by Jennie Garth
When I look back, my childhood seems a bit lonely, and in some ways it was. But in other ways it wasn’t at all. There were long days when my sisters were at school and I was on my own, hunting down woolly black caterpillars or lying on my stomach on those soft green mounds of earth in the graveyard. When I think back on this, I feel calm, because being around all those old bones and spirits didn’t freak me out; they kind of filled me with a sense of solace, maybe because I’m a bit of an old soul myself.
I spent a lot of time when I was young not talking to anyone, and so I ended up, both by nature and nurture, pretty shy and introverted. I’d like to think my shyness is more a function of always being alone rather than not wanting to be near other people, because I loved being around my family. I mean I loved it, and I couldn’t get enough of it. And when they were off at work or school, I ended up spending a lot of my time alone and in my own head.
It was just me, a pale little girl with long white braids and all that space, all that sky. It was very Little House on the Prairie, for sure. It’s where I developed my deep love of the land, my deep passion for animals (aside from the horses, we had dogs and cats and rabbits and . . .). It was where I learned to just love, love, love being outdoors. It’s also where I did my first modeling job, when I was around seven. There I was, in my overalls and braids, and I was supposed to stand and smile in front of a cornfield, for a picture that would be featured in a brochure for the Corn Growers Association. Well, my nerves must have gotten the best of me, or else I ate too many bowls of Rice Krispies that morning, because on our way out to the photo shoot, I barfed all over the backseat of my mom’s car and down the front of my shirt. My mom took my shirt off, wiped my hair, the ends of my braids, and the front of my overalls with it, and then—snap!—the picture was taken with me standing there in my overalls, my pigtails looking like bunches of young corn silk, the satisfied look of a kid who’d just barfed still on my face.
I wasn’t adored just by all of my older siblings; I was also the undisputed apple of my dad’s eye. My mom tells me that when I was a baby, my dad would come in from work in the late afternoon, scoop me up, settle down on the couch with me on his chest, and we’d both crash hard, me rising and falling on his big, burly chest, cozy and asleep. It was my favorite spot, a place I long for still to this day.
I idolized my dad from a very young age: He was the hero of our family, a man’s man who loved his house full of girls with all his heart. He wasn’t a talkative person (I definitely share this trait of his), but he was a solid person, a dependable person. I always knew I could count on him. And I stuck by him like a burr on a sock. We were so close, in fact, or so goes the family lore, that I decided to be born on his birthday. And I was, he liked to tell me, absolutely the best birthday present he ever got. To say we were close would be an understatement: I was the poster child for “Daddy’s little girl.”
“You were a pain in the ass,” my sister Cammie laughingly said to me recently when I asked her what I was like as a kid. “You were into everything. Everything. And, man, you were just so damn cute.” Ah, Cammie. I was also the apple of her eye, no doubt about it. Despite being almost a decade older than me, Cammie never gave me the brush-off, never made me feel like I was really in the way. Since we shared a room, she would get me ready for school and braid my hair in the mornings. I remember that I was in second grade when Cammie got her driver’s license, and she’d drive me to school in her bitchin’ El Camino, the radio blasting so loud that I’d burst into tears. That was my Cammie: driving good ol’ Puddles to elementary school on her way to high school in her badass car.
I loved Cammie just as fiercely she loved me. I love all my siblings, every single one of them, but me and Cammie? We were thick as thieves. Two peas in a pod. All of those things and then some. All of my other siblings would do anything in the world for me, too. They are all just that kind of people: true-blue, kind, straightforward. Completely unpretentious. They are the salt of the earth, the Garths, and I’m proud to be one of them.
My mom, to this day, from time to time likes to tell me that her kids and John’s kids would fight over whose family I most favored, whose sibling I really was. I was treated like a princess by everyone, like the little royal who united two households, joining them in everlasting love and harmony. I would be lying if I didn’t say this went to my head, at least a little.
I’m sure I’ll remember more about my life on that sweet farm, but until I do, I just want to say that our rural, very private, big and close family upbringing in Illinois was a truly beautiful thing. It was a solid start that I’m forever grateful for. But like most of the best things in life, it didn’t last. It all got shaken up when my dad had a massive heart attack when I was nine. After that, things for the Garths were just never the same.
THE FIRST BIG BLOW
When I was a little girl, my dad had his first heart attack. It was a massive one. It was so bad it very nearly took my father out of the game, and his heart was so damaged by this episode that he had to undergo major open-heart surgery. Back then, this kind of surgery was pretty new and dangerous and super-risky. But my dad’s heart was so badly damaged that there were just no other options: My mother was told that he had to have the surgery or he would surely die.
Fortunately for me, for all of us, my dad survived this awful ordeal, but he was never the same afterward. The blow to his heart pretty much knocked the stuffing out of him, and he emerged from the long rehabilitation that followed his surgery a different man—at least physically. He was no longer the invincible he-man of my child’s mind, the burly guy with the chafed farmer’s hands who could lift and bale and ride and wrestle. My dad came back rattled and tentative and visibly weakened. He had had a serious brush with mortality and this stuck with him, making him even more withdrawn and quiet than he had been before.
