Once, on our way home from Jamaica and stuck with plane delays due to weather, my whole family was waiting on line for a connecting flight. It was one in the morning, we had to go through customs, we had a zillion pieces of luggage, and there were hundreds of people on line ahead of us. Basically, we were in hell. Saxton was screaming and clinging to my leg, and Grey was shrieking and rolling around the floor all strung out on Benadryl, while Blaise stood there laughing at the whole mess. I couldn’t get Grey to stand up and walk, so I had to keep nudging him forward with my foot, like a piece of luggage. I dreaded the annoyed looks from the other passengers, who must have been totally fed up with my screaming kids. Then I looked around and saw the stares I was getting from other people. They weren’t annoyed at him, they were pitying me. They all felt sorry for me, because they thought my kid was sick. Meanwhile, I wanted to say to all of them, “He’s not sick! He’s just a pain in the butt!”
In more ways than one I was back to my old coping mechanisms—there was the shame and the covering up, and there was also the belief that somehow if I worked hard enough, I could force everything to be all right, as if I could cure my son’s alopecia by sheer force of will. Traditional medicine clearly wasn’t having any impact on Grey’s hair loss, so when a friend mentioned a doctor of Eastern medicine who had helped her through infertility, I didn’t see what it could hurt to at least visit him and see what he had to say. My own life had been transformed by a healer, so I was open to anything.
I could have kissed that elderly Asian doctor across the examining table when he told me that he believed that Grey’s hair would grow back. He prescribed some teas to brew at home—all perfectly safe, although they made our entire apartment smell like ass—and Grey drank them like a trooper. When the course of teas was completed, the doctor had me apply warm compresses to his body once a day, and that became a ritual for the two of us for weeks and weeks.
I badly wanted to believe that the treatments were working, but there was no evidence. Increasingly, I was snippy with everyone around me, including our babysitter, Pauline, who is like a member of our family. There’s no one on earth I trust more, but during this time I was so deeply wounded that I even lashed out at her once because the pantry was a disorganized mess. Finally, after a raised-voice argument, as I was crying and apologizing to her for being a total nightmare, I screamed, “I’m just so mad!”
That moment was very profound for me, and I realized that I had just had a breakthrough. All along I’d been thinking I was sad or deeply upset, but far more so, I was angry—deeply, poisonously angry—a very different emotion. It made me feel clearer, and saner, to be able to identify what I was feeling. Clearly it had nothing to do with Pauline, or the kitchen cabinets. I was in a rage over what was happening to my son, and none of the positive self-talk or warmhearted wisdom that had accumulated in my soul could penetrate my fury. I knew this feeling of betrayal because I had lived with it for a long, long time. And after twenty years it was just as fresh and raw.
I told myself that I was keeping my pain under wraps and that the kids were far too little to pick up on it. Every day I came home from work to see the twins barreling down the hall to greet me. And every day I would have to suppress a gasp at how Grey looked so different from my mental image of him. In my mind he had hair, so the reality of his little face now stung me each time I walked through the door. I’d plaster a smile on my face, then go into my room and weep.
This couldn’t go on, and I will be forever grateful to my daughter that she brought an end to it once and for all.
One day over that summer, Blaise was having a play date with a friend. When the little girl caught sight of Grey, she asked why he didn’t have any hair. I stiffened, but I didn’t say anything, and the moment passed. After the play date was over, I noticed that Blaise seemed sullen, and not at all her usual self. Blaise is a deep-feeling little girl, so I knew something must be bothering her—maybe she and her friend had had an argument. So I asked her what was wrong. She got upset right away, and I assured her that she could always tell me anything. Then she said, “Mommy, I’m sorry, I forgot to tell Susie the rule.”
I looked at Blaise and said, “What rule, honey?” Blaise said, “The rule that we don’t talk about hair.”
