Or maybe I was delirious from all the pain, which was now gone thanks to that shot.
The love of my life came into this world a few weeks prematurely on 17 January 1986. She made her debut at 5.17 in the morning, and it is no surprise that seventeen is now my lucky number.
After a quick exam, the doctor put Chloe in my arms for the first time. She was the most beautiful angel, newborn pink and perfect, with bright blue eyes and fair hair. Thank God, she was perfectly healthy even though she was early. I remember staring into those pure, innocent eyes for the first time and starting to laugh.
I was overwhelmed, bursting with love and smiling like crazy because my baby brought me so much joy. Chloe was also so funny from moment one. Her little facial expressions made me giggle. They say you are what you are when you’re born. I could see this beautiful funny child as she slept in my arms.
This was life on a setting known as perfection.
When the epidural wore off, I had the headache of the century and was shivering and shaking. The person who had administered the shot had actually punctured my spinal column and I was leaking fluid. My regular internist, Dr Giorgi, a practical, wonderful female version of Lt Columbo, stepped in and ordered a spinal patch. This meant they were planning to take blood out of my arm and inject it into my spine to cause a blood clot to stop the leakage. All of a sudden, I felt like a plumbing disaster instead of a new mother.
This ‘glitch’ was actually quite major. I had to endure a second epidural, which unfortunately didn’t work. I was terribly afraid, and I couldn’t sit up for about a month afterwards.
The miracle of Chloe’s arrival into my life made everything else insignificant by comparison. Babies have a way of wiping every slate clean. But I couldn’t deny the pain.
The headaches were so bad that I had to mainly stay in bed for the first few months of Chloe’s life because getting up and down was excruciating. I was lucky enough to have a nanny to help and bring my baby to me for breastfeeding. I did that for a long time and that skin-to-skin contact with my child was an experience that can’t even be put into words.
I had the best times with my beautiful new daughter. Chloe was a natural actress from the day she was born. She would make funny faces to get attention (not entirely unlike her mother), and eventually would love to sing as much as I did. All I wanted to do was watch her grow and develop, and it was the most joyful and magical time. The love that I had for my child was a love I had never experienced before in my life.
It was overwhelming that I had this tiny human being to take care of and protect. I knew every choice I made and everything I did would affect her for life. I could always be found hovering over her crib to make sure she was breathing.
I wish you could bottle the feeling of a dark night in a sweet-smelling nursery watching your happy and safe child sleep.
This was why I was born.
Sadly, there was a bit of anxiety mixed in with my joy. The headaches went on for five long years and were pretty severe at times. I would sleep in dark rooms until they went away.
It took my body a long time to heal itself.
Six weeks after I gave birth to Chloe, on 3 March 1986, Nancy and Jim Chuda, my dear, dear friends, had their daughter, a beautiful fair-haired baby girl they named Colette. I was so honoured when I was asked to be her godmother. It was as if we each had two daughters, and we knew the girls would grow up as sisters and best friends. From that moment on, we did everything together and went everywhere as one big, happy family.
The joyous cries of those baby girls filled every space.
As for getting back to work, I was getting there – slowly. When Nancy and I were still pregnant, we collaborated on a screenplay called The Perfect Specimen. We were actually way ahead of our time with this idea. We were talking about Matt, how perfect he was for fathering a child, and we wrote a whole story in which a woman can’t find the right man to father her baby, so she goes to a sperm bank to find ‘the perfect specimen’. When she gets pregnant, the hunt begins to find the anonymous donor.
I remember Nancy and I taking our babies into Universal Studios and sitting on the floor with them for a pitch meeting with one of the most powerful female executives in the movie business at the time, Dawn Steel, who sadly later died of breast cancer.
During the meeting Chloe had fallen asleep on my right breast and it grew swollen with milk to the point where it looked like a bowling ball. I had a privacy blanket over me and, luckily, we left before I had milk running down my shirt.
The studio optioned it from us, but sadly it was eventually dropped when John Hughes made a similar film called She’s Having a Baby.
