by Kim Fields
By then, Chris and I had another production in the works. We were going to have a baby. We did not tell anyone outside of our families; it was too soon. In May, our dreams were put on hold when we suffered a miscarriage. There was no horrific drama or visuals. As I like to say, there was mercy involved. It happened over a period that spanned my birthday and Mother’s Day in 2012, which also happened to be the weekend Chris’s play ended its run at the Alliance. The hospital staff was incredible. When they realized it was my birthday and Mother’s Day, they gave me cards for both, doing their best to lift my spirits even a little bit.
Perhaps not coincidentally, I had recently read Charles Swindoll’s profile of David and, in particular, the section where he wrote about the miscarriage David and Bathsheba had before Solomon was born. Their child was conceived in a very different way—obviously our circumstances were very different—but I’d noted the way they handled it and then a few weeks later, following our miscarriage, I said to myself, “Wait a minute. Didn’t I just read something similar?”
It was information that had been put there for me to use at a later date, as God does all the time. Likewise my husband was a pillar of strength and comfort. I could lean on him or curl up next to him and get the love I needed at that vulnerable moment. He never once said, “She had a miscarriage” or “She lost the baby.” It was always about us. “We suffered a miscarriage,” he said. Or “We are getting through it.”
Afterward, I healed the best way I knew, by working. I had booked a part on the movie What to Expect When You’re Expecting, the Jennifer Lopez comedy based on the bestselling book that has been every expectant woman’s guide through pregnancy, including me. I auditioned and got to work with Jennifer and Roberto Santiago as the social worker who helped with their adoption. The book’s author, Heidi Murkoff, signed the copy I’d had on my shelf since I was pregnant with Sebastian. I confided what had just happened to me and Chris. “It will work out for you,” she said.
We had doubts when we suffered a second miscarriage right before New Year’s Day. At my regular checkup, Chris and I and were told the baby’s heartbeat was weak. We left her office knowing all we could do was pray, and that’s what we did, as did everyone in our family. However, on New Year’s, we lost the baby. On the way to the hospital, I turned to Chris and said, “Another miscarriage on a holiday? Really? If it has to happen, why can’t it just be Tuesday, August 20—or something random?” The nursing staff was so sorry to see us under these circumstances again. I remember a nurse walking into my room and saying, “Oh, hell no, not you two again—and of all the days.” Their outpouring of love brought tears to my eyes.
The anesthesia preceding the D&C (dilation and curettage) brought another reaction. As I sat in my bed, I started to scream (as if I was grooving to music in my head), “Quincy Jones! Emerald City!” I hollered it at the top of my lungs, like I was in a club. “Quincy Jones! Emerald City!” Chris cracked up. “You are so high,” he said.
Yeah.
But.
“Quincy Jones! Emerald City!”
* * *
Chris and I told only our family and closest friends about both miscarriages. Not many people knew I had been pregnant. After I sent out the email, the responses came back instantly. The phone also rang nonstop for days. We were blown away by the number of people who said, “Guys, this happened to us, too. You’re going to be okay.” We never knew. Then, suddenly, we were all sharing. It was like going to some bizarre speakeasy you never knew existed. But once down there and your eyes adjust to the darkness, it’s like, “Oh crap, you’re here, too?”
After a D&C, the doctor gives you a window of time to heal from the procedure. Toward the end of that window, Chris and I were intimate. Afterward, we were concerned. “Did we mess up by not waiting the exact number of days?” I wondered. But I seemed fine and we went on with our lives. It was April, and there was a flu going around. Sebastian came home from school sick. Then I got really sick. I thought I had the same thing, but Chris said, “No, babe, you seem sicker than Sebastian,” and took me to the doctor.
On the way, I decided I was premenopausal rather than sick. I had been writing and researching for a script and wanted one of the characters to be premenopausal, so I knew all the symptoms and self-diagnosed myself. It made me angry. “Are you kidding me?” I exclaimed to God in the car. “Are you kidding me? First two miscarriages. Then menopause. Come on, Jesus, this is so uncool.”
