Happy Chaos

by Soleil Moon Frye

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Chapter 1 - Welcome to Happy Chaos

  Chapter 2 - Let’s Have a Baby!

  Chapter 3 - Granny Panties

  Chapter 4 - Ya Never Know

  Chapter 5 - Not-So-Traditional Traditions

  Chapter 6 - Perfectly Imperfect

  Chapter 7 - You Marry One, You Marry the Tribe

  Chapter 8 - Please, Sir, May I Have Another?

  Chapter 9 - Trusting My Gut, and Not the One I Came Home with After the Baby

  Chapter 10 - Expect the Unexpected

  Chapter 11 - What’s Yours Is Mine

  Chapter 12 - Don’t Speak to Me Like That

  Chapter 13 - Eating Dessert First

  Chapter 14 - What’s in a Name?

  Chapter 15 - Happy Birthday

  Chapter 16 - Yes, Michael Jackson Was My Babysitter

  Chapter 17 - What I Learned from Punky

  Chapter 18 - Too Scared to Scream

  Chapter 19 - Let’s Play the Quiet Game—You Know, the One Where No One Speaks ...

  Chapter 20 - First Comes Love

  Chapter 21 - The Mack Truck Moment

  Chapter 22 - Over-the-Shoulder Boulder Holder

  Chapter 23 - Jake Ryan, Where Are You?

  Chapter 24 - Girl Time

  Chapter 25 - The Much-Needed Family Vacation

  Chapter 26 - Embarrassing Moments

  Chapter 27 - Sticks and Stones

  Chapter 28 - The Dash Between

  Chapter 29 - Please and Thank You

  Chapter 30 - Be My Baby

  Chapter 31 - Rated PG

  Chapter 32 - Crushes

  Chapter 33 - Wild Child

  Chapter 34 - It Takes Time to Save the World

  Chapter 35 - Welcome Back, Virgil Frye

  Chapter 36 - Don’t Stop Make-believing

  Chapter 37 - Growing Pains

  Chapter 38 - To All You Dads out There

  Chapter 39 - Mix Tape

  Chapter 40 - Press Pause

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  DUTTON

  Published by Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.

  Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.); Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England; Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd); Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd); Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi—110 017, India; Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, Auckland 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd); Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  Published by Dutton, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  First printing, August 2011

  Copyright © 2011 by Soleil Moon Frye

  All rights reserved

  P REGISTERED TRADEMARK—MARCA REGISTRADA

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  has been applied for.

  ISBN : 978-1-101-54352-8

  Set in Bell MT

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  While the author has made every effort to provide accurate telephone numbers and Internet addresses at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author assumes any responsibility for errors, or for changes that occur after publication. Further, the publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party Web sites or their content.

  http://us.penguingroup.com

  This book is dedicated to my two children, who fill my life with so much love and Happy Chaos each and every day, and to my nieces, whose laughter and smiling faces bring so much joy to us.

  To my big bro and his wife, who have shown us to live every day as a new adventure. To my mother, who taught me to never stop believing in myself or the world around us. To Mema, Bapu, and my dad. I love you now and always. To everyone who taught me that sometimes the best lessons come when we fall down and get back up again, and to my husband, who I fell in love with from the moment we first met. I love you more today than ever before and like we said when it all began: “As my sweet dreams of childhood come true, I am so grateful to dream them with you.”

  1

  Welcome to Happy Chaos

  Question of the day: If you were going to write a book about the story of your life, what would the title be?

  “Short Girls Have Feelings, Too.”

  —Dana

  “It would probably be No Regrets. I have no regrets in life, just learning experiences! Life is too short to regret.”

  —Tracey

  “The heart of a mother: My journey to mommyhood through open adoption.”

  —Stephanie

  “I think it would have to be called The Trails. I’ve noticed that no matter how you cut it, no one goal in life has a direct route. So you keep following different lines till you get there.”

  —Gary

  I was seven years old when I walked onto the set of Punky Brewster, a show about a little girl who was abandoned by her mother in a grocery store. I think of it now and smile as I imagine them pitching the series. A show about a kid whose parents abandoned her at the tender age of seven . . . and it’s a comedy! Then she narrowly escapes being sent to an orphanage . . . an orphanage! This wasn’t a drama—or a novel by Dickens—this was a prime-time sitcom on NBC. Amazing. Even more amazing, Punky wasn’t saved from the orphanage by a mom and a dad with a big house and a backyard. Instead, she and her dog, Brandon, were taken in by a grumpy old man. And together they made a family.

  Punky became a champion for all nontraditional families, and I spent some of the happiest, most incredible, adventurous, hilarious years of my life playing that little girl. I like to think that there’s still a lot of Punky in me. Or maybe there was a lot of me in Punky. In many ways, I’m still that same inquisitive, boundary-questioning kid that I played on television.

