Mommywood

by Tori Spelling

  I know Liam didn’t have the time of his life and won’t even remember the party. I know that, on some level, it was an excuse to gather my friends together. But looking around that day I felt like everyone who came was instrumental in our lives. They’d all known me throughout my pregnancy. They’d known Liam since he was born. His party may have been wasted on Liam, but it wasn’t purely selfish. I hoped that Liam would grow up knowing that he was surrounded and celebrated and loved by our close friends and us. This was his family.

  Here’s what I learned from Liam’s first party: I would have had an amazing time if it had been a smaller party, with just the close friends who know my day-to-day life. We invited one hundred people. It felt like an event, not my son’s birthday party. I go to so many events and it’s usually the same drill. Sometimes we’ll take friends, like Bill and Scout, to an Emmy party or a similar event. Afterward they always say that it was so much fun. The buffet, the bar, great music, a couple of people they know. But for me, parties like that are always about doing business—schmoozing and talking to fans. Both are important, but they suck up all the time that I might have spent talking to friends, having a drink, or exploring the buffet. I never make it to the food. People stop me every inch of the way. Afterward someone will say, “Oh, there was great art in that space.” I never see any of it. I get into a room and don’t move forward. Once I went to an NBC/Universal event with NBC affiliates and press. I made it four feet into the room, stayed in that one spot an hour and a half, and then we left. I never made it past the door.

  At Liam’s party there weren’t any businesspeople. It was all people we cared about. People who cared about Liam. But when I’m hosting people I don’t see very often, I spend the whole party playing catch-up. I felt like I greeted people from beginning to end. Dozens of five-minute conversations with people and my child’s birthday was over. I was pregnant, and at the end of it all I was exhausted. We went home and I had to go straight to bed. All I could think was, Thank God Dean and I got married alone.

  Okay, here’s what you should be thinking right now: Wow, an elaborate party that ends up being more about her than her child? She is her mother! Now wait a second, no need for insults. I get it. I see the similarities. But here’s the difference, and it all comes back to this whole Mommywood desire I have to raise normal, healthy children despite the crazy, weird world we live in: Liam may not want Hansen’s cake forever. He may not want theme parties. And as soon as it’s clear that he wants something else—boom. It’s over. I want him to grow up understanding that he’s unique and important, and that means “his” days really are about him, his mother’s wishes be damned.

  I know it can be hard reconciling your fantasies of who your children will be with who they are. My friend Jenny, who lets her three-year-old daughter, Delilah, dress herself, says sometimes it’s torture to see the adorable dresses hanging ignored in the closet. One time we met at a restaurant and Delilah was wearing a halter dress that was probably designed to be worn with a T-shirt underneath. Her little nipples were showing above the top of the dress. She was totally happy and comfortable. But what seemed to be rankling Jenny most were Delilah’s shoes. “I mean, would you ever wear those shoes with that dress?” she said. It was really offending her sense of style. I was enjoying Jenny’s obvious anguish, but she said, “Just you wait. It’ll happen to you too, and when it does, it’s heartbreaking.”

  I thought back on the prissy pastel Bonwit Teller dresses that my mother made me wear year after year. And that stupid bob cut she insisted the hairdresser give me. Who knows why I didn’t or couldn’t rebel, but if next year Liam doesn’t want another big party and would rather sit in a sandbox with a plain old cupcake, I’ll be fine with it. When Liam is old enough to express himself, I’ll do everything I can to make sure I listen and give him the parties that he wants. And should I overdo it, I’ll let him hang out in his high chair, munching a banana, if that’s his preference. Of course I mean this for both my children. If someday in the not-too-distant future our baby girl walks out in a green dress with orange socks and blue shoes or, even worse, insists on a bob, I don’t think I’ll be heartbroken. I think the ten-year-old in me will take vicarious pleasure in my daughter’s freedom. And then maybe the ten-year-old in me will go ask my mother what happened to all those Madame Alexander dolls she gave me every year but ultimately kept for herself.

