by Jennie Garth
In the olden days, meaning twenty years ago, you still had to work for a bit of publicity, because the cameras came out only if you were walking a red carpet or making some kind of promotional appearance. We weren’t stalked the way celebrities are stalked nowadays. It seemed to me to just be a much more civilized, respectful time, in terms of the relationship between stars and the press.
I feel pretty lucky that my separation from Peter largely went under the radar for as long as it did, that I was able to live up at the ranch with the girls in relative solitude, far away from all the clamoring for the “money” shot. In more ways than one, the girls and I really did live off the grid for those two years; those crucial months allowed us to get grounded, get our balance back, reinforce ourselves while our family changed—me and my little pack of fierce women. It was a great place to fall apart and begin to put the pieces back together. I will forever be grateful for that time, despite how very difficult and frightening it was—especially at the end, when the full realization that my marriage was over finally hit me.
When Peter filed for divorce in the spring of 2012, things just became way, way more complicated, in terms of navigating this huge life transition, especially when the media caught hold of the news.
Never mind the packs of paparazzi that started following me, wanting to know how I felt. Of course, at times I felt like shouting out my own questions, like, “How do you think I feel, having my marriage end, my family be forever changed?” It seemed like all the tabloid shooters wanted to do was capture my sadness on camera, so they could then sell it to the highest bidder. The goal seemed to be to get the shot of me looking weepy or distraught or just heavy and tired. Then it would be paired up with some made-up sad-sack story that didn’t at all represent what any of us were actually going through.
I look at the photos taken of me during that time now, and I just feel so sorry for that version of me. I look like a deer caught in the headlights, just before the crash actually happens.
Fortunately, the celebrity “news” cycle is fast. My news became old news and gradually the paparazzi lost interest in me. For the most part.
I mean, here I am, a full year and a half later—we’ve all moved on, we’ve all begun to settle into our new lives, yet . . . there are still a handful of photographers, which is, mercifully, a small number, who think that getting a photograph of me is somehow going to help pay for their kids’ college.
These are the guys who ambush me while I’m walking my youngest to school, or who follow me, after school drop-off, to the nearest gas station, and they snap away while I’m wearing sweats and pumping gas. I call these guys the “shooters,” as they’ve kind of broken off from the pack and are lone wolves, out there looking to get their money shot at eight a.m. I can’t stand it that these guys think it’s all right to track me and my kids like this, though, for the record, my girls just think they’re dumb and ignore them. I have to work hard not to lash out—especially when they might actually hurt someone, like the genius who follows me by riding in the backseat of a car with blacked-out windows, and who thinks nothing of having his driver bang a U-turn in the middle of a three-lane street so he can shoot me while I walk into the grocery store. But here’s the thing: They’re just waiting—waiting—for me to lash out, so they can get the picture of me going off the deep end. That’s the shot that they’re all after: catching me losing my composure. So my job—in these moments—is to not react. To give them nothing. This may mean stifling a yawn or resisting the urge to scratch. Or it might mean buying just a half a tank of gas, instead of a full one, so I can get the hell out of there.
By now, of course, I can sense when a “shooter” is anywhere in the vicinity. It’s as though I can smell them—even when they’re pretty far away. I’ve been known to be walking along with Mr. Showbiz and will whisper under my breath, “Shooter at eight o’clock!” And of course he’s completely oblivious and he’ll start craning his neck and saying, “Where? Where?” Every single time, he seems genuinely surprised when a picture of us shows up on some crappy Web site the next day. He’s still, after all these years, one of the lucky ones who has never gotten used to this.
I, on the other hand, haven’t been so lucky. Lately, I’ve lost my Zen cool where the shooters are concerned, and so I’ve taken to wearing hoodies in order to provide myself with some level of protection, since these guys hide out inside parked cars, for God’s sake. So I have lots of hoodies in many different colors, because I like variety. When I wake up and I sense that the shooters are out there, before I head out the door, I just hood up, and miraculously I become way less desirable to the camera. It’s almost as if I’m invisible. Who knew? It’s the best antipaparazzi wear going. Whoever said diamonds are a girl’s best friend was talking about another time, another era; I’m here to tell you that in this crazy town, hoodies are a girl’s best friend.
