Unqualified

  Anna:“Wow, Kevin. Is Kevin your real name?”

  Cassie:“It is.”

  Anna:“I’ve got to tell you, I was hurt that I didn’t hear from you. I’m confused. Am I supposed to know that you are a spy or is it top secret?”

  Cassie:“I can only tell people I trust and care about, and I trust and care about you. I work for the CIA. I can’t tell you any more than that. So sometimes I disappear. Is this a relationship you think you can continue with?”

  Anna:“I think so. I’d love to maybe discuss this further, though I know you probably can’t give me a lot of information. Is everything you’ve told me about your life and childhood true?”

  Cassie:“For the most part, yes.”

  Anna:“For the most part?”

  Cassie:“I’ve changed some names. But they all know I work for the government.”

  Anna:“The only thing that worries me, I guess, is that you might be lying. I’m sure you can understand that. You probably have a suspicious mind, too, since you’re a spy.”

  Cassie:“Sure, I could see how it could appear that way.”

  Anna:“It’s not that you’re married, right? And have another family?”

  Cassie:“No. You just have to trust me.”

  Anna:“Is your life in danger a lot?”

  Cassie:“Not while I’m here in Los Angeles. Maybe when I’m abroad. Look, I hope this doesn’t change anything between us.”

  Anna:“Well, I think it will be hard if we’re in a relationship and I’m waiting for you to pick me up and you’ve disappeared.”

  Cassie:“I’m supportive of your career, Anna. I’d like it if you were supportive of mine.”

  Anna:“I love our country, but I feel like we haven’t known each other very long. Can you give me a little time? Actually, you know what I’ve just realized? You met my friend Elizabeth, right? Well, over the last couple of months I think I’ve fallen in love with her. I think I’m a lesbian. Thank you for protecting our country. Keep fighting the good fight, okay?”. . . . I was willing to give Kevin the benefit of the doubt at first. I was hoping the story would add up, but it definitely started to seem like he was lying. Long term, could I date a spy? Maybe. Chris has Navy SEAL buddies from his time filming Zero Dark Thirty who would talk about how they got calls in the middle of the night and would have to just leave and they couldn’t say what they were doing. They got the call and they were out—and they do the most dangerous stuff and their wives don’t know where they are. But Kevin could have just been supercreepy, with a wife and child.

  You are about to have sex for the first time with your guy of the month, a forty-year-old hottie named Todd. Just before you do the deed, he says, “I’m so glad I waited all these years. I’m a virgin. Let’s make this special.” How would you proceed?

  Anna:Have we talked about his previous relationships before?

  Cassie:Nothing too detailed. He’s had serious relationships before, but he wanted to wait for marriage or someone he thought was really the right, special girl.

  Anna:I think I’d be like, “Let’s do it!” I’ve never had sex with a virgin. I would probably feel like, Whoa, my vagina is magical. It would be a huge ego boost. I would want to ask him questions, but if things are getting hot and heavy—I’m thinking more like a dude right now than I usually do, but I think I would have sex now and ask questions later. Selfishly, I’d want to have that experience, though I’d definitely feel the weight of, Oh boy this is big for this person. I’d probably say something like, “Are you sure you’re ready? I would love to have sex with you but I want to make sure that you feel ready and if you do I’m glad.” The sex probably wouldn’t be that good or that long, but I’d hope he’d be happy with the sensation. And maybe later on I would ask about the other gals. What happened with them? Were they just okay with waiting? Did they do other things? Oral? Anal? But yeah, I think I would do it.

  Jack Pratt

  I got pregnant at thirty-five. Chris and I tried for a year. We did that thing everyone does, where I went off birth control, which I’d been on since I was seventeen, and figured I would get pregnant right away. We didn’t know enough about the whole process to realize that that was optimistic, so we approached getting pregnant with a lot of romance. Rather than bothering ourselves with checking my ovulation or taking my temperature or any of that stuff that maybe is actually useful, we just thought we’d burn some candles and set the mood and poof! A baby.