  Liam’s first party was over. I morphed back from Event Planning Hulk into plain old Tori, took a look at the disassembled train and monkey poop around me, and asked, “What happened?” When the episode of Tori & Dean aired showing Liam’s party, my publicist got an email addressed to me from PETA. Though they had no idea where we hired the monkeys or how they were cared for, they still chastised me about the inhumane use of live monkeys as birthday party entertainment. That explained Liam’s lukewarm reaction. Obviously they got to him first.

  Once all the guests cleared out, Liam got his zest back. Dean took him into the moon bounce and he had the best fifteen minutes of his life up to that point. I watched my two boys laughing and tumbling in circles and felt the baby somersaulting in my belly. For all the planning, that moment felt like the real birthday present—for all of us.

  The Suburban Dream

  Once Liam’s birthday passed, Dean and I turned our attention to practical matters: real estate. I wanted our kids to grow up in a real neighborhood, a normal neighborhood—one with sidewalks, and neighbors with kids, and people borrowing cups of sugar. The house in that dream neighborhood was linked to my fantasy of being a stay-at-home mom, but as far as I could tell, the staying-at-home part wasn’t going to happen any time soon.

  The success of Tori & Dean was a welcome point of stability in our household. The timing of Liam’s birth was such that I had a couple of months off work, but with the comfort of knowing that I had a job to return to. But this baby girl was due to be born when we were right in the middle of filming our third season, and she expressed no interest in waiting an extra few months. Assuming I was in good-enough health, I’d return to work the day after I got home from the hospital. In my fantasy world, I would put my career and my finances on ice and take a year off the minute the second baby was born, but the reality was that we were lucky to have work, and sadly, it couldn’t be put on hold for our brand-new baby.

  In Hollywood, if an actor doesn’t work for any period of time, the casting directors forget about her. It doesn’t matter why you’re not working—because you can’t bear the thought of playing another FBI agent, because you want to take time off for a trip around the world, or because nobody will hire you post–jail term. (No, none of these reasons apply to me, although a trip around the world sounds nice. Minus the plane rides.) The point is, as an actor, if you’re off the job for a few months, that’s it. You’re over. Or so it seems. All actors have had dry spells and remember how stressful it is never to know if or when we’ll work again. The same way an athlete worries about injuries, or a fund manager worries that his investments will go sour, or a Beanie Baby employee might worry that the fad will end. It’s part of the job. Actors live in a semiconstant state of fear and anxiety that we’ll never work again.

  I wish I could afford to be a stay-at-home-mom. I fantasize about taking Liam to a Gymboree class or going to Mommy and Me groups with the new baby every single week instead of just when I can fit it in. I imagined us living in a new neighborhood where I could walk the two of them to the playground in a double stroller every morning, then push the baby in the swing while keeping one eye on Liam in the sandbox. My friend Jenny is a full-time mom. She and I would soon have two babies the same age. We were already having Friday night family dinners with the boys playing together at one family-friendly restaurant or another. Our dream was to raise families together, and now we were, but wouldn’t it be nice to do it…more? Sometimes I look at Jenny’s life and wish it were mine: if she’s pulled in multiple directions, it’s by her two, soon to be three, children. She takes her oldest, D
elilah, to preschool, then she might take Shane (Liam’s buddy) to gym class. After preschool Delilah goes to ballet, then Jenny’s back home making dinner. When Norm gets home from work, they eat as a family. I know she’s just as busy as I am, and I know she gets stressed out, but she’s doing mom stuff. She has one job. She never has the work versus family conflict.