Whoah. I’d never articulated it, but of course she was right. The word hair had become verboten in our household. It wasn’t spoken of—except in whispers late at night, behind closed doors when the kids were asleep. I told Blaise not to worry, that it was fine, but inside I was rocked. Clearly this facade of normalcy was not fooling her. Then she said, “Mommy, why is Grey’s hair falling out?”
My little girl’s question—and her frightened face—illuminated the dark circle I’d been walking. Suddenly I understood so much about this path I’d been on for the last twenty years. I understood why my mother had wanted to change the channel when I sat in her living room, bleeding on the sofa. It wasn’t because my mother didn’t care—it was because she couldn’t cope with the fear and the pain, and she wanted to shut it out. My mother didn’t know that she was shutting me out along with the pain—she was just doing the best she could with the tools she had. Back then, no one around me wanted to talk about the attack for fear it would upset me. As a result, my attack became something to be ashamed of, to minimize, and to bury. It had taken years to uncover and work on the issues it caused me. Now I was turning Grey’s alopecia into a subject of fear and denial as well. Something devastating was happening, and instead of confronting it head-on and recognizing it for what it was—no more, no less—I was not-so-quietly losing my mind over it, and I was dragging everyone else down with me.
I’d allowed myself to forget everything I’d learned over decades and to fall back into those old painful patterns. But by some grace I didn’t even know I had, I’d taught my daughter a new pattern. And now she had the inner strength, empathy, and bravery to hold up her hand and point out the elephant in the room. Yes, what was happening to Grey was unknown and scary, but I had forgotten that my children’s only reality was my reality. And I had to be their center pole.
That minute, I sat down with Blaise, and I called in the boys as well. I looked at all three of them, and I said, “We’re going to talk about Grey’s hair.” I had no plan, no idea whatsoever what I was doing, or preparation with Bennett, but I knew I had to do something immediately. Not for one second longer did I want my home to be a place of silence and shame. So I told them that Grey’s little body had an allergy. I knew they could understand that—they had plenty of friends with allergies. I said some people are allergic to bee stings, some to wheat, some to peanuts. We didn’t know what Grey’s allergy was yet, and his hair might come back or it might not. But in the meantime, he was perfectly healthy, and that’s all that mattered.
That conversation was like flipping a switch in my kids’ faces. At first they were shocked that I’d said the forbidden word: hair. Then their long-buried curiosity took over, and understanding dawned on them like sunshine. Grey has an allergy—okay, let’s go play! And that was it, they were off and running.
A few weeks later, when Grey and Saxton were about to head off to preschool, I asked Grey if he might like to take his hat off when he was inside (outdoors it protected him from sunburn). He said that he would—and it was like he was admitting something to me that he’d been holding in for a long time. Then he headed off to school and he never looked back. He had never cared about where he was in his hair/no hair cycle. I was the one who needed to let go of my sad predictions and woes. This was his little life, and I needed to let him live it, and if it didn’t bother him now, then it was time for me to brighten up my reality.
One night I was watching television, and I saw Bruce Willis—bald as a cue ball and standing there being interviewed on a red carpet alongside his hot girlfriend. I pressed record on the TiVo, and I spent the rest of the night going to every channel looking for more bald men—I scoured baske
tball games, movies, television shows. By the end of it I must have had thirty different ten-second clips. The next morning I showed Grey one clip after another, starting with Bruce Willis. I said, “Look, Grey, who does he look like?” He looked at Bruce Willis, and then at me. With a huge smile on his face, he said, “Mommy, he’s a Grey-Grey man!” We watched each of these men, and I said, “See Grey, some people have hair, and some people don’t. Some people have curly hair and some people have straight. Some people have lighter skin and some people have darker skin. Everybody’s different, and everybody’s beautiful, and it’s all okay.” Then I handed him the remote control, and I said, “Go get your brother and sister and show them, too.”
