the other side of the store, in the first-aid aisle, while Mehran picked out a pregnancy test. I pretended to be contemplating my wart removal options, though, come to think of it, being outed as a warthog would be much less flattering than being outed as possibly pregnant.

  After what seemed like hours Mehran came back across the store with a pregnancy test. It said it was ninety-eight percent reliable. We could do better than that. I sent him back to try again. But the design of the next pregnancy test looked cheesy. I wanted more scientific-looking packaging. Back Mehran went. Finally we settled on a test with high reliability and an acceptable design. There were no ambiguous pink lines on this test. It would say “pregnant” or “not pregnant.” Nobody was going to accuse me of reading that test wrong.

  We headed back to my house and I drank lots of water and peed on all three sticks. Mehran and I waited a few short minutes for the results to appear. Was I pregnant? The first test said “pregnant.” The second one said “definitely pregnant.” The third one said, “Ask again later—nah, just kidding. You’re totally knocked up.”

  Jenny and I would be pregnant together for the second time. Some women who live or work together get their periods at the same time. Apparently Jenny and I get pregnant at the same time. I’d had all of a week to live it up at my goal weight. Now I was four weeks pregnant. I looked down at my Fred Segal skinny jeans and sighed. I knew they weren’t long for that body. I’d just given away all my maternity clothes. I mean, I knew I was going to want at least one more child, but I thought we’d wait till Liam was a year old to start trying, and by then all of my maternity clothes would have been out of style. As it happened, Liam was only seven months old (six when we conceived)! He wasn’t content to hang out with us in his carrier anymore. He wanted to wiggle around, explore, eat solid food, and make a mess. I couldn’t imagine what the workload was going to be like with two.

  But I remembered how much I’d loved being pregnant. It calmed me. I felt safe and completely at ease. I loved the feeling that I was completely responsible for protecting and taking care of someone else. We were taking care of each other. I was never alone. Call it pregnancy hormones, but I’m convinced that pregnancy gave me the sense of connection that I was missing with my mother. I was caring for a child, but I didn’t have the fear that I was doing it wrong.

  Mehran, my gay husband, had guided me through the testing phase. Now it was time to tell husband number one. I was nervous about telling Dean. My heart was pounding just because it was big news: I didn’t really think there was a chance he’d be anything but excited. There was no doubt that we wanted multiple children together. Things were just happening a little faster than we’d anticipated.

  I put Liam in a blue shirt and taped a little sign that said “I’m a big brother” to the shirt. Then I called Dean up to the bedroom. Liam was in bed with me. I handed him to Dean. No reaction. “Babe,” I said, “look at Liam’s shirt.” Dean sort of chuckled. Like the way you’d chuckle if you were pretending to get a joke but actually had no clue. Dean has many fine qualities, but I had to walk him through it: “What does the shirt say?…Right, and if Liam’s a big brother, that means…” It took longer than Dean would like to admit, but suffice it to say that before the night was over he was made to understand that he was going to have another child.

  Dean was psyched. He’d been psyched when I thought I was pregnant in Scotland, and he was happy now. I mean, neither Dean nor I had an extreme reaction to the news. It wasn’t “Oh, shit!” or “Oh, yes!” We had always talked about wanting a boy a
nd a girl. Of course any baby is a blessing, but we discussed how many boy babies we’d have before we’d stop trying for a girl. Dean had read about spinning sperm to try for the gender you want. A lot of people might look down on this, but we talked about whether we’d feel comfortable doing it. Was it messing with nature? Would it feel weird? We thought when Liam was a year and a half we’d talk to a doctor about what the research showed about spinning. Or we could see what the old wives’ tales said about timing and positions. When I got pregnant without looking into any of the girl planning, I immediately thought, Oh, okay, I guess I’m going to have a boy. Dean had his son Jack from his first marriage. We had Liam. I just thought, Dean shoots boys. No part of me thought I would naturally have a girl.

  Come January I was three months pregnant and we were ready to share our good news. But my life is not entirely my own. I lost the baby weight for my image, and now I had to keep my pregnancy under wraps for business reasons. My book sTORI telling was due to be published in March. My publicist said that if we announced or acknowledged my pregnancy beforehand, then all the magazines would run big pieces about me. If they ran big pieces about me now, then when the book came out they’d all say, “Oh, we just had Tori on our cover. We can’t do that again.” So my “team” decided that I had to do everything I could to hide my rapidly growing belly from the media until the book came out. By then I’d be five months pregnant!

  Luckily, right before I got pregnant, a company in New York called Porter showed me a beautiful black cashmere coat. It was heavy and thick and hit me just above the knee. They said they wanted to give it to me. I didn’t think I’d ever have a chance to wear a cashmere coat in Los Angeles, but it was chilly in New York on that trip and the coat was so gorgeous. Long story short, I did not turn it down. Thank God it was fall and thank God for that coat. When my belly needed hiding, which was almost instantly, the cashmere coat became my personal paparazzi shield. When I put it on, my blossoming pregnancy disappeared. Now you see it, now you don’t. There were heat waves that fall, but no matter how hot it got or what the occasion, I was wearing that same cashmere coat.