  Throughout my whole life, as soon as I could talk, I was asking why. Not just the usual why is the sky blue? kind of questions. No, I wanted to know how the world worked. I was fascinated by human behavior. I vividly remember that as early as preschool, I was already wondering how I got here. I just had to know where babies came from, and I wasn’t satisfied with vague answers. I wanted detail. So my free-spirited mom gave me Where Do Babies Come From? This book offered the complete lowdown—including diagrams of the male and female anatomy. Little did she know, I tucked that wonderfully informative little book into my school bag, and the next day I played show-and-tell with my wide-eyed classmates. There was some drama with the other parents at the school after that, but you know, knowledge is meant to be shared! The really remarkable thing about all of my questioning i
s that I didn’t even speak my first words until I was three years old. And of course my first sentence was a question: “Mommy, how do you like my painting?”

  Then I grew up (sort of), and eventually I became a mom myself, and I had so many questions. Again, I looked at books, but most of them didn’t really seem to speak to me. And then I looked at the other parents around me—the ones who seemed to have this parenting thing down really well—and I wondered if maybe there was a secret manual they all read, and somehow I didn’t get my copy. It felt like other moms opened their strollers with a neat flick of the wrist while bluebirds sang around their heads. Meanwhile, I’d still be struggling to get mine open, and wondering, “What’s that smell?” before discovering that I’d managed to walk out of the house with baby vomit in my hair.

  In my search for answers I read books, blogs, and magazine articles, and everything just seemed so . . . perfect. I’d see a blog where the mom was cutting vegetables on the counter, and the baby was sitting quietly (and cleanly) beside her. Okay, I don’t know about you, but that is not my life. If I’m cooking pancakes for breakfast, the kids are throwing batter and they have syrup up their arms and strawberry stains on their clothes, my clothes, the furniture.... We live a messy, chaotic life. And I love it. But still, every once in a while I wonder—are we crazier than everyone else, or does it just seem like that?

  So I dug a little deeper online. And I found some places where people like me were asking their own honest questions. I discovered the incredible world of social media. I found myself turning to Twitter and Facebook so that I could connect to people like me, the other parents who were leaving the house with clothes on inside out and syrup all over. And then the world opened up. Suddenly here were all of these moms and dads connecting in a way that felt so authentic and genuine. Here was a space where parents could be themselves and speak openly. I found that the more I shared, the more other parents were sharing their stories, and I learned that I wasn’t alone as a new parent. There were a lot more parents like me out there, parents who didn’t get the secret manual, either. And it was such a relief! Finally, I could take a breath and let it out slowly. It’s all right not to be an expert at opening up the stroller or figuring out the car seat—just as long as someone gets the car seat installed properly. It’s okay that I still have no idea how to get those plastic toys out of their packaging. All of those little things that for so long had been piling up and making me feel like I came from another planet—suddenly that weight lifted and I realized that there are a million other parents who have felt this way. I’m not the only one who’s walked into the room to discover her two-year-old drawing on the white walls with a black Sharpie.

  It’s so easy for us to be hard on ourselves. We compare ourselves to other parents and hold ourselves up to some standard of perfection that we’ve seen or read about in books—or invented in our own heads. Because of course we want to be perfect for our kids. God knows, if I could, I would! But the vomit in the hair, the pancake batter on the chair, and the black Sharpie on the walls—this is real life. And it’s dealing with all that messiness that makes us great parents, and makes us laugh, and makes us stronger.

  Instead of being so focused on trying to be perfect, I decided to live my life trying to be the best parent I can be. I like to call myself a work in progress, and I feel like every day I grow as a parent, and I learn something new. There are plenty of books out there that tell you how to do everything perfectly. But those didn’t help me when I was feeling really lost and confused. What helped me was knowing that other parents felt the same way that I did.

  That’s why it was so important to me to write this book. By sharing our messy experiences with each other, we learn that we’re not alone. You will see many of my questions throughout the book, along with answers from parents just like us. We will share our proud parenting moments along with our most embarrassing ones, and I will tell you the secrets that no one told me about. If there’s any way that I’m an expert, it’s this: I know what I know—and I know how much I don’t know. So consider this the “Messy Guide to Parenting”—it’s the secret manual that I wish I had when I first started out on this incredible parenting journey. Along the way, I’m going to share a few incredibly helpful tips that I’ve picked up, either from my own experiences or from the amazing wisdom of others. At the end of each chapter, you will see “S.P.S.” It stands for Soleil’s P.S.—because, yes, I still use P.S. all the time. I can’t help it. I’m an eighties girl at heart.