  I’m constantly working. I work seven days a week. It’s not just the TV show. I have fifty million different projects and obligations. My jewelry line. My children’s clothing line. Meetings about a new website. Talk show appearances. Building Dean’s and my production company. Developing new ideas for TV and movies. Even writing books! For better or worse, I have the kind of fame where my name is a brand. I know it sounds weird, but we treat “Tori Spelling” like a business. What do people think of me? Do they recognize my name? Do they trust Tori Spelling’s taste? Even when we’re not working on the series, my life is a never-ending meeting about building the Tori Spelling brand. Not every actor goes this route: I suppose I could do the reality show and leave it at that. But I can’t. I’m telling you, it’s the curse of the Hollywood actor. It’s impossible to turn down opportunities. So then I think, I’ll work my ass off now, earn bundles of money, and then I can be home with my family one day. But we all know how that will turn out. I’ll work hard for fifteen years, finally earn enough money to be home, but by then my kids won’t even want me around. My prime earning years are their prime growing years. It gives me grief and guilt every single day.

  I have no idea how to do anything but act. I always have lots of ideas for businesses, and our show made me realize I could actually give them a try. I started by opening a bed-and-breakfast, but it wasn’t for me. Then I toyed with starting a french fry business. Can’t you see it? A chain of stores with reliably excellent fries and excellent toppings in food courts across the country? In reality I’m not going to spend all day working a deep fryer. It would frizz my hair. But I still think it’s a good idea. And I still fantasize about opening a Mommy and Me store—a store with a play area for children and staff to supervise them while their mothers shop in peace—but that hasn’t gotten off the ground. I could make my famous red velvet cake and hold bake sales on street corners. We could move to the country and Dean could work in construction. I’m sure a life coach/spiritual guide/high voodoo priestess could give us some other options, but for now I feel pretty stuck in the life I’m living. I think lots of people are like this. We’re afraid of what we don’t know. And I like my life. I’m grateful for it. I’m just conflicted.

  I can’t control work, but I try to create more time to be with my children. Like any mom (except my own), I have scaled back on the personal maintenance. The hair extensions? Gone. The pedicures? Infrequent. I’m single-handedly trying to bring back the closed-toe shoe, and it’s not for fashion’s sake. I’d love to get back in shape, but if I have an hour or two off, I don’t want to spend it taking a yoga class or slogging away on the treadmill. I complain about my weight and Dean tells me I should go to the gym. But an hour-long class away from Liam? I can’t do it. The only weight loss program I can manage is dieting. Being distracted by children during dinner is a great diet program; I don’t have to go to the gym nearly as often! I discovered that I could get healthy the family way—by taking the kids out in the double jogger, by swimming or biking with Liam, by cooking nutritious food for the whole family. Rather than take time away from the family, I made our family time wholesome for all of us.

  I wasn’t going to be a stay-at-home mom, but at least Dean and I could find a home in a place that felt more like a neighborhood. When Liam was born we were back and forth between friends in L.A. and the bed-and-breakfast. Then we rented a house up in the canyons with no flat sidewalks where we could walk with the stroller and no real sense of neighborhood. I grew up in a house with a driveway that was so long I can’t remember ever walking to the bottom of it. So now I fantasized about living in a real neighborhood, where we could go out for walks, chat with the neighbors, and maybe even make some friends with children the same age as ours! As my second pregnancy progressed, Dean and I decided to buy our first house. Maybe the suburban dream house would balance out my working mom angst.

  We found a house on Leave It to Beaver Avenue (let’s call it Beaver Avenue) in a part of L.A. called Westwood. The neighborhood was flat (yay!), with mostly two-and three-bedroom houses on nice but not huge plots of land. Anyone walking through it could immediately imagine that it was a pleasant neighborhood with lots of unpretentious people. It was a very real neighborhood—by L.A. standards, anyway. The houses were close together, not town houses but right up against one another. Most of them were one-story houses that had been in the same families for generations. The younger people on the block had grown up there and the houses had been passed to them from their parents. Our future house had a pool that filled most of the backyard and it had a patch of green grass where the dogs could do their business. When I looked at that backyard, two images filled my head: Liam swimming to his heart’s content, and the amazing cocktail parties we could have.

