Bulletproof

by Maci Bookout

  4. You find out what people really think of you.

  Have you ever wondered what it would be like to know what everyone really thinks about you? Would you want to know? When you live your life on camera for several years, you don’t have a choice. I don’t read articles or Google myself, but I’m still very aware of what’s going on and the general public opinion. Every second I’m on camera sparks an opinion somewhere, and thanks to magazines, blogs and social media, those opinions reach my ears. Any piece of you that ends up on camera is going to spark a roar of feedback from people, and since to them you’re just someone on TV, they don’t hold back.

  5. Your life looks different from the outside.

  When I first watched 16 & Pregnant, by the end of the episode my jaw was practically on the floor. I couldn’t believe it. When we first started filming, I was innocent, pure, naive, 16-year-old, pregnant me. At the beginning of the episode, I thought, “I was such a child!” But by the end of the episode, I looked like a completely different person. I could actually see drastically how the experience changed me and pushed me into an early adulthood. My face, my expressions, my demeanor, the way I talked, and everything in general were noticeably different between the beginning and end of the episode, even though we’d only filmed for eight months. I already knew being a mom had changed me a lot, but I had no idea it was so obvious to everyone watching. Cameras let you see things you don’t normally see. Another example was seeing how many tics and mannerisms I have in common with my mom. Also, it turns out I’m a lot more Southern than I realized.

  6. People stop censoring themselves with you.

  In a normal life, it would be shocking for a total stranger to run up to you, give you a hug, and start asking personal questions. Once your life has been on TV for a while, you learn to expect it. But it can be unpleasant when people lose perspective and say things they wouldn’t say to anyone else. It’s not ill-intentioned. But when someone I’ve just met asks, “So, how are things with you and Ryan?” I think, I don’t know you! Even worse is when they come right out and trash Ryan. My hackles go up. I can talk about Ryan all I want, but I’m not going to hear it from a stranger. I might not like him ninety-nine percent of the time, but he’s still Bentley’s dad, and I still have his back in a way. The worst is when Bentley is right there beside me and some stranger comes up and casually calls his dad an asshole. It’s hard to deal with people constantly forgetting that you’re a real person and have a human reaction to what they say. At least they’re nicer sometimes: “Oh my God, you’re so much prettier in person!” Thanks?

  7. You have to work harder for respect.

  When the other Teen Moms and I started interacting with the media on talk shows and the like, it was sometimes really obvious that we were not being taken seriously. The hosts and interviewers always seemed to be talking down to us. We had almost everything going against us: We were teenagers, we were girls, we were pregnant teenage girls, and we were known for being on reality TV. There were plenty of people in media and entertainment who automatically thought of us as beneath them. It was hard to handle. Very quickly, my goal became to make it clear that there was no reason to treat me that way. I became very conscious of my tone, my language, the topics I spoke on, and how I presented myself so that interviewers would know I’m not about letting them talk to me without a certain level of respect. It’s challenging to do that while still staying real and relatable to your audience, but it’s better than being talked down to and forced to play along with someone else’s condescending view of you. You can tell when media personalities are frustrated by it. Sometimes when they can’t get what they want, they just shut down and half-ass the rest of the time allotted because you pissed them off by not letting them portray you the way they wanted.

  8. You’ll never be able to show who you really are.

  The reality TV format is all about capturing the moment. It’s all about what’s going to happen, what’s happening, and what just happened. Your thought process is never shown in any sort of depth. For instance, if they’re filming you and your kitchen sink breaks, they’ll show that the sink breaks, but not that you know how to fix the pipe. The next scene won’t be you fixing the sink, it will be you telling someone that the sink broke and it sucked. The camera shows you reacting to problems, but not fixing them. It’s very hard to show signs of intelligence in a reality TV format.

  9. You have a special bond with your co-stars.

  Whatever happens between us, the original Teen Moms and I share a unique connection. Only the four of us know what it’s like to be in this situation and deal with what we’re dealing with. The three of them are the only people in the whole world who know exactly what it’s like from my point of view. No matter what kind of friction there’s been between us, I don’t appreciate it when people say negative things about them or expect me to do the same. I know how difficult it is to be scrutinized by millions of people, and I know some of my cast members have had it a lot worse than me. Whenever I hear someone I don’t know judging one of them, I just want to say, “If I had to deal with assholes like you, I’d probably be like that, too. You’re part of the problem, not the solution.”

  10. You get the fame, but not the fortune.

  Reality TV can make you very famous, but you basically get the shit end of the deal: Everyone knows your name and talks about you, but there’s no red-carpet prestige or glamorous piles of money. Once you become a so-called reality TV star, people immediately think you’re a high-end celebrity and you travel the world and have a mansion and so much money and all these other things they associate with having your face on television. They think it’s impossible to be a normal human being once you get a million followers on Twitter. The fact is, my real life isn’t that much different from what it would have been without MTV. I still live in Chattanooga and go to Wal-Mart and buy bread and milk.

