I Never Promised You a Goodie Bag

by Jennifer Gilbert

  I called their offices after the fund-raiser and offered to help. By this point Save the Date® was booking tens of millions of dollars in events, and we had tremendous buying power. I could save them money that they could use on their mission, instead of on their fund-raising events. Planning an event for Women for Women evolved into joining their committee, and the same thing happened when I planned an event for the National Institute of Reproductive Health. Reproductive rights and access to safe health care for women and girls had always been important to me, but when you have your own daughter this issue takes on a whole new meaning.

  My life had taken so many turns. I’d gone from an innocent girl, to a broken shell, to a wannabe masked avenger. Then I’d resuscitated my own heart again, and I’d found that it had no limits anymore. I had come through such hard times myself that I couldn’t bear to just watch someone else struggle in the dark. Bennett teases me that I automatically say “God bless you” to everybody—it could be the sneezing stranger in a movie theater five rows ahead of me. And I say to Bennett in response, “Everyone deserves to be blessed.” I don’t underestimate the importance of even seemingly small gestures. If I’m at a social function and I see a stranger who clearly doesn’t know anyone, I’ll reach out and say, “Come sit here with me” (forever remembering those new moms that included me at their table). And when I pass a babysitter struggling up the subway steps with a huge stroller, then I help her no matter how tight my suit is or how high my heels. I like to think that I have become part of a larger circle of kindness.

  One day I was walking down the street with Blaise in her stroller, and I saw a man on the corner poring over a map, looking this way and that, clearly with no idea where he was. I walked up to him and said, “Can I help you?” In a thick Italian accent he asked me where Chambers Street was, and I gave him directions.

  Blaise looked up at me and said, “Mommy, who were you talking to?”

  “Just a stranger,” I said.

  “Why were you talking to a stranger, Mommy?”

  I thought about that a second, and then I said, “Because he was lost, and he needed help. And that’s what we do, Blaise, we help people who are lost.”

  I had spent so long being lost myself, but through this whole journey of the last twenty years, every day I’ve been a little more found.

  Chapter Sixteen

  All Clear

  I was so grateful for the life that Bennett, Blaise, and I had together, and I was eager to add more children to our family. We hadn’t had such an easy time getting pregnant with Blaise, so it didn’t surprise us that we’d need to go the IVF route again. Once more I started up with the self-injected hormones—and the hoping and waiting.

  I had become a new person over the previous few years, but tragedy is tragedy, and it rocks each of us in our own way. So when I lost my next pregnancy at six months (a boy, I learned afterward)—a point in a pregnancy when your baby has already become so real to you—I was flattened. I would have kept our mourning a secret between Bennett and me, but at six months my belly was out there for the world to see, and there was no way to hide our devastation. The day we found out, I sat down at the computer and wrote an e-mail to everyone we knew. I told them all that I’d lost the pregnancy and was grieving. I said that while I knew they’d want to extend their sympathy, I simply couldn’t bear it. Please don’t call, please don’t e-mail, I cannot even talk about it.

  I’m sure it shocked some of the people who received it—after all, what’s more welcome than sympathy in a time of great pain? But I remembered too well how I reacted to other people’s sympathy. After the attack, I had absorbed the pain that other people felt for me, to the point that I could no longer feel my own. I remembered how I felt compelled to write a thank-you note for every card and bouquet of flowers. I remembered how alone I felt when people tried to find a silver lining to my experience. I could imagine the version this time—At least you have your daughter. Of course that was true, but I couldn’t bear to hear it. Later, people would give me so much advice. They’d tell me I had to join a support group, I had to let myself have a good cry, I had to go to therapy. I knew they meant well, but at this point in my life I thought, No, I don’t have to do any of those things. All I have to do is breathe.

  Meanwhile, I couldn’t allow myself to collapse—I had a daughter who still needed her mother. But the one thing I could not handle was work. I told my office staff that I needed a week—just a week—to get my head together, and not think about anything other than my family. And this wasn’t just any week—we were days away from a celebration for Fox News’s ten-year anniversary, a massive event that I’d personally shepherded. We’d been working on it for a full year and a half, and had managed to get permits to clear a block of Forty-eighth Street for the outdoor event. We erected a huge clear-span tent so that guests could look up through the ceiling and see the ticker tape newsreel of the brand-new studio above their heads. We had furniture made and branded pillows, a huge red carpet covered the entire sidewalk, and klieg lights lit up the sky. We’d even had the streetlights and parking meters removed. It was a real New York City happening, with throngs of people watching from behind ropes. Rupert Murdoch was in attendance and scheduled to make a speech, and I was supposed to be there to make sure everything was flawless. The old me wouldn’t have dreamed of not being there. But the new me had different priorities. There was no Jen suit in the closet that would have been sufficient to cover up my sadness. I just couldn’t go, and the event was flawless without me.

  It was spring when the doctor gave me the go-ahead to try to get pregnant again. I said to Bennett that we’d give it one more go, and if the IVF didn’t take this time, I’d just accept it as a message from the universe and take a break.