HOME ALONE
The first time my girls went to stay at their father’s house, I had no idea what to do with myself.
There is a lot of romanticizing that goes on around this particularly rugged rite of passage: the first time your kids go to your divorced spouse’s place to spend the night. To some—particularly, say, your still-married friends who have a houseful of small children—there’s this crazy, hyper-romanticized idea that once you drop the kids off, or wave good-bye and close the front door, you’re going to pop the cork on an iced-up bottle of bubbly, blast music from the long-neglected sound track of your own youth at an insanely high volume, and then dance around your place with the abandon of a crazed, dizzy-with-freedom pixie.
Well, I am here to tell you that this is not what happens. At all. Instead, you close that door and immediately you feel about ten tons heavier. You do not feel free, and no burden of any size whatsoever has miraculously been lifted. No sense of relief at not being Mom for the first time in fifteen years descends; no curiosity about reconnecting with your long-neglected self takes hold. There’s just this awful, dull ache where your now-kid-free heart used to be, and the emptiness of your arms feels like a particularly nasty kind of amputation. In short, it does not feel good. It hurts. Terribly. And for me, at least, it was right up there with the worst things I’ve ever experienced.
How on earth can anyone prepare for this moment? How can you ready yourself for sending your babies off to be with their dad when that means that they’re not going to be with . . . you, too?
In an instant, I got that this was the kind of I-don’t-wish-this-on-anyone-else moment that can easily lead a woman to drink, overeat, or numb her pain with some kind of sinister substance. It was the kind of moment in which the dark side beckons and any woman would be hard-pressed to resist.
And I was no different.
But before these or any other destructive options could flash through my mind, I looked down and noticed something: There was a smudge of dirt on one of the white tiles on the floor of my all-white kitchen. I bent down to take a closer look, and lo and behold, there was another speck of dirt on another tile, and another and . . . the floor was filthy!
So I did what any woman who finds herself home alone for the first time in more than a decade (actually, almost two) would do: I got out a toothbrush and a bottle of bleach, and I got to work. I spent the next however long (I lost all track of time) on my hands and knees, scrubbing each tile with an intensity that would put Mr. Clean to shame. But that was just the start: When I felt like no tile had gone untouched, I then went to work on the tiny tracks of grout that anchored those tiles. I went at those yards and yards of caulking as if my life depended on it. I worked in a methodical clockwork spiral, beginning in the middle of the floor, and I did not look up until I had bumped, quite literally, into the oven anchored against one wall. By then I was utterly spent and the floor was gleaming like an ice-skating rink just after the Zamboni has passed through. I looked up at the clock and realized that almost three hours had passed. I was drenched in sweat and my hands hurt. It was time for a bathroom break a
nd a drink of water.
Now that I look back on this, I realize that I might’ve come across as a woman who had a pretty serious case of OCD, and you know what? That night I guess I did. I experienced the absence of my girls like a loud bell ringing, and ringing, and ringing, and the only way I could turn it off was to scrub that floor until it looked like it had just been installed that afternoon.
I scrubbed that floor like a mad cleaning lady because I had absolutely no clue on earth how to just be on my own.
There. I said it. I had no idea at all how to just be alone with myself.
No one ever tells you that you have to have a bit of a plan of action for this particularly cruel moment when the universe reaches down and tears your mom suit right off of your back, leaving you standing there naked and utterly lost and confused.
After my bathroom break and a drink of water, I remember I did feel a bit better. And absolutely bone-tired. This was good. Because the only thing I felt any confidence at all in being able to do was sleep. So I put the cap back on the bleach, tossed the toothbrush, and turned off the lights. As I snuggled in, I willed myself to think happy thoughts, such as, Just think how nice it’s going to be to wake up to such a clean kitchen floor! so that the vast aloneness surrounding me wouldn’t swallow me up.
