Open Book

by Jessica Simpson

“Take a breath,” my mother would say, getting down to my level to look me in the eye. That only worked so well. If you want someone to calm down, try telling them “calm down” and see where it gets you. But Connie had another idea, something that worked with other people who stuttered. Singing.

  “What you’re trying to say,” Mom said to me one day, “sing it to me.”

  I turned the phrase over in my mind, smoothing the edges of its consonants and vowels until the words became the breaths of a song. A lyric I could control.

  “I want Cheeeeeeri-ohhhhs,” I sang. I can’t describe that release. The rush of simply being understood.

  “Yes, you can have Cheerios,” my mother yelled. “You can have whatever you want! You sound so beautiful.”

  For the next two years, singing was the only time I didn’t stutter. I sang for everything I wanted, like some Disney princess making a wish. Around four, the stutter became more pronounced and my parents took me to a therapist. He used art therapy and asked me to draw myself in the family. I drew my parents standing in front of our house, then put myself inside looking out from a window. He told my parents I had a fear of abandonment. Looking back, I know my parents never left me alone, and maybe I was even around them too much. But somehow, I still had a fear that they would leave me.

  I kept going, and the stutter resolved. I stayed shy, though, and it didn’t really help that our family was constantly moving. We would move eighteen times before I hit fifth grade. You move around a lot working in the Baptist church, but my father was especially restless. Even when he left the ministry for a few years when I was little to see what it would be like for us to actually have money, he kept accepting transfers from his job selling postage meters for Pitney Bowes.

  He usually gave my mom and me one month’s notice. “Say bye to your friends.” The ones I had just made. Even with my shyness, I learned to adjust until change was maybe not easy but expected.

  We were briefly living in Waco when my sister Ashlee was born in October 1984. I was four and had prayed for a sister. I stopped every single person I saw at the hospital to bring them to the nursery.

  “That’s my sister,” I said, over and over again. I didn’t care if you were a nurse or doctor who had somewhere to be. You were going to see this baby girl. That night, I had a temper tantrum when Nana and Papaw, my mother’s parents, said they were taking me to stay the night at their house. I didn’t want Ashlee to spend the night without me. She was my baby. When she came home, I kept putting a little pallet beneath her crib so I could sleep under her. When she was one, and we were living in Littleton, Colorado, Ashlee began to climb out of her crib and sneak into my room to sleep with me. Every morning, my mother would find us snuggled like two little puppies.

  We moved to Littleton in September 1985, the only time we left Texas during my childhood. I think my dad was escaping something. His father, my Papa, had died suddenly in May of 1985 at age sixty-four. He had been a beloved Southern Baptist preacher after serving as a U.S. Army sergeant in World War II—the nicest man on the planet. I just remember he had massive hands and this great big belly laugh. He always sat on a recliner, and I would tickle his feet just to hear him laugh. He died while my parents were on a trip to Hawaii that they had saved up for and probably still couldn’t afford. They left me with my mom’s parents and Ashlee with dad’s. Papa showed up two hours early to get Ashlee the morning of the trip, and the change in plans infuriated my dad. He didn’t feel like entertaining his father. “I’ve got stuff to do,” he yelled at Papa. They got on the plane and he never saw Papa again. He died of a heart attack while they were in Hawaii. One minute he was mowing the lawn, the next he was gone.

  After that, my dad felt lost. We moved to Colorado and didn’t even go to church. The irony is that my dad got a job selling to churches—supplies like choir robes and stained glass. I thought he sold BMWs because he drove one and it was all he talked about.

  Littleton was magic to a Texas girl, so opposite to what I knew. I’d only seen snow in picture books about Santa Claus, so there was a magic to it. We moved just before I started kindergarten and I liked school, even if the day sort of peaked with The Pledge of Allegiance. I loved hearing our voices in unison with our hands on our hearts making this solemn vow that felt important. I was just never going to be the best student, because I didn’t know yet that I was a different kind of learner. It was hard for me to focus in school, and as the teacher talked my mind wouldn’t just wander off. It would take off running like a track star. By the time I realized I wasn’t listening, I’d accidentally given my mind such a head start that I could never catch up. But if we went on a field trip, I could tell you all about where we went and what we learned. I told myself I was more of a life experience type, and I would rather travel to the place that we were talking about and form my own opinion than be told what was important.