  All the other times I’d tried to get pregnant since Blaise, I’d done everything by the book and then some—I’d given up exercising, coffee, I’d quit drinking, I’d even done acupuncture. This time I let go and I hoped for the best. I worked as hard as ever, because that’s what I loved to do, and I exercised because it made me feel good. And I drank coffee and wine, because, hell, if you’re not pregnant then you should be able to drink whatever you want.

  When I got pregnant again, the feeling was completely different than it had been with Blaise. The first four months I was so sick that just the thought of certain foods made me queasy. If I even looked at a vegetable, I’d throw up. I was so sick that the doctor prescribed the kind of antinausea medication that chemo patients take. I even had to cancel a trip to Turkey with Deanna and my sisters, because the night before the flight I woke up leaking blood. I was terrified that I was miscarrying, but it turned out that the spasms from throwing up had caused a small rip where the placenta attached to my uterus. The doctor put me on bed rest until it healed.

  Over the course of the weeks when I was throwing up like mad, Bennett and I kept it top secret that the reason for all that nausea was that I was carrying not just one but two baby boys. We waited until my fourth month even to tell my parents, because my fear of losing one of those babies was so severe. When we first heard their heartbeats, they were both so strong and present that I knew neither of them was going anywhere. I couldn’t wait to tell my parents, especially my father. He’d had three girls, I had a daughter, and my sister had two girls. I knew he loved us all more than anything, but I also knew he would love to have a grandson—and now he was about to have two.

  Not long after I told my parents that we were having twins, they asked my sisters and me to meet them at the University Club. They called it a “family conference.” I knew that my father had been having some health issues, so I suspected they had some news for us, but I never expected to hear that my father had been diagnosed with a rare form of melanoma. He told us that he’d already been to Sloan-Kettering as well as NYU Langone Medical Center, and there were various ways of proceeding, but that no matter what, his chance of survival was only 15
percent.

  The whole thing felt surreal. I could hear the words that he was saying, but my brain would not compute them. My father was my emotional touchstone—he’d been my mentor, my trailblazer, my cheerleader. And he was invincible. This couldn’t possibly be happening.

  The sound of my sisters crying snapped me out of my disbelief, and I went into business mode, rattling off questions about the procedure, how long it would take to know if the treatment was working, and on and on. But I wouldn’t cry. I just could not allow myself to go to that dark place, and I wasn’t going to let my father go there either.

  When I had some private time with my father a few days later, I looked at him and I said, “Dad, if you have an angel of the dark side on one shoulder, battling the angel of the bright side on the other, which one wins? The one you feed. You are going to fight this, and you are going to be okay.”

  I knew that I couldn’t control the situation—I’d learned my lesson about control at least a hundred times by now. But I also knew that despair wasn’t going to help us. He’d always been the one to tell me, “Yes, you can.” He’d made me believe that there was no challenge I couldn’t face and beat. Now I needed to believe that for him.

  The one thing that my father asked of us was that we not tell anyone about his illness. Not for the first time, I realized how similar my father and I were. After the attack, we’d both suppressed our pain because we each were trying to protect the other. Now I completely understood his desire for silence. Once you start telling people, it becomes all the more real, and it takes on a life of its own. He wanted to contain his illness and deal with it in his own way, without having to manage the worries—and worse, the pity—of everyone he knew.

  The months that followed were a balancing act for me. I had a deep, instinctive desire to protect my pregnancy from stress. But stress was all around me. Since the beginning of the year I’d lost a baby, become pregnant with twins, and now my father had been diagnosed with life-threatening cancer. By the time I was eight months pregnant and my belly was so massive I could barely move, I was bending over to tie my father’s shoes because he was so weak from radiation. Then, just weeks before I was due, he had an operation to remove what was left of the cancer. I spent the rest of my pregnancy hoping for the best, and praying that my father would be alive to see his grandsons.

  Despite the looming worries about my father’s illness, my body did its job beautifully while carrying the twins. A C-section was scheduled for thirty-eight weeks, considered full-term for twins, and I felt great right up until the end. The doctor wanted to put me on bed rest, but I never gave him an excuse—I had no swelling, my blood pressure was perfect, and I worked and trotted back and forth between home and my office. It’s both poetic and ironic that when I finally relinquished control over my body, my body knew what to do.

  When they were born, Saxton was seven pounds and Grey was six pounds, and my father was there in the hospital to hold them, my mother standing by his side. He hadn’t yet received the all-clear after his operation, but he was alive.

  The first weeks after the boys were born was a blur. Because the easy way never seemed to be my first choice, I decided that the twins would get only breast milk, no formula. So, around the clock, all I did was feed them. I did nothing but nurse and pump, and nurse and pump again.