I was still ranting when the doctor came into the examining room. By this time, I was a wreck. I told her my symptoms as well as the diagnosis. “I’m premenopausal,” I said. “And it’s just horrible.” Because the doctor had been our doctor since we moved to Atlanta, she knew my credentials as a diagnostician were from the University of I Looked It Up on Google, and so she did a full workup on me, including a blood test. After a short wait, she came back into the room and said, “You are two months pregnant.” I was stunned. “What? What do you mean I’m pregnant?”
I looked for Chris before remembering he was waiting in the car with Sebastian, who had fallen asleep. I pulled out my cell phone and called him. “I got something to tell you,” I said. “I’ll be right there.” I got in the car, shut the door, and put my face right up in his. “I’m pregnant,” I said. He leaned back and very slowly every pore in his body turned into a gigantic smile. “I told you that you were sicker than Sebastian,” he said. “I told you that you were sick.”
After that initial bout of sickness, my pregnancy was smooth sailing. Though I was forty-four years old, my doctor did not prescribe rest or recommend anything out of the ordinary. “You feel good,” she said. “Do your thing.” Unlike my first pregnancy, though, I developed a mad craving for cereal. We could not keep it in the house. Our pantry looked like the breakfast aisle at the grocery store—Cap’n Crunch, Corn Pops, and Cocoa Krispies. Sebastian, who thought I was still pregnant from the first time, was thrilled when we told him that he was going to have a little brother.
I told the rest of the world our good news on the TV talk show The Real. I know, I know, it was not the most traditional way to let the world know I was eating for two. At the end of July 2013, I went on and announced I was having my second boy as well as the fact that Chris and I had already picked out a name, one I’d loved for years, Quincy Xavier.
My fans left the most incredible reactions on social media. “She looks amazing,” one woman wrote. “I hope I still have my own face when I get pregnant.” Another person said, “She still looks fine as hell.” And still another said, “Black don’t crack! She’s beautiful.” As I went into my ninth month, I was of course heavier than normal, but I felt strong enough to shoot our latest Holiday Love special, which was titled The Rebirth. Afterward, I converted half our kitchen into an editing suite—my idea of being barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen.
As for the birth itself, I had another elective C-section. The little fella arrived at 10:30 in the morning on December 3, weighing slightly more than eight pounds. As with Sebastian, tears filled my eyes as the nurse laid him down on my chest. Chris kissed both of us and announced the baby was here and healthy to both sets of our parents who were waiting outside for the news. Despite the painkillers I had been given, I spent the afternoon negotiating a distribution deal for Holiday Love: The Rebirth from my bed. Hey, I wore two hats—mom and mogul.
“He is a blessing,” I told Chris’s parents before turning to my mom and adding, “and so is our distribution deal.” Within two weeks, we were back home and in our routines. Both of our parents had left and I was doing press for Holiday Love when Sebastian came down with a mystery illness. He ran a fever at night and it spiked the next morning. Also, he couldn’t move his legs.
Chris carried Sebastian downstairs while I bundled up Quincy and we drove to the doctor, figuring she would make a diagnosis and prescribe some medicine. We told Sebastian that we’d pick up a Christmas tree afterward, hoping that would boost his spirits. Instead the doctor looked at
Sebastian and ordered us straight to the children’s hospital. I felt like I was in the twilight zone as I watched a doctor examine our six-year-old and then tell me his enzymes were 200 percent higher than they should be and although he didn’t have blood in his urine he was going to be admitted. “He was running around two days ago,” I said. “Then this morning he couldn’t walk. What’s going on?”