  It didn’t work exactly like that. Six or seven months passed and I didn’t get pregnant. Chris was traveling all the time for work, and while I would say we had a healthy sex life, it wasn’t like we were having sex every night—that would just be weird. So we decided that if a year passed and I still wasn’t pregnant we’d consult a doctor.

  At right around that one-year mark, I started to feel weird. I had to pee all the time. I was bloated and was more tired than usual and so hungry. For whatever reason, the frequency with which I was peeing was the major sign for me. Of course I must have missed my period, but I don’t remember getting hung up on that. It was simply, Why the fuck do I have to pee so much?

  So I took a pregnancy test and it was so thrilling. And then my doctor, whom I adore, called me and was like, “Since you’re thirty-five, you’re a geriatric pregnancy.” Huh, I thought. That’s new. It’s such a horrifying term. But despite geriatric conjuring the image of a ninety-year-old grandmother with a watermelon under her girdle, I actually had a really lovely pregnancy. I never felt ill. Chris and I were both excited and happy and ready to be Mom and Dad. Jack was growing at a great rate. And I just loved eating. I have a small frame and I hover around 110 pounds, but I was close to 180 by the time I was seven months in.

  But, as those of you who’ve been pregnant know, it can be boring. You can’t drink and all you want to do is binge on TV shows and you’re tired and your brain generally feels numb. I was filming the British comedy I Give It a Year in England and Chris was doing Zero Dark Thirty in Jordan, and he’d travel to visit me when he had the chance. After my twenty-week sonogram I had my British obstetrician put the sex of the baby in an envelope, and when Chris came to visit we sat in a hot tub—well, a lukewarm tub, because when you’re pregnant you can’t do anything fun—and did the big reveal. It was a really wonderful time.

  Soon after that we both finished our movies and went home to LA—Chris to Parks and Rec and me to my nesting phase. We got a crib and went to baby CPR class and did all the stuff that first-time parents do.

  By the time I was thirty weeks in, I was feeling lucky. Sure, I had restless legs and backaches, but I was active and my regular ultrasounds were all good, and compared to the horror stories I’d heard from some friends, I was having an easy time. Then, on the morning of August 10—when I was thirty weeks and one day—I woke up at two fifteen to a massive gush. The bed was soaked, and even though I felt the fluid coming out of my vagina, I smelled it to make sure it wasn’t pee. For those of you who haven’t had babies, let me assure you: You can’t really mistake your water breaking for peeing. They are entirely different sensations. But when you aren’t due for two more months and you’re taken by surprise by a sudden burst of fluid, you will pray that it’s urine, and you’ll go as far as sticking your nose in it if necessary.

  I was completely unprepared for anything dramatic like that to happen. I called my OB’s office, and I’ll never forget the way the on-call doctor said, very calmly, “Sooooo, you need to go to Cedars-Sinai. Right now.”

  Even after that phone call, it never really occurred to me that Jack was coming. I thought, I’ll go to the hospital, then maybe I’ll be home in a few hours. I know that sounds stupid, it was stupid, but I was in denial. My pregnancy had been so drama-free. I thought they’d stitch me up (is that a thing?) and send me on my way, but I certainly didn’t think I was in labor. Chris took it more seriously than I did. S
erious isn’t the right word. It’s not that I wasn’t serious; I was just in shock. So Chris threw some underwear and socks in a bag, but he knew enough to know there wasn’t time for anything else.

  We arrived at the hospital at two forty-five and since this was the middle of the night in Los Angeles, the emergency room was packed. The nurses put me in a wheelchair and rushed me into a room, where they immediately started pumping me full of magnesium, which had a 50 percent chance of stopping labor. It felt horrible. I could sort of feel it going through my veins and it was incredibly painful—the best way I can describe it is like having a headache throughout your entire body. There were a lot of medical professionals in that room, and that’s when the fear really set in, as well as the reality that my son might be coming two months early. The magnesium worked, fortunately, but the doctors were very clear that I would not be leaving the hospital until my baby was born.

