by Rob Lowe
My brother was born on January 15, 1968. I have no memory of Chad’s birth, although I know my dad fainted dead away when he was told about it in the waiting room. Apparently, not letting him hold his newborn had some wisdom to it after all.
Baby Chad came home, my father did not. At least that is my assumption, as he is absent from my memories of this time. But these recollections are fuzzy and likely distorted. I believe it’s not because I was so young as much as it is because the house was so filled with unhappiness; my mother’s, my father’s, and as a result, my own. I had already begun to tune out reality, to retreat to a private world and block out any pain. From this period of my life I have only two distinct memories—both events are unique; impossible to experience more than once in a lifetime: a stopping of time after which nothing will ever be as it was. One is my mother waking me up for the moon landing. The other memory has played out in my mind again and again over the course of my lifetime. I knew the moment it happened that all I had known was over; it has taken forty-three years to begin to understand the ripples that have emanated from that day. The shattering, dull wounding, the mistaken lessons, and also, the circuitous road that opened up that day, leading me to eventual happiness and fulfillment that would have been impossible to achieve otherwise.
Again, it is just my mom and I. I’m five years old. Chad is not there, and I am waiting for my mother to finish her errand at the lumber store. It’s a big place, brightly lit, with giant stacks of two-by-fours and other cuts of wood, all in rows, one after the other. I’m sitting on one of these big stacks, watching my mother at the cashier. I’m sipping chocolate milk through a straw. It’s summer and even though I am wearing shorts, it’s hot and humid in the giant store, and I’m restless. I’m also thinking that there has been something bothering me, I’ve been sad and uncomfortable, anxious now, for a while. When feelings well up I push them down, lose myself in make-believe, play, cartoons, toys. I can’t name this thing that is bothering me; I’m not old enough to know that I should even try. And today, in the sticky Dayton summer it’s upon me again, this unease, this feeling of something bad about to happen. Usually chocolate milk from Mom can make it go away. Today it won’t.
I’m watching my mom walking toward me. Later in life her hair will turn brown, but now she is still blonde, with a perfectly shaped nose and clear blue eyes. She seems tiny in this giant store, alone. Inside me something clicks. I see our life together very clearly, in all its reality for how it is and is not what I want it to be. Everything falls away, all other thoughts, all other feelings. Just a question forming now, for the first time, triggered by my mom walking toward me in a lumber store. She looks at me and smiles. I blurt out, “Is Dad ever coming home?”
My mom pauses for just a moment, then answers. “No, he isn’t. We’re getting a divorce.”
I have spent my career on high alert to clichés, excising them from scripts and speeches whenever I could. I’m deeply suspicious and rarely entertained by conventionally accepted turning points in a plot, of events that are meant to seem earth-shatteringly dramatic when in fact, to me, they are merely predictable.
There is no hoarier cliché than a child’s psyche rocked by divorce. And for much of my life I have not only resisted this notion, but have had a sort of vague disdain for anyone who pinned their adolescent or adult challenges on their parents’ broken lives. To do so is to substitute another’s life mistake for your own. And so later in life as I came to face my own shortcomings, I rarely considered the effect of a lost father on a four-year-old boy. That understanding would only come later, as I confronted my alcoholism and, more clearly, when I had two sons of my own. Anything painful surrounding my parents’ breakup I sealed off and buried, left unexplored and undisturbed, like nuclear waste.
My mother was unprepared for my reaction to her unvarnished, truthful answer. At the mention of “divorce,” my body felt as if I had been shot, shot full of terrible stomachache and a swirling, spinning-out-of-control desolation. I began to cry. Clerks and customers passed us by, oblivious, before my mom hustled me outside as I began to deteriorate. “Do you know what divorce is?” she stammered. I remember thinking, you idiot, what do you take me for . . . a kid?! “Of course I do!” I snapped. “I watch Divorce Court!”
By the time we reached our navy-blue station wagon I was inconsolable. All I wanted was my dad. In the onrushing, awful vision of life without him, I was confused and scared. When would I see him again? Would I ever see him again? If so, for how long and under what circumstances? I told my mother I wanted to see him, now!
It must have been a weekend because the first places we looked for him were the tennis courts. I can take you today on a tour of all Dayton’s various tennis facilities; this terrible pilgrimage is so etched in my mind. And as I sat desperately looking out the window, hoping to see him on a court, in passing cars, or on the street, I thought to myself bitterly, that’s what I get for asking the question. And with that I began to plot how to avoid any similar pain for the rest of my life. To avoid being emotionally bushwhacked on any level whatsoever. And somewhere in my unconscious, I vowed to never ask a question if there was any possibility of a painful or even uncomfortable answer, to disassociate from conflict. I began a life of avoidance of potential disharmony at all costs. Unknowingly, I set out down a road that cost me dearly.
I never did find my father that day.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Rob Lowe is a film, television and theater actor; a producer; and an entrepreneur. He is also involved in politics and is the author of Stories I Only Tell My Friends: An Autobiography. He lives in Los Angeles.
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ALSO BY ROB LOWE
Stories I Only Tell My Friends
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Copyright © 2014 by Rob Lowe
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information address Simon & Schuster Subsidiary Rights Department, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020
First Simon & Schuster hardcover edition April 2014
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Interior design by Joy O’Meara
Jacket design by Christopher Lin
Jacket photograph by David Raccuglia, courtesy of the Author
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.
ISBN 978-1-4516-8571-8
ISBN 978-1-4516-8575-6(ebook)
Photo credits: With the following exceptions, photographs are courtesy of the author and his family: FilmMagic: 61; NBCU Photo Bank via Getty Images: 115, 160 (bottom), 187 (bottom left), 198 (bottom); Playboy: 126; HBO: 187 (top right); Showtime: 187 (bottom right); Mike Yarish/Sony Pictures Televison: 187 (center); Getty Images: 243 (right). Back endpaper: David Raccuglia.
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