Dedication
To sweet Sarah, my angel.
And to those who are lost and hope to be found.
I pray my truth will help.
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Prologue
Part One
1. A Lesson in Survival
2. Singing My Life
3. Saved by Failure
4. Cheerleader Blues
5. Against All Discouragement
Part Two
6. Taking Flight
7. Romeo and Juliet
8. Eyeshadow Abs
9. Warning: Contents Under Pressure
10. Flight Suits and Wedding Gowns
11. Into the Fishbowl
12. Success Has Made a Failure of Our Home
13. The Gilded Cage
14. I’ll Fly Away
Part Three
15. Going Off-Script
16. Playing Dress-Up
17. Desire and Possession
18. They Let You Dream Just to Watch ’Em Shatter
19. Return of the Southern Girl
20. Death by Mom Jeans
21. True Beauty
Part Four
22. Love Comes to My Door
23. Since I’ve Been Loving You
24. Let’s Go Dancing in the Light
25. Ever After
26. I Once Was Lost
27. But Now I See
28. Birdie Mae
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Copyright
About the Publisher
Prologue
February 2019
The kids are asleep, and my husband is reading in the other room. So, it’s just you and me.
Every night after we put our children to bed, I come down here to the study to write. It’s cold here in Los Angeles, so bedtimes have been creeping later. My daughter Maxwell is six now and my son Ace is five, and they have the kind of energy that needs to be burned off outdoors or it will just add up like a bill that needs to be paid at the end of the night. The poor kiddos have to be at school at seven a.m., so getting them down by eight or eight-thirty is tough. Swimming has always helped—my kids are fish—but it’s been too chilly for the pool. Sometimes, as they are racing around the house, I think back to when I was their age in Texas, and I can’t remember having all this energy. But I guess I was busy, at dance class every day and then nights at church.
This afternoon my husband Eric set big drop cloths in the backyard as an activity for them. He’s done this for years, laying out paints and brushes so they can have at it. He says it’s like therapy. A way to get out all your emotions. I panicked the first time I saw them throwing paint.
“It’s washable, babe,” Eric said.
“Don’t do this at anybody else’s house, okay?” I yelled, pulling a face as Ace upended a cup of yellow paint on a canvas. “This is just for here.” I am Southern, so manners matter. Say please and thank you, and don’t throw paint at playdates.
Eric would let them paint the whole house if I’d be okay with it. He’s this amazing blend of athlete and hippie, a pro football player who did yoga on the sidelines at Yale while everyone else ran sprints. I usually join in on painting, but I am so pregnant with our daughter Birdie that today I just sat and watched, hoping that if I just shifted one more time, I would somehow get comfortable. Spoiler: Nope.
Still, I was present. I kept a promise I made to myself a little over a year before to show up in my own life. To feel things, whether they were the result of bad memories, or good ones in the making. Like the gold of the setting sun hitting Maxwell’s face as she knelt on the grass to draw freehand, the quick moves of a girl who is sure of herself. And Ace, stepping back to look at all the paints before committing to action. Just like me, he quietly observes and then has that moment where he tilts his head back and just does, every premeasured stroke of color seeming spontaneous.
We divide and conquer at bedtime. Eric takes Ace, who wants every minute he can get playing with Dad. I take Maxwell, who still lets me sing “Jesus Loves Me” with her every night. I know you might be thinking of the singsongy “Jesus Loves Me,” but I do the version from The Bodyguard. The one where Whitney and her onscreen sister whisper-sing a slowed down, wistful version. Maxwell and I list off all the friends and family we are praying for, and then we sing, “Jesus loves them, oh, yes He does . . .”
Lullabies came hard for me. My first night home from the hospital with Maxwell, I was afraid to sing to her because I didn’t know if I could sing quiet. I’ve never had to sing where I didn’t have to perform. Aim my voice for the back of the arena. I remember thinking, Should I just sing “The Star-Spangled Banner” quietly? If I tried “Amazing Grace,” I knew I would get the Spirit and bust her little eardrum. It was like I was in an SNL sketch about the over-singing pop-star mom. Whitney saved me.
Tonight, in Maxwell’s room, when prayers were done, I got up from sitting on the bed—which takes some strategic planning when you are seven months pregnant—and I was about to slip out. Maxwell is not one of those kids who need you to stay until she’s asleep. I love that she is her own girl and she will let you know it. But tonight, just as I went to turn off the light, I heard her little voice.
“Will you rub my nose?” she asked.
“Yes, baby.”
This is something I did with both my kids when I breastfed them. I sat with them in my rocker, and stroked the bridges of their nose lightly, back and forth. Each stroke, an I love you, I love you, I love you. The times they ask for this are growing further apart, and I know that one of these times will be the last one. There are so many firsts to raising kids, and parents are told to catch them all. But they don’t warn you about the lasts. The last baby onesie. The last time you tie their shoes. The last time they think you have every answer in the world.
As I rubbed her nose, Maxwell settled in to her pillow and sighed. I looked down at her closed eyes. She is growing up so fast, I thought. Just on the edge of the age I was when I began beating myself up when I fell short of perfect. A few months back, we were in the kitchen at lunchtime. I gave her tomato soup and I asked her if she wanted some bread.