Thank God I did sleep that night, but it was strange, like sleeping in a vacant house. Every cell of my own body missed the cells of those three precious bodies. It took me a while to settle down, but when I did, I slept the deepest, blackest sleep of my life.
I woke up to my phone ringing. It was my girls, calling me to say good morning.
I could do this. I could.
GETTING TO KNOW THE GIRL IN THE MIRROR
What do you do when you hit rock bottom? Run—run, I say—to the bathroom and look at yourself in the mirror. I am not kidding.
But first, I think the better question is, What do you do when you don’t hit rock bottom? What do you do when you keep bashing your head against the craggy rocks of life over and over and over again? What if you don’t hit bottom and so you never get to learn to recognize that you just keep hurting yourself?
It’s all about getting wise to the pattern. The repetition. The constant doing of things that don’t serve you. Recognizing, finally, the voice in your head that doesn’t serve you, that keeps you trapped.
Only hitting bottom can break all this shit up.
It starts, I think, somewhere around early adolescence, or at least that’s where it started for me. I think of it as the “point of impact,” that moment in time when something so profoundly unsettling happens that something vital and deep inside gets flipped upside down and spun out of balance. It could be any number of things: a change in your family structure by death or divorce, the loss of your home, or financial troubles—or any combination of these. Or it could be something more horrific, like abuse, neglect, or molestation. Whatever it is, it disrupts the flow and creates kind of a dam that keeps the waters from moving freely in and out of the beautiful, flowing river of your soul.
For me, knowing that the point of impact is usually during childhood makes me feel incredibly sad. It’s amazing how oblivious we tend to be to the suffering of those around us, especially the smallest and youngest among us. Don’t get me wrong: We don’t miss the signs of sadness or sorrow or loss or confusion on purpose. I think our brains are kind of designed to persevere, even when we may need a helping hand. At least, mine was.
The point of impact for me was my dad’s first heart attack, when I was nine years old. From that moment on, my family changed. Every decision that was made going forward was made with my dad’s failing health in mind. His heart attack led to my family being torn apart. My dad’s poor health caused us financial hardship and forced both my mom and dad to scramble to find new careers. In response to this, I think that on some level, I decided that I should start taking care of myself and, if possible, contribute what I could, even financially, to the greater good of the family.
This meant that I became incredibly stoic, which is an acceptable way of saying . . . I learned how to shut down emotionally pretty early on. It wasn’t until I met Peter that I was able to let my guard down again, and even being married to him and having children and all the emotional support and opportunity that provided me couldn’t get to what had been locked up for so long. No amount of love from the outside was going to break that dam that held back my heart. Only I could do that. If only I knew how.
I had become a master at coping. As my mother once said, I could do appropriate very well, meaning I just didn’t let anyone, myself included, see what was really going on inside. I mastered the cool, slightly disapproving mask, which always seemed to signal to the world that I was in control and unruffled, when in fact I was dying inside.
This was true when I was young and had to leave Illinois for Arizona. It was true when I found myself in LA working eighteen hours a day when I very well could, and possibly should, have been in high school. And it was most heartbreakingly true when my husband was working across the country for long stretches of time and I was home in LA caring for our kids and missing him so much, but not knowing how to reach out to him and tell him that I wasn’t doing so well being both mom and dad on my own with three young kids.
I just didn’t have any freaking clue how to raise the white flag. Instead I’d isolate myself and push the people I loved and needed the most away—especially him.
The two years or so leading up to the divorce were the worst, in terms of my being stuck in this emotionally withdrawn coping mode. Peter was really coming into his own as an actor, but his work was either always on the East Coast or up in Canada, and so we didn’t get to see him very much, and definitely not as much as I needed. But despite how busy he was, he’d always fly home whenever he could, even when it meant landing and spending less than a day with me and the girls.