  The people who sold us the house told us what an exceptional neighborhood it was. Everyone was friendly and we were lucky to be moving in that spring, because every third year Beaver Avenue threw an incredible Fourth of July block party. That wasn’t all. Every Halloween our neighbor had a wine bar for the adults and cupcakes for the kids. Another neighbor told me that a nearby block had a party—a “progressive dinner.” Five houses in the neighborhood would host. The first house would serve cocktails. The second house would serve hors d’oeuvres. The third house would serve appetizers. The fourth house would serve the main course, and the last house would serve dessert. The neighbor said, “We should do that on Beaver Avenue,” and I was completely on board: “We should!”

  As soon as we closed on the house, we started doing some minor work on it, and every time we came to check on the progress, there was some new neighborhood feature to be excited about. We saw kids playing out in the street: would their parents be our new best friends? There were people taking walks in the early evening: it must be so safe! I was going to have neighbors! A neighborhood! I got a double stroller and imagined that as soon as the baby was born I’d take long walks with the two babies. The double stroller was the übermom accessory. I was on my way to a minivan and proud of it. But life doesn’t always go according to plan, and for all my fantasies, I was no June Cleaver.

  People Randomly Die

  I had a wonderful husband, an adorable son, and a daughter on the way. We had an income, and now we even had a family home that was almost ready for us. My dream life was coming together. But for all my ongoing efforts to be and prove myself a normal mom, I had to come to terms with the fact that—Mommywood aside—I’m just not one hundred percent sane. I’ve always had irrational fears. A sniper would open fire on me as I walked across a parking lot. The baby would kick a hole in my uterus. A shampoo bottle would get upset if it was facing the opposite way from all the other hair care products. And always, always, the plane would crash if I wasn’t wearing a certain necklace or carrying a particular stuffed animal. Or both. Now that I was a mother, and very nearly a mother of two, I was supposed to be the grown-up. I was supposed to reassure Liam when he was frightened. I was supposed to be a point of calm in the storm. A rock. But here’s the thing. In the past I always knew my fears were irrational. The way I kept them under control was by reminding myself how unlikely they were. But now that I was a mom, my irrational fears were replaced by a whole new set of worries. And these fears were real.

  A week before our baby girl was born, Dean was out with Mehran getting a tattoo of all three kids’ names. They were filming it for our show, although that little adventure didn’t make it on the air. I was home with Paola, a babysitter we had hired as I reached the end of the pregnancy. I’d been having pain when I carried Liam, and my doctor told me I needed to stop lifting him up, so Paola came to the rescue. That afternoon, it look
ed like Liam was starting to get sick. He was running a fever, he threw up, and he was a little out of it. So we gave him a bath and some Tylenol and put him to bed. Then Dean texted me that he was going to be home in half an hour. It was 8:30. I told Paola she could go home, but she insisted on staying with me in case Liam woke up. (Remember? I couldn’t lift him out of his crib.) I went to lie down in my room. Liam was in his room, next to mine, and Paola was downstairs watching TV with the video monitor. Next thing I knew Paola was sprinting upstairs. I came out of my room and asked what was wrong. She said, “I think he threw up,” and hurried into his room. I followed behind.

  When we found Liam he was blue and didn’t seem to be breathing. His eyes were white, rolled back in his head. Paola took him into her arms, but he was limp. He wasn’t moving or breathing. I thought he was dead. I froze in shock. Paola looked at me and said, “T, call nine-one-one.” The phone was downstairs, and though I had lumbered slowly and painstakingly up and down those stairs throughout the pregnancy, this time I don’t remember touching a single stair. I flew.

  Paola brought Liam downstairs while I was on the phone screaming, “Help, help, I think my son is dead.” The emergency operator was going through a greatest-hits list of emergency operator lines: “Ma’am, you have to calm down. Ma’am, just give me your information.” I was hysterical as I somehow gave them my address and relayed their instructions to Paola. Thank God she hadn’t gone home. All I could think was, Oh my God, in a week I’m going to have my daughter, why is this happening? I was about to have my perfect family and now I was going to lose one child. Is this how it’s going to be? Is one taking the place of the other?