From then on, I always felt like I was waiting for some kind of terrible, terrifying shoe to drop. I was afraid that my dad was going to get sick again, or worse, he’d have another heart attack, and this time we wouldn’t be so lucky and we would lose him. It was a horrible feeling that I just couldn’t shake. I don’t know if any of us could.
I was too young to understand it back then, but my dad had been diagnosed with heart disease at his young age, in his late thirties, specifically arteriosclerosis (hardening of the arteries). This was the same kind of heart disease that had killed his own father at a pretty young age.
Winters in Illinois are long and cold, and when your home is a working farm, you have to spend most of your days out of doors tending to the animals. Though my dad regained a lot of his strength after that brutal first heart attack, he was never a hundred percent again, and we all felt this overwhelming need to protect him, to figure out what we could do to keep him from putting any undue stress on his beleaguered heart. Caring for the farm in the middle of nowhere, especially during those pretty brutal Midwestern winter months, was no longer in my dad’s best interest. All of us believed this.
So when I was twelve, we left our Illinois farm and headed for Phoenix, Arizona, where we had some distant family ties, and where, the doctors told him, the warm, dry weather would help heal him.
I’ll never forget that move, which just felt so surreal, so strange; we were like a circus family, packing up all of our belongings, including our animals, all of our farming equipment—everything. We didn’t have a lot of extra money, so we couldn’t afford to hire a moving company to help us. I remember a caravan of our vehicles being lined up by the barn and then packed to the gills with everything we owned. We were making a family move, but only part of my family—my older sisters Wendy and Lisa—was coming with us. My older brothers and another older sister, and my Cammie—my protector, my big sister, my second mom—were not. Cammie was twenty-one and already married and settling into her own new family life, but this didn’t make parting any easier for either of us. In fact, I would say it was pretty damn traumatic, leaving her like that.
I a
ctually need to stop and think for a minute about the impact of this on both of us. I had been her baby even more than I’d been my parents’, in many ways. She’d scoop me up and snuggle me into her life. I was like her real-life Polly Pocket doll: She took me everywhere with her, did everything with and for me from the moment I was born until the moment we pulled away from our farm. And . . . what on earth would I do without her by my side? How would I manage without her? I imagined it would be like having a bike without wheels. I don’t think I’ve ever been able to really wrap my head around what a huge piece of my heart stayed with Cammie back in Illinois when we moved south to Arizona. But I can say that it was, at that point, absolutely the biggest loss I’d ever sustained, and one that I never quite got over.
But we Garths were on a mission, and that mission was to keep my dad alive. Whether we were staying back in Illinois or heading out to Arizona, everyone in my family was determined to be doing whatever had to be done to make sure our dad stayed around as long as possible. And if that meant my parents would sell their farm and move to Arizona, well, then that was what would happen. For me, as a girl just on the verge of adolescence, this didn’t seem like a sacrifice; it just seemed like the right thing to do. And, of course, it was.
So we loaded up my dad’s beat-up pickup truck and our ragtag bunch of old cars and off we went, tentatively hopeful about what the future would bring. I left the farm and all that quiet and space, and landed, with a loud thunk, in the giant, crowded megalopolis of Phoenix. I had never been in a city before; heck, I had never even set foot in a suburb. I was scared to death about going to a new school on my own. Of course, as the new girl, I was promptly teased and bullied, and I realized pretty quickly that I needed to pretend I was okay and keep a stiff upper lip, because Puddles just wasn’t going to have a fighting chance here. So I sucked it up and forced myself to come out of my shell, and I threw myself into some activities so I wouldn’t just crumple with grief and run off crying. I was such a fish out of water, such an outsider, that I did my ever-loving best to fit in. I became a cheerleader, and I took dance classes, and I wore the kinds of clothes the other girls wore, and I even did a bit of preteen modeling. Who knew that all of these slightly random, very lost-girl decisions would end up determining the trajectory of my life in such dramatic, almost made-for-TV-movie ways? Because, as it turned out, Arizona was just an uncomfortable, temporary landing pad for me. It was never home, not in any real, meaningful way; it was just a pit stop for a lonely young girl.
BIG BANGS AND UGLY BAND COSTUMES
Leaving Illinois was pretty traumatic, to say the least. I remember my mom throwing a good-bye barbecue at our remote twenty-five-acre ranch and I got to invite all of my friends—I think there were four of us, including me. On that, my last day in Illinois, my friends and I climbed trees and ate cake, and then said awkward good-byes. And that was it.
Next thing I knew, auctioneers were selling off most of our belongings, whatever didn’t fit into the haggard assortment of cars and trucks and U-Hauls my parents had stuffed full of our stuff. (I remember them throwing the last odds and ends—blankets and such—into a horse trailer that was hooked up to my dad’s pickup.) It would become the Garth family parade, pulled together by my parents and waved away by pretty much everyone I’d ever known in my life.