We didn’t much care. We were raising our daughters side by side in the haven of Malibu. That far outweighed the time we would have spent on some tumultuous movie set fighting with script doctors over lines.
It was a playful, joyous time for my family, and it wasn’t a bit surprising to anyone that the next album I did was for my daughter.
It turned out Chloe was not a good sleeper and I spent many a night trying to soothe her. I searched for the right music to lull her to sleep and I couldn’t find it. There was one easy solution that could turn into a family legacy. I recorded Warm and Tender, an album of children’s lullabies in Melbourne live with the beautiful and world-renowned Victorian Philharmonic Orchestra. It was produced by my bestie John Farrar with orchestrations by Graeme Lyall. These were classic, timeless songs and I wrote the title track with John, ‘Warm and Tender’, for Chloe.
For the most part, I put my career on hold to really experience life as a wife and mother. Matt was a wonderful father and soon we went on family car trips. He even took us camping when Chloe got a bit older. Our greatest love was having family adventures – even if there were a few not-so-great moments.
In Wyoming with Nancy, Jim and Colette, we were going to explore the wilderness, and even stayed with a friend who owned a hunting lodge. By now, the girls were two years old, toddling about and talking, and they were smarter than anyone knew. Both grew up loving animals, so they were a bit freaked out to see the deer and other big animal heads on the walls of that lodge, which was a sadly common thing.
Chloe kept trying to go behind each wall to see where the rest of the animal was. She was determined that each animal could be freed to go live a happy life in the mountains.
Poor Nancy and I had to explain to the girls that the animal bodies . . . um . . . weren’t there anymore. We couldn’t very well say that some mean people shot them and stuffed them. Talk about giving your two-year-olds nightmares!
Try telling even the simple version to a hysterical two-year-old who couldn’t deal with the fact that anyone would take the heads off such beautiful creatures. The girls were so upset that I thought we might have to find another place to stay for the trip. Using some newly acquired motherly ingenuity, Nancy and I ran around putting large bath towels over the animal heads so they would be ‘out of sight’ and thus ‘out of mind’.
We had so many mummy adventures back in the day. When the girls were about two and a half, all of us flew to my farm in Australia for a live filming of a Christmas program where I would sing ‘Waltzing Matilda’. Chloe and Colette loved the great outdoors and had so much room to run in the fields on the farm. We were always worried about those dreaded brown snakes biting two trusting little babies, so we kept an eagle eye on the girls as all of us frolicked in the sun and our plastic swimming pool. Poor baby Colette did get stung by a jellyfish during one of our swims at the beach and had to be rushed to an ER. She never cried even once, she was so brave.
These were such happy times for me. I loved that the girls were so grubby by the end of the day that we would dunk them together in the tub and then transfer their clothes straight into the washing machine. The truth was, I loved doing the washing and hanging it outside on the Hills Hoist, where it would dry, making it smell so delicious from the flowers and fresh Aussie winds.
My other grea
t joy was fuelling the girls with organic and delicious food. At the farmhouse, I was always at the stove cooking up Chloe’s favourite dish, tofu rice. I’d make Vegemite soldiers on toast. All of us would sit on the terrace, eat and watch the cows wander in the pasture down below.
We did try a trip without the kids once, with Sarah, our nanny, staying with the girls while we took a couple’s trip with Nancy and Jim to Alaska where we stayed at Yes Bay Lodge. There were many warnings about bears, but we still took our hikes in the woods where I did an impromptu a capella concert and sang my heart out to an audience of trees. Someone told me that singing was a way to keep bears away – the opposite of my usual goal of drawing fans in! This time, I really didn’t want to participate in a meet and greet.
I remember watching in horror as Matt stood under a tree way too close to a mama bear’s cubs. ‘Matt!’ I yelled. ‘You are much too close. Get out of there.’
I sang even louder.