Everything changed after that. Suddenly, bald was beautiful in our household, and I realized that there was no one more qualified than me to teach my child the gift of resilience and the importance of empathy. I didn’t kid myself that Grey would never hear an unkind word, or ever have reason to feel self-conscious. But when that moment came, we’d both have a choice—my choice would be to pick him up and dust him off, and his choice would be to shake it off and keep on loving himself for who he was. We could both choose a brighter path. It was time to open the shutters and let the sun in.
I remembered all the times I’d wished that my own scars were more visible, so people could know just by looking at me that something terrible had happened to me. Meanwhile, here was my child, perfect in every way, and yet he looked like something devastating had happened to him. If I believed in fate, I might think that there was a beautiful kind of kismet in this. I think Grey and I have a lot to teach each other about looking past the surfaces that we all construct for ourselves. I would teach him and his siblings now what I had come to understand in my forties: that once you stop fighting yourself and things you can’t control, and surrender—just let go—then you find your power and the energy to move forward. The power comes from the surrender, not from the fight. We can all have a do-over, if we just let ourselves.
We all have our stories—Grey’s would just be a little more visible than other people’s.
After the night of the TiVo clips, we saw Grey-Grey men everywhere, and Grey loved it. He just glowed with the idea that there were people like him all around. There was nothing wrong with being a Grey-Grey man—in fact it was pretty cool. And then one day Sax announced that he wanted to be a Grey-Grey man, too. For his next haircut, he said, he wanted his head shaved so he could be just like his brother.
So one day, after weeks of pretty constant begging from Saxton, I took all three kids to the barber, and Saxton told the barber he wanted to be a Grey-Grey man. He had all his thick, luxurious hair shaved right off. The squeals of laughter were such a wonderful sound that they’re still ringing in my ears. Blaise was cracking up, and Saxton had a smile a mile wide, and he and Grey were kissing and hugging the whole time. It was the most pure and genuine display of love I’d ever seen. I stood there crying, and in that moment I knew that it was all going to be okay.
We plan, and God laughs. My whole life is a lesson in the truth of that statement. I could plan every turn of the road I was on, but I couldn’t control my destination any more than I could predict that the bride’s heel would break on the way up the steps to the church. Recently my entire office spent nine months managing a concert in Central Park that sixty thousand people would attend. And what does any event planner know about outdoor events? Hope for sunshine, but plan for rain.
And of course it rained, the moment we started the concert. It had been clear skies for the entire day, so the event organizers made the call . . . game on. The strange thing was, it only rained in Central Park. I think all the lights and the generators must have caused some kind of localized weather . . . I mean, right? Who could have predicted that? But Andrea Bocelli sang anyway, and it was the amazing capper to months of events that we’d managed all over New York leading up to the concert. I knew the rain wasn’t my fault, but in the old days, my surface calm in the face of potential disaster would have been a big fake—underneath I would have been a sea of anxiety. But now, the outer and the inner me are a much closer match.
Our neighborhood in Tribeca, which I refer to as Triburbia, is like a little suburb, and now that my kids are six and three and a half, pretty much everyone knows us. Grey knows he has to wear his hat in the sun, but otherwise, his bald head is out there for the world to see. And the people we see on a daily basis are so used to seeing him that they don’t even notice it anymore—they just see smiley, gorgeous Grey.
One day at a playground in another neighborhood, I spotted Grey standing at the top of a ladder on a huge jungle gym. He looked at me and he just smiled. Evel Knievel had a plan.
I told him to climb down—carefully—but before I could reach him, he jumped. Luckily the ground was covered in thick foam, so when Grey hit planet Earth with a thud, he was shocked and scared but completely fine. Still he was crying his head off, his hat had flown away, and his face was raining tears and snot.
So now it was a scene, and all the other moms were surrounding me and asking if Grey was okay. I knew what they were all thinking—that the poor little cancer kid fell and hurt himself. But the moment passed quickly. Grey stopped crying, and the first intelligible words he said were, “Can I go on the swing?” Meanwhile, I’m thinking, For the love of God, this kid is going to be the death of me.