I never saw any of those childhood friends again. To this day, this fact just strikes me as very weird, and ever since then, I’ve never been a fan of moving on and not looking back. In fact, I’ve grown up to be the opposite of the kind of person who can just cut and run: I am loyal, loyal, loyal. So loyal that I am now intensely selective about the people I let in. I just cannot bear to let the people I love go. Once I bring someone in close, that’s pretty much it. I am theirs.
The only people we didn’t leave behind were just a few members of our immediate family. The others, as mentioned, had to stay back in Illinois: There was my sister Lynn and her family, my brother Johnny and his family, and my brother Chuck. And, of course, there was Cammie.
I have in my mind the horrible, awful memory of her sobbing and running after the moving truck I was seat-belted into, my tiny white poodle held firmly on my lap. I can still see her in the rearview mirror of my mind. It is an image that still haunts me and seems to offer a pretty succinct snapshot of what I think of as the PTSD (self-diagnosed, of course) that has contributed to my memory being as scattershot as it is a lot of the time.
Looking back, I guess that in some pretty real ways, that move marked the end of my storybook childhood. Because everything changed from then on out. My sisters Lisa and Wendy made the move to Arizona with us, but they were already doing their own thing by then: Lisa was going into college, I think, and Wendy had only a year of high school left, so Lord knew where she’d be heading off to soon.
Illinois is picture-postcard-pretty farm country: lush and green in the warm months, barren and cold in the winter months. It is one of those states with four classic seasons, each one arriving after the last with a Technicolor flourish. Landing in Arizona was like landing on the moon: It was hot and dry, and this was what was supposed to be so good for my dad’s heart. But everything in Arizona was the same khaki-colored brown. Except, of course, for the endless, cloudless blue sky. And, I was soon to find out, it never changed. Arizona had just one hot, bright season, which just never felt right to me.
New state. New weather. New school. New home life. New everything. The only saving grace for me was that I had a cousin in Phoenix, Tammy. She was just a year or so older than me, and being around her was the only thing that felt even the slightest bit familiar during the fleeting and disorienting but supertransformative years I had to spend there. If I were to ask her now, Tammy would probably say I was okay to be around, but I know that I was so lost, so needy, that I would try to attach myself to her like Velcro. But she had her own scene going on, and she had a settled bunch of friends and parties to go to and all sorts of activities that she was committed to, and so I never got to see enough of her. I was just young enough that I was much more of a pest than a pal to her, I’m sure.
When I wasn’t with Tammy, I just tried really hard, probably too hard, to fit in, to pretend that I somehow belonged there. Just like it is for lots of girls around this age, this was a period when I fumbled along, taking some pretty bumpy, almost jarring, tentative steps out of my childhood and into early adolescence. It was a time of massive preteen confusion, combined with a complete sense of dislocation and isolation. Man, who knew twelve could be so rugged? Who knew it could be so chokingly lonely?
My parents bought a house in what was supposed to be something of an equestrian neighborhood, in this kooky suburban development that was about five square miles and which was made up of cookie-cutter houses lined up along tidy—but tiny—lots. All of the people who lived there pretended they had a lot more space than they did, and crammed all sorts of large animals into their almost comically small backyards. I know my parents picked this part of town in a well-meaning attempt to replicate, as best they could, our old farm life. Crisscrossing this faux-strip-mall version of ranch country were these trails that looped all around the neighborhood, so I did what I always did back on the farm in Illinois: I’d go out and ride my horse, which, when I was twelve, was a palomino named Golden Boy Jet. Poor GBJ, as I called him, bristled and bridled at not having any space to let it rip and run (that’s what the Jet in his name was for). It was so trippy to be riding my horse while cars zoomed by, and then to actually have to wait on a traffic light before we could cross the street. Traffic was something absolutely new to both me and GBJ, and it just added to the inescapable feeling that I’d landed on a strange, alien planet that was known by all the indifferent humans who lived there as Glendale, Arizona.
It kind of goes without saying that I figured out pretty quickly that we just weren’t in Kansas—er, Illinois—anymore. And there is one incident that really crossed the “t” on this fact.
One day, while I was out ridi
ng GBJ and we were making the trail loop and heading for home, a man stepped out from behind a giant bush and exposed himself—this was the real deal, full-monty, something-is-seriously-wrong-with-this-guy brand of flashing. I mean, really? I had never seen actual man parts in living color before, and I don’t think I’d ever even seen them in a book at that point! I gasped, looked away (Gross!), and kicked GBJ hard. Finally, he did what he loved to do best and he ran. That horse ran all out, ignoring every speed bump, yield sign, and stoplight in his way. He ran all the way to my parents’ house without slowing down for a moment. I remember getting off of him, my legs shaking, tears welling up in my eyes, and being so freaked out that I just hurried through my routine with him, got him into his stall, and ran into the house and to my room. What upset me the most, at first, was that I knew that riding a horse in this strange city as a preteen girl wasn’t something I would ever be able to do again. No, this weird suburb was not my family farm, which was big and private and safe because it was buffered by acres and acres of private land, which was surrounded by miles and miles of more private land. This was the big, bad city, where nobody was safe, especially a girl who just wished she could go home.