  Welcome to Happy Chaos. Welcome to the worry, the uncertainty, and the joy. Look at your kid and remember the kid you once were, and get down on the floor and be that kid again. That kid never went away—she’s still right in there. And if the laundry is piling up, and your daughter just sprayed the kitchen with a gallon of rainbow sprinkles, and you wonder what that smell is (my advice: check your hair), rest assured that if you opened the door to my house right now, you would find the exact same thing. Sometimes we even go to bed without bathing. With chlorine in our hair. Don’t look at me that way. I know! Just don’t tell anybody, okay?

  Here I am as a kid living in “Happy Chaos”

  2

  Let’s Have a Baby!

  Question of the day: What is your recommended playlist for the labor/delivery room?

  “Some relaxing meditation music (for the time I spend not in labor), and a mix from The Beatles to NOFX for when all the ‘action’ is taking place.”

  —AnnaMae

  “Labor is a different creature altogether. You want some loud music to drown out the contractions, some soothing tunes for those quiet lulls and some high-energy songs to inspire you through to the finish. Authentic South African mixes are great for the delivery room. You just have to look past the fact that the baby will be born to The Lion King.”

  —Ashley

  * “Baby Love”—The Supremes

  * “Sweet Child O’ Mine”—Guns N’ Roses

  * “Push It”—Salt-N-Pepa

  * “This Woman’s Work”—Kate Bush

  * “I’m Coming Out”—Diana Ross

  * “Ordinary Miracle”—Sarah McLachlan

  —Jason A. L.

  “Something calming. Let’s face it when you are in full labour you won’t notice music anyway but calming is better than punk!”

  —@vanity ace fake:

  Bob Marley was playing on the stereo, soft lights decorated the room, friends and family were laughing and swapping stories . . . it was a party—the best party ever. And there I was, in the center of it all, pushing out my baby.

  That’s how we do things in my family. Sure, you can have a baby without the help of everyone you love, but where’s the fun in that? When my free-spirited mother was a month overdue with me, my godmother took her out to the local dance hall, where her water broke on the dance floor. Then Mom planned to have me at my godparents’ house in Topanga Canyon, but there were complications, and instead of having the perfect earthy at-home birth, my mother found herself on an adventure in the back of the family van. Mom and my godparents tore off through the hills, looking for a hospital that would take her. While my mother labored away on a makeshift bed in the back, hospital after hospital turned them away because she wasn’t preregistered. Finally, after driving all the way to Glendora, California, hours away, my godfather found a hospital that accepted my mom. And there I was born, welcomed by all who loved me most in the world.

  I hoped for the same kind of experience for my own baby girl. I daydreamed about what colorful place my water would break. I would be standing in the middle of a party, decked out in all my nine months of glory, and get excited at the idea that a gush of water would appear at any moment. I must have woken my husband up a thousand times during my pregnancy, thinking that I was about to give birth. I was just so excited. I wanted my new baby’s first breath of air to be filled with love. I wanted happiness to wrap around her like a force field of strength and protection that would last a lifetime. I found a great
doctor who made me feel incredibly comfortable (and who was the crush of every pregnant woman in Hollywood), and in the weeks leading up to Poet’s due date, I stayed up late every night making playlists so that her arrival would have the perfect soundtrack. I bought small lights to put around the hospital room, and I packed the softest sheets, a robe, and a pillow from home. I was determined to make the hospital feel like a cross between a spa and a hotel room.

  Then, two weeks before Poet was due, my doctor discovered that there wasn’t enough amniotic fluid to support her any longer, and we would have to induce. “Today,” he said. I still remember the feeling that washed over me. I had thought I was ready for this, but was I ready for this? Even Jason couldn’t quite grasp that Poet wasn’t waiting two more weeks to make her entrance. He actually said, “Do I have to cancel my meetings?” The doctor’s response was something like “Yeah, guys, I think you’d better clear the day.” We had just enough time to race home and grab the bags stuffed with every item I thought I could possibly need or want. And thus began one of the most amazing, unexpected, and perfectly imperfect experiences of my life.

  My labor room was like Thanksgiving, Hanukkah, Christmas, and a birthday party rolled into one big celebration, all to the tune of a folk-reggae soundtrack. While I labored, a group of friends and family came to support us and then stayed for the party. I had brought a little Buddha with me to be a calming focal point, and my loved ones generated waves of nurturing love that reverberated around that room. An amazing number of people were there to welcome Poet into the world: my mom, my godmother, Tori (my best friend since we were two years old), Ashton, Demi (who turned out to be the best birthing coach ever; I swear, she must have been a midwife in a previous life), my good friend Heather, and my mother-in-law. Oh, and the doctor, the nurse, my husband. And me.