“Bella told me bread makes you fat.”
You are six, I thought.
“Maxwell, bread does not make you fat,” I said. “And I don’t understand why you would think about that.”
“Well, Bella’s mom does not eat bread.”
“Well, you’re gonna eat bread.”
“Oh good,” she said, and paused. “Because I really love bread.”
“You listen to what your mommy says,” I said. “Don’t listen to someone else’s mommy.”
I even put extra butter on that bread. As I did so, I thought How does she even know what “fat” is? It was a wake-up call. She already has this world to grow up in, and I want her to feel safe enough to love herself and the body that God gave her. Not waste the time I did being cruel to myself. Standing in front of the mirror at seventeen, pinching a tiny vice grip of stomach fat until I bruised, because the first thing I heard from the record company after I signed was, “You’ve got to lose fifteen pounds.”
Maxi is one of the reasons I am writing this book. It’s also a commitment I’ve made to you, though it’s hard sometimes to look back on some moments in my life that I spent years, okay, decades, trying to forget. For me, sitting down here with a piece of paper and a pen is like, “Hello, self! What are we gonna confront tonight?”
This was supposed to be a very different book. Five years ago, I was approached to write a motivational manual telling you how to live your best life. The Jessica Simpson Collection had become the top-selling celebrity fashion line, the first to ea
rn one billion dollars in annual sales. I delivered the keynote at the Forbes Power Women Summit and Women’s Wear Daily was talking up how smart I was to make clothes that flatter all silhouettes. (Hello, I’ve had every size in my closet, so I’d better be inclusive.) I was a boss, and I was supposed to tell you how to make your dream come true. You too could have a perfect life. Like me.
The deal was set, and it was a lot of money. And I walked away. Nobody understood why.
The truth is that I didn’t want to lie to you. I couldn’t be honest with you if I wasn’t honest with myself first.
To get to this point, to talking to you right here in this moment, I had to really feel. And I hadn’t been doing that. Up until a few years ago, I had been a feelings addict. Love, loss—whichever, whatever, as long as it was epic. I just needed enough noise to distract me from the pain I had been avoiding since childhood. The demons of traumatic abuse that refused to let me sleep at night—Tylenol PM at age twelve, red wine and Ambien as a grown, scared woman. Those same demons who perched on my shoulder, and when they saw a man as dark as them, leaned in to my ear to whisper, “Just give him all your light. See if it saves him. . . .”
For years, I occupied my time trying and failing to be the woman the men in my life wanted me to be. Never just me. I ran into situation after situation, telling myself that the reason I had so much anxiety and was scared to death to be alone at night was because I just needed to be a better person for whomever I was trying to please at the time.
When I found the love of my life in 2010 and started my family, I could just be me. I took myself out of the music industry to be normal and be the kind of mom I wanted to be. I had to change all my numbers and my email address so none of my exes had any hope of contact. It sounds dramatic, but I had dated a guy who had a habit of showing up out of nowhere to mess with my mind.
It was a good plan, but without the creative outlet of making music or the distraction of cryptic man texts to decipher like riddles, my anxiety took over. I didn’t know what to do with all that energy. I was like a lot of women who get their wish: I loved being a mom, I just didn’t love being me.
To avoid feeling, I numbed myself with alcohol. For about three years of my life, up until Halloween 2017, I had an unhealthy relationship with alcohol. I never hid it. “I know, I know,” I told my friends, “I just need another one.” I had given up drinking so easily when I was pregnant and never craved it, so I didn’t think it was a problem. But our house was the gathering place for all my friends, the place where everyone always ended up. I had a prescription for a stimulant, which gave me the focus to never get messy. I’d look around at my friends getting sleepy and/or sloppy and think, I’m just an ox, I guess. Then at night, still flying from the second stimulant that I had maybe taken at six p.m. with tons of alcohol in my system, I’d take an Ambien.
Yes, I realize I am very lucky to be here with you. Even then, I knew it was getting out of hand, but I put that on the back burner. I told myself, Eventually, you’ll get it together. There was always a later. Soon the kids will notice, I worried. I never grew up with alcohol in the house, and we had so much. If the kids started questioning us about why, I wouldn’t have the answer. Because I didn’t know why we had so much alcohol. Except that our house was always the party house for all our friends. When the kids notice, I promised myself, I’d stop.
There was no time, though. I was juggling relationships, my business, motherhood, and the needs of anybody but me. I didn’t think I was enough, so I overcompensated by making my life a series of experiences for everyone else. There was always another friends-and-family getaway overseas, and then I’d come home to plan an over-the-top kid’s birthday party.
Maybe you’ll relate: It’s like when everything is moving really fast, but you’ve created that speed. You’re the one who set all these great things into motion, but now they’re spinning all at once. You take a step back to try to make some sense of it, and before you know it, you’ve accidentally become a spectator to your own life, unsure how that woman who used to be you plans on doing it all. You stand there thinking, Okay, when am I gonna jump back in?
And when I did, I knew I had to face my fears and do it sober.
Or else I’d be a hypocrite.