  The morning of January 28, 1986, we kindergarteners sat on the floor—criss-cross applesauce—to watch the Challenger space shuttle launch. Our class had spent a couple weeks learning about space and planets in preparation, because our school was one of the many in America that NASA TV had hooked up with a live viewing of the launch. NASA made a big deal about that flight because it was the first time a “normal” non-astronaut was going into space. Christa McAuliffe, a social studies teacher from Concord, New Hampshire, was picked from thousands of applicants in NASA’s Teacher in Space Project. We were all excited, because when else did we get to watch TV in school?

  At 9:38 a.m., we watched as the Challenger blew up in a ball of white smoke. At first, we thought it was the blastoff moment. I think even our teachers did. And then there was just nothing in the air. A teacher turned off the TV, but it was too late. A room full of five-year-olds had just watched seven people die and there was no hiding that fact. They were there, and then they were gone. Let’s just say we had some questions.

  When I got home, my parents let me watch President Ronald Reagan speak to the nation from the Oval Office at three o’clock our time. I didn’t understand much of the speech, but I listened when it felt like he talked directly to me. “And I want to say something to the schoolchildren of America who were watching the live coverage of the shuttle’s takeoff,” he said. “I know it is hard to understand, but sometimes painful things like this happen. It’s all part of the process of exploration and discovery. It’s all part of taking a chance and expanding man’s horizons. The future doesn’t belong to the fainthearted; it belongs to the brave.”

  The future belonged to the brave. When I went to bed, I prayed for all the astronauts. For Christa McAuliffe and her family. President Reagan had talked about their sacrifice, and in my five-year-old mind, I decided the best way to honor that was to take on Christa McAuliffe’s work and become an astronaut and teacher. Christa McAuliffe needed me to do it, and kids like me who had trouble following along in class needed a teacher who understood the way they learned.

  I was so serious about becoming an astronaut after this tragedy that my parents let me attend space camp that summer. I was all in. They gave each of us a little NASA blue button-down shirt, so I was basically already an astronaut in my mind. They led us into the zero-gravity simulator, built to look like you were in a shuttle, and I took right to floating around, flying through the air just like I did in my dreams.

  And then I hit the first roadblock on the race to space. Lunch. They served freeze-dried ice cream as a “treat.”

  “This is what they eat in space,” one of the counselors said, cheerily passing out the foil-wrapped squares, each with chemical stripes of strawberry, vanilla, and chocolate. One small bite of that chalky excuse for dessert felt like a betrayal.

  “Ugh,” I said, spitting it into a napkin. “I can’t be an astronaut. No way.”

  I hung up my NASA dreams right then and there.

  BY THE END OF SUMMER, THINGS WERE TENSE AT HOME. MY PARENTS WERE fighting a lot, each accusing the other of overspending. They always stayed kind to each
other in front of Ashlee and me, but sometimes one would have to storm off to keep from saying something nasty.

  This made me think about money from a young age, even though we’d never had any, so I didn’t know any different. Before I was born, Dad took out a two-thousand-dollar loan from the one bank in Cross Plains, Texas, and had them keep the money because he knew mom and he couldn’t help but blow through it. Then that money went to pay the hospital when I was born. My dad paid the doctor who delivered me with the Canon 24-70mm lens on his camera. Dr. MacDonald admired it as dad photographed my arrival. “I tell you what, Dr. MacDonald, I will trade you this lens for your bill.”