  So they put me on bed rest. A lot of people think bed rest sounds amazing—you can skip work and watch TV and no one can fault you! Living the dream! But the goal was to be on bed rest for four weeks, to give the baby another month to grow. And this was not the kind of easy bed rest where you hang out on the couch but can sneak out to pee or get a snack. This was hospital bed, catheter, no showers, no standing up, ever. I didn’t know how to occupy my brain—I was too on edge for books, so I watched movies all day, which sounds fun until you’re watching The Mummy for the sixth time.

  Chris was amazing. He decorated my room with posters and photos and he came to the hospital every night after work with desserts for me and, sometimes, a six-pack of beer for himself, and he’d just sit with me and hold my hand or crawl into my bed. I loved when he brought the beer because he’d get a little buzz, which always made me giggle. He slept there every night.

  Days were lonely, but I didn’t want any visitors except Chris. The look of concern on people’s faces when they saw me really stressed me out. There’s nothing worse than being sick and yet feeling like you have to be the one reassuring others, which is exactly how I felt. Also, I was in that bed-gown thing and I was big and puffy and I had really short hair that I was trying to grow out (priorities) and the whole combination just felt like, Please, please go away.

  In the early morning of my seventh day of bed rest (I made it sound like a year, I know, and it felt that way) I started cramping really badly. You know how on that show I Didn’t Know I Was Pregnant the women always just thought they had to poop? I get that. Contractions really do feel like you have to take a shit, so that’s what I thought this was. Or, at least, that’s what I told myself it was, because I was in denial. I tried to downplay the intensity of the pain until around noon, when the nurses finally called it. “No, this is labor,” they said.

  I tried to convince them otherwise, because I wasn’t prepared, but I’d just reached the thirty-one-week marker, which was a big deal. When a baby is that early, even one extra week in the womb goes a long way, and decreases that baby’s chances for long-term health concerns.

  What followed was, in some respects, a blur. Chris came rushing in. The pain was so crazy that I could barely speak. I do remember asking my ob-gyn, “If he’s this early and he’s going to be so little, shouldn’t it hurt less?” She laughed at me and said, “Oh no, that’s not how this works.”

  I eventually got an epidural, which I appreciated because it made me feel present in the moment, as opposed to the stabbing, piercing back pain that is unlike anything anyone can ever describe.

  “Listen, when he comes out there are going to be a bunch of people in here because he’s premature,” my doctor explained to me before I started pushing.

  “But will I get to hold him?” I asked.

  “We’re not sure,” she said. “We just won’t know until after he’s out.”

  That’s where the unexpected nature of this whole fiasco really hit home. When you have a healthy pregnancy, you never wonder if you’ll get to hold your son right after he’s born. It’s a given. I was terrified, but I also knew I had to be a soldier. I have to be as strong as I possibly can, I thought. I just have to.

  Just as the doctor had promised, as soon as Jack came out eight to ten people from the NICU appeared. Chris and I held him for a brief moment and he was crying and looked like a minuscule noodle. But he was tall and beautiful and perfect. And just like that they whisked him away to the NICU and I had to deliver the placenta, which I didn’t get to see even though I really wanted to. Not because I wanted to grind it up and pop it in pill form but because I like gross things.

  Jack was in the NICU for about a month, and I was released from the hospital after day two. For the next four weeks, I spent all day there, pumping milk for my baby until my nipples were bleeding and blistered, because it felt like the only thing I could do to help him. He was fed the milk through a tube up his nose. In that month, we went through the transition where the terror you’d dreaded (or not even dreaded, in my case, because it never occurred to me that I would have a premature baby) becomes your weird normalcy, though every day is peppered with the intense emotional pendulum swings of parenthood, from clouds of disbelief to flashes of reality to moments of pure optimism.

  The same group of shell-shocked parents came into the NICU every day and the group of us became an odd community—the kind that no one wants to be a part of, but then you are so grateful to have it. And it certainly made me realize the bubble I lived in. My friends are all in the entertainment industry and I don’t leave the house very much, and if I do I go to work or shopping at Barneys or some similarly lame Hollywood shit. But the cross-section of the people in the NICU who were just as scared as we were, it was as intense a reminder as any that the celebrity stuff doesn’t really mean anything. We’re all just parents trying to raise healthy kids at the end of the day.

