We went out that night, all of us boarding a bus to take us to a burlesque bar. It was a fun night, and I was able to further distract myself from what the doctor said. Eric drank too much tequila and got argumentative with one of his friends. He resolved it, but on the bus back to the hotel, he started laying into me about the doctor’s call. It was like he realized what it meant and wanted to shock me into taking it seriously. He accused me of neglect, not so much as being a bad parent, but because a mom shouldn’t be so selfish that she would risk her life. “Don’t leave us,” he said, right there in front of my mother and my friends.
He still says it was not his finest moment.
When I got home, I cut down on everything, like someone cramming for a test. I disregarded what my doctor said and kept the surgery date. The morning of the operation, my mom tried to get me not to go. I had never shown her my stretch marks and skin.
“Mom,” I said, taking off my dress in front of her. I stood there, nekkid before the woman who birthed me.
“Let’s go,” she said.
The surgery went fine, but I wasn’t happy with the results. I still had loose skin that hung over my pants. I had a recurring thought: people had been so cruel to me when I was onstage at 120 pounds. What were they going to say when I raised my arms, caught in some moment where I forgot myself in the music, and they could see my skin sagging over my pants? I could bank all the self-esteem in the world, but I wasn’t ready to face that laugh-and-point cruelty again. So I scheduled a full tummy tuck for two months later.
This surgery was more involved. There was a sense that something was going to go wrong from the get-go, even though I stopped drinking to prepare. The day of the surgery, Eric was puking his guts out because he was so nervous. He had to leave the hospital, and my mother stayed. She did not want me to do the surgery—nobody did. CaCee was of course googling every complication she could find to prep for the worst.
The surgery took two hours longer than planned. Post-op, I was sent to recover at a luxury hotel near the doctor’s office. I know, people call it Hollyweird, but it’s a thing here that folks recover from plastic surgery with aftercare services at hotels. I couldn’t believe they just did the surgery and practically sent you home. I still had two drains with pouches to collect blood.
It did not go well. I got an infection—colitis—and was vomiting so much I thought I was going to bust my sutures. My mom and Eric were so worried. They had to rush me to Cedars, and I secretly stayed there for nine days. Doctors talked seriously about me needing a blood transfusion. It was so hard on Eric, who was convinced he should have talked me out of going through with the surgery. Eric loved me at any size or shape, even if I couldn’t.
I recovered, and yes, my stomach looked great. I felt like myself again. But I can tell you that plastic surgery does not cure what’s inside. Really, it’s about how you feel emotionally, and I was still just as hard on myself once those stitches were out. I still had work to do.
I DECIDED THAT 2016 WAS GOING TO BE THE YEAR THAT I COMMITTED TO my music and to songwriting. I needed to save myself, get to know myself again. I wanted to start journaling again, pick up a pen and confront who I had become and challenge myself to be better. I had mostly stopped when I was so tormented by John. The longer I waited, the more of a reckoning it would be. I was in a position where I had my own studio in my house, and I could pay producers and songwriters to come and work with me. This way my kids could see what their mom actually did for a living.
But opening that new Mead notebook to write with other people in the room was like summoning all my ghosts. “Places everyone.” I was taking my memories, trying to put them to music in a room with people I had never met in my life. I know that there are songwriters who treat it like a job. For me, it’s ministry. I sat on the floor of the recording studio, trying to write the story of my life so that I could help others. About the heartache of a failed marriage, of giving yourself over to someone who tortured you. Songwriting takes me to an honest place, and honestly, I was in a dark place. I just didn’t know it until the words came out of me. Before I even knew how heartbroken I was about my parents, the words spilled out of me. Wait, I’m heartbroken? I thought.
To prepare, I drank before the songwriting sessions, and during, and then after to recover. The alcohol helped me go to the painful place, but then it started to hold me back. When I sang, it wasn’t the same as when I was younger. I was scared, and fear kept me from being wholly there.
I kept putting the music off, then coasted into the next year as I focused on the kids and the Collection. It was easy to invest my time in kids and the business. As much I was my own worst enemy, I did everything I could to be present for my children.
In September 2016, my father called to tell me that he had been diagnosed with prostate cancer. He’d been told that if he didn’t have surgery, he had six months to live.
“So, you’re having the surgery,” I said, gulping from a glittercup.
“I’m not sure,” he said.
I couldn’t believe my father would consider not fighting. He was spiraling, and I didn’t know how to help him, I wasn’t a doctor, so all I could do was remind him what he taught me to do. To have faith and know that it’s all going to be okay. But you have to fight. You can’t give up. I was still recovering from losing him as a manager, but losing my father altogether was something I just couldn’t fathom.
He set the date for the surgery. My poor mother still loved him, and I know she felt powerless. For thirty-five years, she’d helped him, nursing him through every cold and flu. And now, when he needed her most, he didn’t want her there. I felt the pressure to take her place. To be that mother figure, a wife to my own dad.