  11. It affects your friends and family, too.

  The media attention was confusing for the people around me at times. For awhile, every time there was a magazine headline like “Maci Bookout Elopes in Vegas,” my grandparents would call my parents. “We know these stories aren’t true. But please confirm anyway.” I knew I could deal with the negative parts of being in the public eye, and the judgment for being a teen mom, and all the criticism that came with being on TV. But then I became aware of the fact that my family and friends were being approached and asked the same kinds of unfiltered questions people were asking me. And of course they feel obligated to defend me when it was negative. It made me feel guilty that they were being put in certain positions that nobody wants to be in. I definitely wasn’t the only one to be put on the spot.

  12. You never feel like a celebrity.

  I’ll never forget going to the MTV upfronts. If you don’t know, upfronts are the big events where television networks announce their new lineups for the next season. The first time I went, I was surrounded by entertainment people and celebrities from normal reality stars like myself to actual stars and performers. Everyone from the cast of Jersey Shore to Bruno Mars and Justin Bieber. I like to go into any situation as confident as I can be, but I felt like a fish out of water in celebrity situations. I didn’t want to look insecure or make myself look silly, so I had to act like I belonged there and deserved to be there. But at the same time I didn’t want to come across like I actually did think I belonged there and deserved to be there. It was like trying to find the right size pants to put on. It was difficult not to freak out in a room with people who are extremely famous when I’m just on a little show called Teen Mom. But all I could do was try to be normal Maci, and that’s pretty much what I stuck with for good.

  CHAPTER 16:

  SETTLING FOR STABILITY

  After five months of soul searching in Nashville, it was time to go home to Chattanooga. Originally I only meant to stay for the summer. I’d started taking college classes again, so the plan was to go back to Chattanooga in August when school started. But when summer
came to a close, I just wasn’t ready yet. I felt like I had a little more to accomplish. So I signed up to take all of my classes on Mondays and Tuesdays, so I could drive home with Bentley and he could stay with Ryan’s parents for a couple of days while I stayed with my parents and went to school. But that got to be a hassle after a few weeks, and the gas costs were getting to be unreasonable. So around October, right as Bentley was turning two, I found a condo in Chattanooga and headed back home. And I brought Kyle with me.

  I was never the type of girl to dream about my wedding day. Actually, the thought of planning a wedding has always seemed like the most stressful thing to me. I never had a vision of it, I guess. Although I knew I wanted to be married one day, it was never a number one priority type of thing. Of course at that point I’d already been engaged. Back when Ryan and I found out we were pregnant, we’d both felt a lot of pressure to get married. He proposed to me on my seventeenth birthday, just before Bentley was born, and my mom and I did make a few moves toward planning a wedding. But it never felt like a natural thing to do. I loved Ryan at the time and wanted us to be a family, but the engagement always felt vaguely forced. It had seemed like the right step to take, until it very obviously wasn’t.

  When I got together with Kyle, I never had any thoughts along the lines of “Okay, I’m entering this relationship because I’m gonna marry him.” It wasn’t a top goal and the concept didn’t play a big part in us being a couple. But once he moved down to Chattanooga with me and we’d been there for awhile, it started to seem like a natural thing to think about. I was very content with Kyle. We had such a long history, and the way it had unfolded meant a lot to me. We had been so close to each other when I veered off, got pregnant, and gotten engaged to Ryan. And then, after such an extreme interruption, we’d gotten back together. It felt like since we’d made it through all of that, we were probably meant to be together. I also had a dream of putting a family together before Bentley was old enough to realize that he didn’t have a set of married parents. And if I thought of it that way, I couldn’t help but hear a clock ticking.

  At the time, I felt Kyle wanted to marry me too. He was an old-fashioned type, and he seemed to have the same understanding that we were meant to be together. But as time went on, it became obvious that he had very serious commitment issues as far as marriage was concerned. Not everyone grew up with the kind of relationship model that I had with my parents. His had split up when he and his brother were teenagers. I can’t speak to what kind of relationship they had, but it didn’t seem to have made a good impression on him. Like a lot of people in those shoes, he was scared. Maybe he was afraid that he was going to turn out like his parents did, or that he wasn’t capable of succeeding as a parent or husband. Everyone has their own kind of baggage when it comes to that stuff.

  As time went on, I clearly became more ready and willing whereas he definitely did not. I’m not the pushy type, so I didn’t say much on the subject. I thought the longer we were together, the more he’d realize that was the next step. We had a solid relationship, and our life seemed settled. He was always absolutely wonderful with Bentley, and was a great father figure for him. It seemed possible that once we’d continued to make it work for a while and he came to accept that he was already a good partner and a good dad, he’d gain more confidence and stop being so afraid of fulfilling his fears by ending up in an unhappy marriage. And so the waiting game began.