In 1988 I had the honour of performing for HRH Princess Diana in the Australian Bicentennial concert in Sydney with Cliff Richard. I remember the Princess being very beautiful and charming. Unfortunately, I can’t remember what she said to me. At the time, she was nowhere near the legend she would become before her untimely death, but I was grateful to meet her. She was very special and I could feel the kindness in her eyes.
I was almost entirely focused on Chloe, though, and no matter what I was doing, whether it was singing for royalty or promoting an album, all I could think of was getting back to her.
Back at home, I decided I wanted the Warm and Tender album cover to feature me with Chloe and Colette in each of my arms. The principal photography took place on our lot for a new house overlooking the Pacific, with both girls dressed in white. Colette wore a tiny brooch from her grandmother while Chloe wore my locket. Both girls were comfortable with cameras, but for some reason Chloe was fussy that afternoon and wouldn’t kiss her mum. There was no time to spare as the sun dipped low over the ocean.
Like any younger ‘sibling’, Colette would go one better. As the sky turned the most gorgeous colour of purple-pink she stroked the back of my blonde hair and then smacked a big kiss on her godmother’s lips. (She was so proud of herself!)
I used the photograph of Colette kissing me for the album cover. Little did I know how significant that picture would turn out to be.
In the hearts of the children, a pure love still grows.
Like the flower that shattered the stone.
In 1990 we were on holiday in Colorado Springs with Nancy, Jim and Colette. The girls were four and running around in their little knitted gloves and warm ski suits. Suddenly Colette stopped and complained of a bad tummy ache. We wouldn’t see her play anymore for a couple of days after Nancy tucked her into bed. A worried Nancy told me that, unlike a 24-hour flu, this just wasn’t passing. Her baby was still in pain and it seemed to be getting worse.
She went home to her paediatrician who did tests, and I remember thinking, It won’t be bad. She just needs a little medicine.
The doctor pulled Nancy and Jim aside and told them every parent’s worst nightmare. He thought that Colette might have a serious kidney tumour. Tests followed and soon the results were in. I was one of the first to learn that she had a very rare form of kidney cancer called Wilms’ tumour, usually only found in children under the age of five and people over forty.
All I could do was be there for Nancy, Jim and our beautiful Colette.
It was almost unimaginable to watch this formerly healthy little girl, who ran like the wind and explored the world with such curiosity, slow down and become sicker and sicker. It wasn’t long before she began suffering terrible pain, and then she had to deal with the side effects of chemotherapy including nausea, lack of energy and the loss of her baby-fine hair.
It was heartbreaking for all of us, and even more tragic because her father, Jim, had just lost his eighteen-year-old son, Andy, a handsome and delightful young man, a few months prior in a surfing accident. Nancy had also recently lost her brother, John.
I had another miscarriage and wasn’t sure if I would ever carry another child to term. This was devastating – I so wanted Chloe to have a sibling. So, while we were dealing with all of this tragedy, Matt and I decided to adopt a child from Romania. The idea struck me after I wandered into an antique shop one day and met a wonderful woman who had seen the heart-rending pictures of Romanian orphans on TV. When she spotted a particular little boy, she turned to her husband and said out of the blue, ‘That’s my son.’ She went off to Romania to find that actual child, which she eventually did, and brought him back as her son. Not long after the adoption papers were filed, she returned to adopt his sister.
This story was so inspiring and I knew that there were an overwhelming number of orphaned babies there. Could one of them be our son or daughter?
As our darling Colette grew weaker, my heart broke at how Chloe would protect her best friend. Once, when Colette was feeling stronger, we took the girls to Disney World in Florida. By this time Colette was bald and in a wheelchair a lot of the time. All of the kids passing her would stare and some would point. Chloe was so protective of her sister and just couldn’t stand it. She even told a few: ‘Don’t stare at my friend. It’s not nice!’
The love that the girls had for each other touched my heart. For Colette’s last birthday party, we had an Easter egg hunt in a garden with the girls holding hands and enjoying a beautiful spring day. It would be one of their last play sessions together, and Chloe did her best to make sure Colette was having fun.