  Then, at twenty-three days old, Saxton developed a fever. Since they didn’t know if he had just a cold or something worse, he was quarantined in the hospital for four days and given a spinal tap and a slew of equally awful tests. I slept in a chair next to his bassinette and pumped away. I would send bottles back and forth between home and the hospital to feed Grey. Then I would take the day shift at home, and switch with my baby nurse to care for Grey, and to make sure Blaise knew that she hadn’t been forgotten in the process. Those were awful, scary days, and I dragged myself through them, meeting first one urgent need and then the next. Then finally Saxton’s test came back and thank goodness it was just a cold and we could bring him home again.

  Then it was back to the round-the-clock feeding routine. When the baby nurse brought the boys to me, both of them rooting with hunger at the same time, they were like jaws coming toward me. I’d look down at their dear little heads nursing, and while I loved them with every fiber of my being, I did not love feeling like a cow. It was almost impossible just to keep up with the calories I needed to make all that milk. In the middle of the night after nursing both babies and pumping, I’d stand in the refrigerator stuffing my mouth with the blue-frosted cupcakes my friend Haley had sent me after they were born. I could practically eat in my sleep.

  I was barely keeping my head above water, but because I didn’t want Blaise to feel neglected with the arrival of these two new babies, I insisted on throwing her a party for her third birthday. And this wasn’t just a few kids and a cake. This was a hundred adults and at least seventy-five kids, plus face painters, gym activities, and glitter tattoo artists. There was no other option as far as I was concerned. I wanted life to be perfect for my children—and that meant that I had to be perfect, too.

  Then I started to itch. All around my middle, I itched and I itched and I scratched until I bled. The next time I took the boys to the pediatrician, I told her that I had a weird rash and I wondered if she’d take a quick look. So I lifted up my shirt and her face fell. “It’s shingles,” she said. “It happens sometimes when you get really run-down.” Of course. I had shingles, and why not?

  One day Bennett came home from work, and I was still in my pajamas, working on the computer. I hadn’t showered, my hair was greasy, and the light in my eyes was borderline insane. Bennett looked at me tentatively and said, “Hi, honey, everything okay?”

  The floodgates opened, and I wailed, “I look like the devil, and I don’t even know who I am anymore!”

  Bennett said, “Just stop. Stop breast-feeding.”

  I stopped bawling. I sniffed. “I’m allowed?”

  Bennett sighed. As if anyone was telling me that I had to be supermom—it had been my crazy mission from the start. Once again I had no one to prove my mettle to but myself. “Yes,” Bennett said, “you’re allowed.”

  Before I stopped breast-feeding, I let Bennett take one picture of me with both boys, each attached to a boob. It’s my proof that, yes, I actually did do that. My body, which I’d punished and prodded and whipped into shape all those years, had now carried and nourished three little lives. I promised never to take it for granted again.

  After months of waiting, when the babies were just a few weeks old, my father was given the all-clear; he was cancer-free. His treatments had been a success. I had my three kids, my husband who loved me, and my dad was alive and kicking. The universe was looking up.

  But if there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that just because you have one or many bad things happen to you, it’s not as if your name is pulled out of the bad karma punch bowl. There’s no magical free pass. No, it’s always the same raffle of what happens next, and we’re all in it together.

  Just two months after the twins were born in the spring of 2008, and mere weeks after my father’s good news, Bear Stearns—the company where my husband had worked for twenty-five years—collapsed. With it went years and years of savings and a lifetime of career investment.

  Now, for the first time in our lives together, it was my husband who needed to be picked up off the floor, and I was the one with enough optimism for both of us. I knew that Bennett would have a lot of grieving to do in the future, but in the meantime I wanted him to know that we’d be just fine. Knowing how hard it was to get out of a bad groove once you started it, there was no way I would let Bennett fall into one of his own.

  As Bennett and I lay in our bed with our three children, I thought, My dad is alive, and the people I love most in the world are right here with me. I said to Bennett, “Honey, it’s only money.”

  While we lay there together, t
he babies squirming and Blaise counting their toes, I remembered back to the night before our wedding. I remembered the simple promise of love and trust that had pulled me through. I learned with marriage and Blaise that love only multiplies, it doesn’t divide. So now with the addition of my twins, I simply had more love to give. When I needed it most, Bennett had faith in me—and in us—and I had trusted that faith.

  Now I had faith in us, too. And there was nothing in the universe that could shake it.

  By that fall the financial world was falling apart. The ripple effect was staggering; every company in every industry was laying off, cutting back. Companies were being publicly ridiculed in the press for any type of unnecessary spending, especially on events. Corporate holiday parties, which at one time were worth $8 million a month for my own company, were canceled. Even if my clients had the money, they wouldn’t risk the perception of celebrating at a time when so many were losing their jobs. This economic climate was crippling to the hospitality industry especially. Three catering companies I had worked with since I started my own firm had closed their doors. Restaurants were vacant, and hotel occupancy was at an all-time low.

  It was also the December that I was turning forty. Bennett and my family kept asking me what I wanted to do to celebrate. For weeks I told them all, “Nothing.” It just felt like the worst timing.