What was going on was rhabdomyolysis, a breakdown of muscles that can lead to kidney damage. Determined not to get distracted with fear (or the sheer wonder of what caused this), Chris and I stayed focused on our faith, our children, and each other. Barely two weeks old, Quincy was not allowed in the hospital, so we traded shifts being with each child. Chris slept at the hospital one night and I slept there the next. At night, I read the cards Sebastian’s classmates from school had sent, talked to friends, and walked the halls. I flashed back to when I was twelve and had been rushed to a children’s hospital for an emergency appendectomy. I realized my mom had walked similar halls on the other side of the country, worrying about me. I asked her what she did while I was in surgery. “I prayed,” she said.
I prayed, too. For four days, Sebastian was given fluids until his entire system had been flushed out. As his enzyme count returned to normal, he did, too. I knew he was his normal self when he asked if could have a hamburger and French fries for dinner and go back to school.
After checking Sebastian out of the hospital, we stopped at our regular Christmas tree lot, thankful to see the owners, the Cooks, and basking in their wonderful smiles, hugs, and spirit. The familiar smell of the trees and fire pit was a welcome return to our norm after a week of anything but. We bought the biggest Christmas tree we could strap to the car, possibly a bit of an outward expression of the enormous amount of gratitude we felt for the extraordinary blessings of life and health. “Mommy, we can put Quincy under the tree this year,” Sebastian said. “He’s like a little present.” That stopped me in my tracks. I reached out and hugged my boy so hard he had to wriggle out to take a breath. “Baby, both of you are the most precious gifts we could ever have.” He looked at me as only a six-year-old boy can when things do not make sense. “But you can’t put me under the tree. I’m too big to fit in a box.”
He was back—and so was I. Talk about miracles. But people have the capacity to bounce back, especially children. As for my own resilience, it must be God-given because if it were up to me, I would not be that way. But I cannot go crazy. No one is going to read about me in the middle of the street, half naked, with my hair all over my head, screaming—as much as I would like to sometimes. Not with all the work, tears, and prayers everyone in my village has given me. That is not what my mother signed on for. That is not what my village signed on for. My resilience is such that I can take a lot and I can let a lot roll off me. Then, when I do succumb, it is quick. I do not live there. I deal with my pain, acknowledge my pain, allow myself to feel it, and then I get on with the healing and the learning and the living.
“Be anxious for nothing, but in all things give thanks” (Philippians 4:6). Embracing that line of Scripture, one of my favorites, eliminates some of the stress in our modern lives—and also some of the worry lines that can show up on your face. Hey, even though black don’t crack, who needs to take the risk?
20
#TrueToMyself
With two children, the reality of my life turned me into a master juggler of schedules. Our kitchen had a multi-layered, color-coded calendar: one for Chris’s life; one for my life; one for Sebastian’s school, which included projects and homework; and one for Quincy’s checkups and playdates. I had days that I am sure every mom can relate to when I felt more like an executive secretary than any of the other jobs on my resume. My life skills now included changing a diaper while in the drive-through lane at Chick-fil-A and doing conference calls with agents and producers in Hollywood while I made dinner, checked second-grade math problems, and listened for any peeps coming from the baby monitor.
So I welcomed the chance to shoot the Hallmark movie For Better or for Worse with my lifelong friend Lisa Whelchel in Vancouver. Sebastian had rolled with us on locations from infancy and that work-life lifestyle (yeah, I don’t call it balance) continued with two wonderful kids in tow. This charming coastal city opened its welcoming arms as I checked into the hotel with two little boys and one of our sitters. Thankfully, production was over Sebastian’s spring break and I enrolled him in camp at the fabulous aquarium there. Both boys visited the set, too. Alexis was also able to break away for a couple days to spend time with the boys. As always, we were a Gypsy-esque family ever grateful for FaceTime and Skype.