  Meanwhile, my life had started to feel like it was on track. I was moving ahead in school, and started to dabble in subjects that I thought I might actually enjoy turning into a career. Along with my business classes, I started taking creative writing. The writing classes were a joy, but I didn’t see myself making a real living writing stories, so I started looking into the journalism side of writing. Being a writer or a journalist was the second thing I imagined for myself after I’d wanted to be a chef. But after moving from creative writing to news and non-fiction, I realized it wasn’t for me. Writing had always been a pleasure for me, and I hated feeling like I was forcing it. I only wanted to write what I wanted to write, and at my own pace. I knew it would be a completely different activity if I was always on deadline. And writing for anyone but myself is hard! This book is a perfect example. When I write, I want it to be as authentic as it can be and as close as possible to what I’m really thinking and feeling. But feelings can be hard to put into words, even when they’re your own. Especially when they’re your own. And no matter what I was writing, I’ve always been so picky about word choice and things like that that it could easily turn into a big ordeal. In the end, it was obvious that was not the career for me.

  Finally I shifted to media technology and found my place. After being on MTV and doing the many media appearances and public speaking engagements that came along with it, I realized I could pursue what I liked about writing in other ways by communicating on camera, on the radio or in social media. Radio, in particular, became very interesting. Having been on screen for so long, I had a little camera fatigue. Like, “Why would I want to keep my face on TV?” Radio also interested me because it involves the challenge of having to entertain and hold attention without anyone seeing your expression or your gestures.

  My first radio show was for an internship at a local station. It was a weekly program called Ask Maci. People would call in and ask questions about any and everything from parenting, being a young adult, or what Justin Bieber was doing that week. I really enjoyed it. When it was over, I found another weekly talk radio show called Live and Local led by a local radio host named Brian Joyce. He covers everything from politics to entertainment, and we started a segment called “Defend Your Generation.” In the segment he brings up things like pop music, smart phones, and all of the dumb shit my generation gets a reputation for. When I started appearing on the show, I wasn’t very good at defending anything. We always laughed about the fact that I wasn’t really sticking up for my own. But most of the stuff people found ridiculous, I found ridiculous, too. Sorry!

  At home, Bentley was a typical toddler. I loved watching his little personality coming out. His first obsession was Thomas the Train. I swear I watched every one of those episodes and movies about ten times. When he could barely even talk, he learned the theme song by heart and he could name every single train just by looking at their faces. I thought that was crazy, because there were so many of them! He was always into dirt bikes and monster truck toys, even back when he was supposed to be playing with the baby toys like simple blocks or big plastic fake keychains. He was making engine noises before he could make words.

  We almost skipped the Terrible Twos. Except for that pacifier. It was his biggest obsession by far. The few times I tried to take it away, he freaked out so bad I thought I’d lose my mind. Over time I tried to wean him off of it, but it was a little bit difficult, because every time he went over to Ryan’s house it was back to square one. It got to the point where I brought it up with a pediatrician. She told me not to worry about it and to wait until he was old enough to reason with.

  Pacifiers are a blessing and a curse in that way. That paci saved my sanity plenty of times before it made me lose my mind. When he was three years old, we finally got him to let it go. Kyle’s older brother was expecting a baby, a little boy, and so Kyle and I told Bentley he had to give all his pacifiers to the new baby because he really needed them. Bentley was not happy about that at all, but he managed to step up and do the noble thing.

  Age three was worse than two by far. That was when Bentley finally got into his first kind of rebellious stage. His personality was coming out and he was learning what he liked and what he wanted. And, of course, he learned I wasn’t the only one who could use the word “no.” Once he figured it out for himself, he said it all the time. Bentley just wanted to do what he wanted, when he wanted. So, that was fun.

  That period was a challenge for Kyle, too. For both of us. Sharing parenting duties is tricky. Kyle was amazing with Bentley, but when it came time for discipl
ine, he tended to take a quiet step back. In every other way he was a natural as a father figure, but in that regard, he never felt it was his place. That bothered me. Ninety percent of the time, he was involved in Bentley’s life, and when he was around Bentley he completely took on the responsibilities of acting as a dad. To me, that meant he had earned the right to make Bentley behave and treat him with respect. It was important to me to have that enforced, and I didn’t like having to handle all the discipline on my own. When I was growing up, my mom would definitely keep us in check and make us behave, but she was the more lenient parent. When I was younger, I might talk back to my mom but I would never talk back to my dad. But it was a kind of balance they had. It was kind of like my mom was the diplomat and my dad was the hardass. So it was difficult for me to fill both roles, and it was especially difficult because I didn’t expect to take the hardass role at all!

  ***

  When we first got together, Kyle had stopped racing and he was working for a company in Nashville. He quit that job to move to Chattanooga. The plan was originally that when he moved down, I’d take care of money and bills and stuff while he found another job. But that didn’t go as planned. We didn’t talk about it much, because I didn’t want to make him feel any more insecure than any guy already is in that situation. The last thing I wanted to do was make him feel bad about it. It didn’t make sense to complain, anyway, when he was always taking care of Bentley while I was at school. It wasn’t like he wasn’t doing anything.