Not long after this, I had to go to Spain briefly to do a TV show. It was an obligation of mine that I couldn’t cancel. On the way back, I was planning to go to Romania to find a sister or brother for Chloe. In fact, my suitcase was filled with clothes and toys for the new child. I think it was my gut instinct that this was something I needed to do.
I never made it to Romania.
Backstage in Spain, an hour before I was supposed to perform, I got a phone call from Matt. I learned that after a courageous time spent on this earth and having suffered more than any child ever should (or any adult, for that matter), our beautiful and darling Colette had died. She was just five years old.
I didn’t want to perform.
But I couldn’t leave.
How could I sing? But how could I not?
They had flown me all the way to Spain for the show, and I had no choice but to get out there and entertain the people. The show must go on. For once, I hated my old adage. I steeled myself as I prepared to fulfil my obligation. In my dressing room, my body told me that there wasn’t a signed contract in the world that could handle the next few hours. My hands shook and I couldn’t stop crying. How would we live without our Colette? All I wanted to do was get on the next plane, throw my arms around Chloe and be there for Nancy and Jim.
I allowed my tears to flow – I was utterly heartbroken. My emotions were completely out of control and I didn’t know how in the world I could sing ‘I Honestly Love You’ without falling to my knees and weeping in front of the audience. What if I started to cry and I couldn’t breathe or get the words out? I just lost my second child, I thought. What happens if I break down right in the middle of the song?
There was only one thing to do.
‘Colette,’ I said out loud before taking the stage, ‘I know you’re with me. Please show me you’re here so I have the strength to walk out on that stage and sing.’
In the next moment, I felt what can best be described as a rush of cool air. It was like a caress, as if something had lovingly brushed up against my face, and it reminded me of that day in Malibu shooting the album cover. It felt like a wing, and it was so very real. It was as if she was telling me that it was okay. To go on.
With a newfound strength, I walked out on that stage and began to sing.
Maybe I hang around here a little more than I should
We both know I got somewhere else to go
But
I got something to tell you that I never thought I would,
But believe you really ought to know.
I love you.
I honestly love you
I wasn’t fine, but I sang well that night for Colette, and I didn’t break down on stage because I knew that a little angel was with me. In a strange sort of way, she felt closer than before when she was in the hospital, and she has been with me ever since, along with my parents, my sister and other close friends who have passed away, like Karen Carpenter and John Denver. I often feel as if they hover around me, especially when I perform. They are two of my spirit guides that I ask to support me before every show, and they keep me strong and focused.
They’re gone, but their love never dies.
I’m not sure how any parent gets through the anguish of losing a child. It was hard enough being Colette’s godmother. What if the fates were reversed? Each night I could barely stop staring at my Chloe sleeping peacefully in her bed.
Nancy and Jim, who are devout Buddhists, chanted their way through the agony, and poured their pain and grief into starting a foundation. They began to suspect that Colette’s illness was a result of environmental toxins, and formed the Children’s Health Environmental Coalition. I was proud to help them start this worthwhile foundation that is now called Healthy Child Healthy World (www.healthychild.org). It helps parents protect their children and families from harmful chemicals.
I became the national spokesperson, and of the many hats I have worn in this life, this one is particularly close to my heart. Their logo still features Colette’s silhouette.
One of our first successful fundraisers included sponsorship from HUD, the Housing Urban Development governmental agency, and we were thrilled to honour Senator Barbara Boxer during our first big fundraising concert. Erin Brockovich joined our board. We even did a special evening called Friends for the Environment with an all-star cast including Meryl Streep, Goldie Hawn, Cher, Bette Midler, Robin Williams and Lily Tomlin. Clint Black and Kenny Loggins joined me on stage to sing. There were also several private events. There was a special anthem written for the charity by long-time friend Joe Henry and Al Jarvis called ‘The Flower that Shattered the Stone’, which became the title of my dear friend Nancy’s memoir.
Don't Stop Believin' Page 14