One day Lisa and her daughter taught Sebastian how to play Uno. He referred to her as Aunty Lisa, and her children, who were older, had always known me as Aunt Kim. These were some of the joys of a long friendship. I found it slightly surreal, though, to be working with Lisa again at this stage of our lives. I was trying to get comfortable in my post-baby skin, and she had gotten divorced two years earlier. She confided that she was thinking about trying to date again, but did not exactly know how to do it in this age of dating apps. It reminded me of when I had called Nancy to ask how to shave my legs. Except here Lisa and I were, she at age fifty-one and me still the kid sis at forty-five, trying to figure it all out.
The movie aired in July and I remember a People magazine reporter saying it was good to see that Lisa and I were not screwed up like other former child actors from the ’80s. Lisa and I said, “Of course we aren’t.” We had strong families, good friendships, and old-fashioned values, including hard work and, of course, our faith.
In other words, I was sane (with a splash of normal and a dash of artsy), which, by Hollywood standards, made me…borderline uninteresting personally.
It was the reason I was mystified every time my longtime manager and friend, Art Rutter, called with an offer for a reality series. My life was acting, directing, speaking engagements, an occasional red carpet appearance, driving in school carpools, and pushing a cart up and down the aisles at my local Publix Super Market. Was that interesting? But the calls came in. At one point Chris and I said yes to a production company. They came to the house a few days before my C-section with Quincy and shot some test footage. It wasn’t like they put cameras strategically around the house and let us live our lives, then edited what the cameras captured. They navigated and created moments from our lifestyle, making the experience a bit more intrusive than we would have liked. Padding through our kitchen, I felt enormous, like I imagined a blue whale felt at the end of her gestation period. If the sizzle presentation they put together didn’t sell, we decided we would say no to reality offers and focus on our busy careers and raising two little boys.
I can’t say I was disappointed. I understood why producers and networks were enamored with reality shows. They are relatively inexpensive to make, they get ratings, and they generate buzz. As an actor, though, when reality shows first hit the scene, I thought they clogged the pipes and took spots on network schedules that would’ve otherwise gone to scripted dramas and comedies and employed talented performers as opposed to outrageous personalities. My heroes were people who tried to elevate the human condition and inspire people. With very few exceptions, reality TV seemed to do the opposite. It mostly showed people at their worst. But the genre had created and grown an audience, and it was here to stay. Networks have been created for it, making room again for scripted projects to come home. In addition, the digital spaces created wonderful outlets for the scripted world.
I was with my kids in the Bahamas for an appearance, after an exhausting press tour for the Hallmark movie, when Art called with an offer from another reality series, The Real Housewives of Atlanta. I’d never seen any of The Real Housewives, including Atlanta, but I knew they were quite the thing—just not my thing. The next day Art sent a follow-up email: The producers understood but they still wanted to talk to me. When we got on the phone several days later, I started the conversation by as
king, “Y’all know you called Kim Fields, don’t you?” Everyone laughed. “Am I being punk’d?” I added.
Besides assuring me that I wasn’t being punk’d, they acknowledged being aware the show was out of my wheelhouse. “Then why me?” I asked. They had reasons: The cast was routinely shuffled, and they wanted to add a lighter tone, which they saw me providing. One of the company’s top executives called the next day to emphasize their interest. They knew what I stood for, he said. They knew I was not going to engage in the show’s trademark confrontations. They were good with that. They did not want to change me. They wanted me as is. They wanted my spirit. They wanted my laughter. And my light.
We also covered the fact that I was involved in projects as a director, producer, entrepreneur, and so on. The show wanted to be informed of those things, in the event they could film them. It appeared, commitment-wise, it was doable with our current obligations. With many other cast members, it seemed like a better fit, logistics-wise, than an entire show revolving around just us.
Later that night, I called Chris and filled him in on the latest. “They also know I’m not a girlfriend type of person,” I said. “I told them very clearly that I’m not a hang-out-with-the-girls kind of girl.” Chris asked what I thought. “I think they’re interested in seeing what this journey might look like,” I said. “They know there are a lot of women watching the show who are like me—dedicated to their family, career, and values. They want that voice in their environment.”