During these short visits, instead of rushing toward him like I really wanted to, I’d pull back and kind of fade into the background, telling myself the girls needed his time and attention more than I did. Then he’d leave, and I’d be flooded with feelings of anger and resentment and blame. I’d get so mad that I’d pull away even further, and so I’d unconsciously create this vicious cycle of withholding myself from him, withholding my feelings and my fears and my needs in a way that is certain to cause harm to any relationship. Being stoic, I’ve learned the hard way, is the death of intimacy.
That period of our marriage totally sucked for me, just as I know it did for him. I was sad and lonely and overwhelmed, and I missed and needed my husband, but I was so deeply embedded in the dysfunctional coping I’d learned so early on that I couldn’t see the forest for the trees. And it cost me. It cost me everything. And so I lost the thing I valued the most. I lost my marriage.
Only then did I hit bottom. And I hit it hard, thank you very much.
At first, when I did hit that bottom, it sucked more than anything I’ve ever experienced before, and it was only when I began to pull myself together, broken bit by broken bit, that I realized this was actually the best thing that had ever happened to me. You need to get shattered in order to put yourself back together properly. The trick, though, is not to try to glue the pieces back into the same old places and in the same old pattern. The better way is to learn and grow and be brave enough to take on a new shape, a new outlook, a new wisdom. God, I wish I’d known this sooner. I really, really do. But you learn only when you are ready to learn.
In Buddhism, they call this repetitive pattern of tripping up samsara, which is the continual cycle of life and death and rebirth that we all go through countless times during the course of our own lives. The goal—in Buddhism, as it is with anyone who wants to grow up and be free to love and live fully—is to break this awful cycle, to get out of the way of samsara and be free to live in the moment, authentically and passionately.
This can happen only by hitting bottom. At least, that’s been my own experience. It wasn’t until I fo
und myself sobbing on that kitchen floor in a puddle of bleach, with a toothbrush in my hand, that I was honestly able to give in to the overwhelming realization that I had just been coping my whole life, not really living, not even really feeling.
I had first learned to cope when my dad got sick. Then I had to learn to cope when I was getting my ass handed to me on the playground of a strange middle school in a strange state. Then I had to cope with dipping my toe into acting and then finding myself pulled into the whirling tornado of teenage fame. Then I learned to cope with having a baby early in a relationship that was too new for me to know whether we were meant to make it or not, but yet we did make it. We kept on together and built a beautiful life together, a beautiful family. Then I lost my dad and coped again, sort of, but then things began to unravel. I tried my best to cope some more. By then my style of coping wasn’t working at all, but it was all I knew. . . . Oh, my God . . . when I reread this paragraph, I realize . . . that was an awful lot of coping! And it was a lot of coping until it was just too damn much, and I couldn’t cope anymore.
I had to stop coping and start to get real, and the only way I could do that was to go within and finally contend with that original point of impact. I had to go back, resurrect my young self, and finally acknowledge how hurt, lost, and unloved she’d felt, and how I’d carried these unresolved feelings around with me, and how they’d kept me from being free.
I know how incredibly corny and clichéd this is all starting to sound, and I have to admit that even I hear Stuart Smalley, the fantastic character created by Al Franken on SNL, whispering in my ear, “I’m good enough. I’m smart enough. And, doggone it, people like me.” But really, he was onto something there. Trust me: Standing in front of the mirror and addressing your younger self works. It really, truly does. When I realize that I’m slipping into “coping” mode, I take the time to look in the mirror and see past my adult self and reconnect with the very young me, the girl with the long white braids and the buckteeth. When I’m lucky, and patient, I see her in there, and when I do catch a glimpse of that part of me, I tell her that I know she felt alone and overwhelmed, but that she’s really not—that I’m here for her, and that I love her, and I won’t leave her, and together we will figure this out.