I can’t really stand in front of the world and say how much I love myself when I’m destroying myself. I had to strip away all the self-medicating to feel the pain and figure out what was wrong. I’m still doing the work in therapy two times a week resolving those issues. Honestly, I am not sure if I’ll have another drink in the future. Will I have a glass of wine in the South of France in two years? The last thing I need is another reason to feel self-conscious about paparazzi catching me doing something and proclaiming, “Oh, she’s off the wagon.” But then I remind myself that life is really just about one moment at a time. To not think about two years from now, but to think about me right now. Two years from now will figure itself out.
Right now, with this book, I want the freedom to say, “Well, there are no more secrets.” I have grown into myself and come to a place where I want to be honest about my flaws. If I can do that in front of the world, then I can remain honest with myself. I like to say stuff out loud so then I can be accountable, but that also leaves me open to criticism. I beat myself up enough with this fight club in my head that I know what can happen if I invite new members. My purpose, however, is bigger than my fear of judgment. Someone, maybe you, needs me to say the things that are scary to admit. If I go there, maybe I can show you that you can, too. I don’t live in a fantasy world—it might seem that way to other people, but I don’t. All of us are so much more alike than we want to accept.
I always knew I was going to be a writer. Even though I’m Southern and sometimes say things in an off-kilter way, I do like the romance of the hard stuff in life. I know there are people who think I can’t string two thoughts together, let alone sentences. In the beginning of my career, somehow, I was always the joke. Everybody made fun of something I’d say, and I admit, I definitely played into it. People’s laughter meant a lot to me, and being the joke validated me being smart to myself. It felt like I could pull one over on somebody. I thought, How dumb are you to think I’m that stupid?
The fact is that I have kept journals since I was fifteen. I started the year my cousin Sarah was killed in an accident. Two years and three days older than me, she was like a sister to me. Sarah left behind a ton of journals, listing off the people she was praying for. When I read her journals, I saw that she had prayed for me. Every day. I inherited her purpose, and I still feel a need to see through what she had started in so many ways. As I wrote about situations in my life and the people I was praying for, the journals became a safe place for me to talk through things without putting any pressure on anybody. And crushes. Oh, so many crushes.
I dragged out a huge box of journals to read through as I started writing to you. The first one has a cover of smiley faces, but in my early twenties I began to fill up Mead Five Star spiral notebooks. I had a few pretty ones I got as gifts, but they always had like one or two pages of notes in them before I gave up. I needed the drugstore kind with hard plastic covers in different colors, a code that only I understood. A black one for the end of my first marriage, red for the hope of a love affair, blue for when I wanted to focus on my career and song lyrics . . . I often wrote in pencil, so I could go back and erase it if I wrote something grammatically incorrect or spelled a word wrong. Partly because I am so self-conscious, but also because, if I died like Sarah, I wanted people to think I was smart.
It upsets me to read some things I said about myself. In the journals from 1999, I beat myself up about how fat I was before I even gave the world a chance to. Ten years later, I wrote about the world telling me exactly what they thought of me when I wore size 27 “mom jeans” to a Chili CookOff concert in Florida. The sad thing is that I talked about finally feeling confident in the pages before that. That ended. “What percentage of the day do I thi
nk about my body on a scale of 1–100?” I wrote. “80%. I hate this.”
But there are good times to relive too. There are moments when I read what I wrote now and I say, “Wait, I like this person. We could make a good life together if we were friends.”
I also hope to be your friend. I am going to need you to hold my hand through some memories, and there may be times that I’ll end up holding yours as we confront similar things that scare us. I’ve come to recognize fear when I see it. It may show itself in different ways, but it’s a familiar face, isn’t it? I have a different relationship to fear now. I’ve learned that we grow from walking through it, and a lot of people don’t even know they have that option. You either conquer it, or you let it destroy you. So, let’s do this together. I promise we’ll laugh, too, because I do get myself into situations. I mean, it had to be a Chili CookOff of all places. Most of all, I promise to be totally honest with you, so you can feel safe to be honest with yourself, too.
When I told my closest girlfriends I was writing a book, they all came up with possible titles. One wanted it to reference the breakout moment on Newlyweds when I wondered aloud—and on camera—if the Chicken of the Sea I was eating was tuna or chicken.
“Call it I Know It’s Chicken,” said one girlfriend, and everyone started saying it loudly to themselves. “I Know It’s Chicken.”
“Guys, it’s tuna,” I said. “I should know.” We all about died laughing.
See? Life’s taught me a few things. Here’s my story. I’m not afraid of it anymore.
Part One
1
A Lesson in Survival
Halloween 2017
Ace was in the backseat, recounting an episode of Wild Kratts. At four, my son lived for his cartoons, and could reel off facts about all the animals he saw on the nature show.
“Did you know there are fish that can fly?” he asked us.
“Fish that fly?” I said.
“Yeah, they’re called flying fish.”
“That’s a good name for them,” I said. Eric was at the wheel, driving us to a Tuesday morning Halloween assembly at our daughter Maxwell’s school. I sat on the passenger side, absently practicing my “I have it together” face.
Open Book Page 1