  More and more, I heard them fight, and my dad saying, “We’ll fly by this month. We’ll be fine.” I wanted to help, but didn’t know how until the answer came to me, at where else but the mall? I remember walking by some kiosk that had these ornaments with everybody’s name and its meaning. I saw mine and held it on the hook. “Jessica: The Wealthy One.” It stayed with me. I walked around thinking, I’m the wealthy one, not realizing it meant rich in spirit. I just thought it was about money, and every time my parents seemed worried, I said, “I’m gonna be rich.” I’d be the one to lift my parents out of their struggles. I’d be the one to end their fights, once and for all.

  “Well, God provides,” my dad said. “He’ll always provide for you.”

  But we needed money now. There was no secret fortune for me to find and no cute barter stories about camera lenses to be had. My family declared bankruptcy to get out from under the weight of the bills. As part of what my mom called a “reorganization,” my parents announced we were moving back to Texas. Dad called around and got a job as a youth minister in Burleson, a little town in the Fort Worth area. So, it was time to say good-bye to my friends again. Soon after we moved, I started first grade. I walked into a roomful of strangers who all seemed to know each other, and I did my best to fade into the background. I was relieved my seat was in the back, and I chose to sit in the back whenever I could at school.

  We lived in a two-bedroom apartment, which my mom hated because she’d gotten used to living in a five-bedroom house in Littleton. We weren’t there much, because our life revolved around church. When my dad returned to preaching, I thought we moved because God would tell my dad it was time to move. He studied to be an adolescent therapist, learning how to reach that brain. Because he was such a good storyteller, he could tug at the heart, too. He’d make people weep, holding up their hands as they listened to him share the Word in a way they had never heard. Even as a kid I could feel the energy of change in the room when my dad was working.

  And I changed also. In the Baptist faith, you choose to be baptized when you are ready. It’s for believers only, and it’s up to you. You don’t just baptize an infant and make the decision for them, which is kind of cool because for a religion that can be painted as so confining, individual choice is a fundamental part of being Baptist.

  On a Sunday that had felt very normal up until that moment, I felt the Word and I made the choice. My dad was up front preaching, and he asked if anybody wanted to come down to be baptized in the name of Christ. I stood up in my white dress, hugged my mother, and stepped forward. As I approached, my father began to cry. He helped me into the baptismal pool, and I felt his hand on my back as he gently submerged me. The water washed over me, and I emerged new. Growing up, there would be kids who would get baptized a lot. I always kind of rolled my eyes at that, because a lot of them did it for attention. It’s not a car wash, you know? The one time took for me.

  Dad’s youth minister salary was about $25,000 a year, so my mom was always looking for ways to supplement the income. This was the era of Jazzercise and she saw that Jane Fonda’s Workout was becoming the highest-selling VHS tape of all time. She thought, I can do that. Since we were always at church, she decided to start teaching an aerobics class there. She had to go talk in front of the whole deacon board to get approval, and she brought us along. There was this old country man who kept staring at her as she talked about aerobics.

  He finally interrupted her. “You gonna be doing acrobatics in the church chapel?”

  “Aerobics,” she said, overenunciating every syllable. “Working out. Good for your heart.”

  The men looked at each other. It was bad enough my dad had an earring, and now his crazy wife wanted people dancing in the church.

  Finally, she hit on the point: “I’m going to be helping women get their best bodies possible.”

  Again, the men looked at each other, but this time they were sold. She started the Heavenly Bodies company, and the class was called Jump for Jesus—

  No, I will not shut my mouth. That is really what she called it. Let’s continue.

  Jump for Jesus was popular, and I went to almost every class, collecting all the checks made out to Heavenly Bodies. I sat in the back, with all these women jamming to Michael W. Smith and Amy Grant, the cool Christian singers at the time. “Stretch your arms towards the heavens,” my mother would yell. “Lift those knees higher for Jesus!” Mom made her own workout video, which I also sold. If we went to any Baptist conferences, you bet we brought those tapes along.