  On our fourth day in the NICU, the pediatric neurosurgeon sat Chris and me down to tell us that Jack had some severe brain bleeding and there was a chance that he could be developmentally disabled. We wouldn’t know until he was eighteen months old, the doctor said. They wouldn’t be able to get a true sense of what Jack’s development would be like until then. I only half heard the words as they came out of the doctor’s mouth. I was in complete shock—somehow, despite everything that had already happened and the fact that, at that point, nothing should have surprised me, I was continually taken off guard.

  We went back into soldier mode. There’s a shield you build when faced with obstacles like these, largely for your own self-protection and the protection of your child. So Chris and I did what we could, which was hold hands and hope and face it together. We held hands while the doctor spoke, and held hands—and smiled!—as we left the hospital, because we were getting paparazzied every time we left, which, frankly, was horrible. How do you smile when you’re spending your days worrying about your sub-four-pound baby? But you don’t really have a choice, because if you’re frowning, then who knows what the tabloids could say. The last thing you want is a magazine running a false headline about the health of your premature baby. Mostly we just held hands and tried to keep our heads down.

  That night, Chris and I went out to eat at a noodle restaurant. We wanted to absorb the information as a team and talk about how we could do this. Okay, these are the challenges that life throws at you, we thought. We’ve lived these amazing fortunate lives, and this is our moment to step up. There are people who face these kinds of challenges all the time, who don’t necessarily have the family or the financial benefits that we do, so we’re going to rise to the occasion and attempt to be great parents to the child we love ferociously.

  It was an emotional day, but I felt so strongly that it was important not to cry in front of Chris. I wanted to be as strong as he needed me to be, and as strong as I needed me to be. These moments can be hard on couples, but for us it really brought us together. It felt like it was us against the world.

  In the face of that terrifying
warning, Chris took on the job of the patriarch, which for sure goes against my feminist sensibilities. But he needed to be the dude in that moment and I was happy to let him. And because we both wanted to wear a brave face, we didn’t let ourselves break down in any way. I know it sounds crazy and superficial, but I think being in our industry for so long, and facing so much rejection, taught us how to build an armor. You need it to survive in Hollywood, and you have to be able to say, Okay, what else are you going to throw at me?

  After a few days, we finally cried and did a lot of what you’re not supposed to do—googling potential scenarios and looking for other parents with these particular issues. There were some really helpful stories out there and some not-so-helpful ones, too.

  I felt so incredibly close to Chris in those moments. It was all so unexpected, and we knew we might be raising a child who was completely different than we had imagined, and I felt so lucky to have a partner who would be able to rise to the challenge with me. Those days also forced us to have some difficult and candid conversations that, as we thought about maybe expanding our family one day, were necessary. Discussions about high-risk pregnancies and miscarriage and things that no one likes to talk about, but every couple probably should.

  • • •

  When you have a baby in the NICU, every parent has the same question every day: “When can we take him home?” It’s what every family wants to know, and the nurses always say the same thing: “We don’t know.” Jack spent three and a half weeks in the hospital because we couldn’t take him home until he could eat on his own. It was an emotionally exhausting month—worrying about Jack and watching nurses poke and prod his gangly limbs with his impossibly tiny diapers that were about the size of a Kleenex. But the silver lining was that the nurses trained me in so many of the tactical parts of parenting. How to swaddle, how to wash bottles, how to bathe a baby—I learned it all at the hospital. I’d never taken care of an infant before, and the nursing staff was a great support system. They were also, in a wonderful way, very practical. They didn’t give me any sympathy, and instead were totally direct. Here’s what you’ll have to do; here’s how to do it. I was shell-shocked by it at first—why weren’t they upset like I was? Couldn’t they be a little more sensitive? But in the end their no-nonsense attitude reminded me that there was no room for self-pity. It would have been harder if they had given me a lot of sympathy, I think. It also helped that those nurses tossed Jack around like he wasn’t the superdelicate little guy he appeared to be. Their nonchalance about his tinyness made me feel good in a weird way. It was like, Oh, they don’t seem fazed at all, maybe it’s not so bad.