Grey started walking over to the swings, and I saw this little clump of kids standing there staring at him and whispering. Grey’s no dummy, and we’d been in this situation with the bald thing enough times to know what the looks and pointed fingers meant. I hovered close but stayed silent, coiled to jump in at the first sign of trouble, when one little girl finally raised her voice and said to Grey, “You don’t have any hair!”
Every atom in my body wanted to say something—do something. But I didn’t. My job was to prepare Grey, and give him the tools he needed to live his life to the fullest. So I hesitated just long enough for Grey to respond himself. He looked at that little girl, he smiled like the sun, and he said, “I know. But I’m cute.” And then he turned around and ran to the swings.
Epilogue
You yourself, as much as anybody else in the entire universe deserve your love and affection.
—BUDDHA
I once planned a lavish wedding in the Bahamas, and I was responsible for every detail except for one: the cake. The bride had arranged for someone local to make the cake, and she was obsessed, and I mean obsessed, with everything about it. She’d been so sweet and easygoing about everything else, but the cake was a different story. That cake became the focus of all her hopes and dreams. It was her marriage, her future, everything she wanted from life, all stacked up in layers of sponge and buttercream.
I didn’t fault the bride for sweating that one detail—she was entitled. And I wanted everything to be perfect for her and for her fiancé. They were a lovely couple, and he was an incredibly dear man. He’d worked on the top floor of the Twin Towers, and had been safely out of the office when the planes hit the World Trade Center, but he’d lost so many friends—so many people who would have been there with them to celebrate their big day. Now he just wanted his bride to be happy, and I wanted to give them both the fairy-tale day they deserved.
The wedding was being held at the ultra-expensive Ocean Club at 6:00 p.m. All was in place and going according to plan, but for one tiny problem: the cake never arrived. I’d tried calling the baker, and the club had tried calling her as well, but there was no answer to any of our calls. Part of me wanted to believe that the baker wasn’t answering her phone because she was already on her way to the club to deliver the cake. Another part of me was convinced that she was sitting on a beach somewhere, sipping a cold one and eating my client’s wedding cake.
At one point late in the afternoon the bride came up to me and said, “Is the cake here? Have you seen it?” She was aglow with expectation, so I gave her
the only possible response: “Yes, I have seen the cake, and you’ll die, it’s so gorgeous.” Meanwhile, I had never even seen a picture of the mythical cake—all the bride had told me was that it was chocolate and vanilla, and decorated with seashells.
Maurice, the maître d’, was an elegant man of military precision who wore the crispest, whitest uniform I’d ever seen. He seemed utterly unflappable, but when I told him that the cake was missing, I thought I would lose him on the spot. The entire staff knew how insane the bride was about this cake. So Maurice said, “I just have to tell her that there’s no cake.”
My response? “And ruin her ceremony and the whole day? No way in hell are you telling the bride there’s no cake.” Then I said, “Maurice, you are going to call your chef and tell him to make me a cake. It’s going to be chocolate and vanilla, and it’s going to be done in two hours.”
Meanwhile, I went to the hotel gift shop and bought ten boxes of Guylian Belgian chocolates shaped like shells and starfish. Then I asked the kitchen to position the chocolates all over the cake, and to paint each one with vanilla buttercream so the chocolates would look like a seamless part of the cake. Then I went around the hotel collecting the silver dollars and gold-painted shells that they used as decoration. These I scattered around the display table where we’d put the cake.
Finally, the moment of truth. It was time for the cake to be rolled into the banquet room before God, the bride and groom, and all their family and friends. Best-case scenario, the bride would take one look at the cake, bite her lip, and have a nervous breakdown later.
Worst-case scenario, she would rend her veil, run screaming from the hotel, and throw herself into the ocean.
I Never Promised You a Goodie Bag Page 20