  Laugh, but she got what she wanted. We left the apartment and leased a two-story house as we continued to make payments on our debts. They still overspent, but not on extravagant things. They just wanted to be the parents who said yes when their daughters asked for Caboodles for Christmas. We opened a lot of credit cards, and thank God for layaway. It was part of their relentless positivity. They were in the business of changing lives. Mom and Dad were always taking people in. When parents threw their pregnant daughter out, she needed a place to sleep until they came to their senses. When a kid was trying not to do drugs, he needed to get away from parents who had their own issues with addiction. In the South, there are so many secrets, and my parents were there to give people a safe place. Even when my parents didn’t physically take people in, they collected people to look after.

  One day after Jump for Jesus, my mom took me across the street to a young woman’s house. I will call her Jane to protect her privacy. Jane was probably nineteen, a heavyset girl with brown hair who had run away from Iowa to follow some dumb boy who liked her because she wasn’t used to that. He got her pregnant, and he skipped town before the baby boy arrived. She was stranded in Burleson, broke with no support, and her parents thought she had made her bed so she could just stay there.

  This was before anybody understood postpartum depression. When it was just women who could recognize it in each other and step in to say, “Let me help you.” But Jane had nobody. That’s why my mom had a heart for her.

  So, when she hadn’t seen her for a bit, she was concerned. She called the house from church and there was no answer. “Come on, Jess,” she said. “Let’s just check on her.”

  You could hear the baby crying before you even got to the door. Wailing. Mom knocked and there was no answer. “Jane?” she called. She looked at me for one second, and some mom instinct in her kicked in. The door was unlocked so she let herself in.

  “Jane, it’s Tina,” she called out as she made her way to the room with the crib. There was no answer. The baby was left all alone in the house. He was on a plastic sheet, not even a real sheet, and he was covered in pee and poop. When mom went to lift him, she realized that he was literally stuck to the bed.

  “Jess, go sit in the living room,” she said.

  I did as I was told as my mom ran to the bathroom and took every towel and washcloth she could find to run under warm water. She brought them to the crib and used the warm wet towels to unstick the poor baby. She lovingly cleaned him as we both cried. She went to the kitchen and made a bottle of formula just from the muscle memory of motherhood.

  “You’re okay,” she whispered to him again and again, as he took hungry gulps. “You’re okay.”

  When he was finally calm, she held him in the crook of her arm and went to the phone on the wall.

 
“Joe, I’m at Jane’s,” she said. “I’m bringing this baby home.”

  She left a note for Jane saying the baby was safe and asked her to come to our house. When she showed up, my parents didn’t judge her. My parents were always good like that. They were just doing the best they could, too. Jane wasn’t a bad person, she just needed help with her depression. She would not be equipped to parent until she could take care of herself. If she had a family, my mother explained to her, they would see how she was struggling and step in. Jane didn’t have that, but she had us. That’s the power of faith in action. It’s not about talking and judging. It’s about doing.

  Jane’s baby lived with us for six weeks, and I thought I had a new baby brother. I know my parents were prepared to formally adopt him if need be. As we cared for the baby, my father got Jane into therapy, and my parents helped her reconcile with her family. Soon, she was able to take the baby back to Iowa with her.

  My mother tried to make it a joyous thing for us. Jane was going home to be reunited with her parents. “The baby is going to be where he needs to be,” she said.

  I felt a real loss, though. As I remember it, she just up and vanished with the baby, which of course isn’t true. But tell it to a six-year-old. I loved him—the way he slept with his hands up, totally at peace as a little boy in Ashlee’s hand-me-downs. The first morning after he left with Jane, I briefly forgot he was gone, and I felt that all-body disappointment that kids can experience. Your shoulders sink with your heart, and you think you’ll never get over it.

  I did. I had to. With the same fervor that my mom now flips houses, my parents fixed people throughout my childhood. We took in people who were sick or neglected, and it wasn’t always fun. Sometimes it was a chore to share my parents with others. Our family time was always with others, whether they were there physically or talked about in our prayers. “To whom much is given, much is expected,” was what I heard. I understood, but sometimes I didn’t feel we had much to share.