The morning of the surgery, I brought alcohol with me to the hospital. Seven a.m. and I was drinking to calm my anxiety. Ashlee was there, along with Jonathan and Dad’s best friend Randy. The doctor told us that during the surgery, they discovered the cancer had spread to his lymph nodes. He had stage IV cancer.
Through the anxiety, I tried to be present and take in the information. I was supposed to be filling in for my mom. As he got treatment, I would relay the information to her, feeling like I was failing them both somehow by not doing enough. I realize now that when I thought I was escaping my feelings of responsibility by drinking, I was actually making things so much worse. It was a dark time, but not being sober for it exaggerated every problem when I just could have dealt with it head-on. Still, his recovery forced a needed reconnection for me with my dad.
Soon after, my doctor informed me that he could no longer prescribe me both the stimulant and the Ambien. I think he was afraid that I’d die. I had to choose, and for me it was to sleep or not to sleep. It was a come to Jesus moment, where I had to ask myself, Which controls me more? My vanity or my fear?
I chose to keep the Ambien. I was terrified of not being able to hit the Off switch at night.
As soon as my prescription for the stimulant ran out, my drinking caught up with me. I would pass out, so I made a concerted effort to stay “with it” until the kids’ bedtime. I was less focused and increasingly unable to hide the effects. So I hid, staying out of the public eye as much as possible.
I did take one trip, visiting Nana in Texas for her eighty-fifth birthday. It was harder now for her to get around. She’d gone into a nursing home, but she didn’t like it and left. Her whippersnapper heart rebelling even with her slowing body. Back home, she used a walker and would amble with it to the driveway, park it next to her car, and slide into the driver’s seat. “I drive around for an hour,” she said, “then come back, and the walker is right there waiting for me.”
“I don’t know how safe that is, Nana,” I said. But I knew the feeling. When your world shrinks, you make adjustments. My anxiety had shrunk my world to my house.
When I did go out, I didn’t have a sense of how clear it was that I was having issues. In late May, I went on The Ellen DeGeneres Show to promote the Collecti
on, making an appearance I have never watched. I admit I drank beforehand and was also on steroids for a chest infection that made me hoarse. I was nervous, but I’d always been able to turn it on for talk shows. Instead, I couldn’t find Ellen’s rhythm, mumbling and second-guessing everything I was saying.
At first, Ellen tried to help, and then she gave up. Her blank stare at my conversational freefall was tough love. Ellen didn’t say anything to me after. I awkwardly walked off the stage and took in the look on the face of my publicist and friend Lauren.
“Uhh,” she said.
“Did I not do good?” I asked, knowing the answer.
“You could have done better,” she said, which is probably the most critical thing this kind woman has ever said to me. I want to say it here to Ellen and the viewers: I’m truly sorry. I disrespected them by trying to make an appearance when I had no business doing so.
My friends began their plans for interventions. I picture them two by two, first dancing around the subject with each other, then gripping each other’s arms in solidarity. They felt powerless, afraid that if they confronted me, I would shut them out. Lauren put together a plan of action for when I was ready, discreetly collecting the numbers of people who specialize in rehab and counseling.
On my thirty-seventh birthday in July 2017, two years after a doctor told me my life was in danger, I had my friends over for a daylong party at my house. At the end, while my friends were all downstairs, I sat on my bed and cried. Another friend had just gone to rehab. She was a mother, and she found the strength to face her pain and anxiety instead of dousing it in alcohol to numb it. She did what I knew I needed to do. I was humbled, because she chose what was best for her family. I knew I needed to stop drinking, and I couldn’t. I had alcoholism in my bloodline, and I was carrying it around. Our kids were five and four. How could I protect them? How could I lead them away from this, and break the cycle?
I prayed, which I realized I hadn’t done in a long time. I had stopped taking those moments of stillness for myself. A remembered Psalm floated up from within me. The Lord is close to the brokenhearted, I told myself. He saves those who are crushed in spirit. But if I was so broken, why did He feel so far away? He’d protected me my whole life, given me a light and a calling to use my voice to help others. Now I couldn’t face this fear in me, and I was dimming my light, and hiding from the world He had long ago told me to change.
There was a tiny light still in me, though, a little flame for me to make my birthday wish on. I whispered my request, asking God for the help and mercy I wouldn’t give myself.
It would take three and a half months. But God would save me so I could come home to myself.
27
But Now I See
November 2017
Twice a week, my therapist and I sat across from each other in our study, exorcising demons. My kids were at school, and Eric would busy himself to give me space. I told her the stories that I’ve shared with you, and in the beginning, I could rattle off the facts of things that happened, standing outside of the girl next door as she went through the experiences. Eventually, I could examine that girl’s feelings closely enough to better understand them and how they informed her choices. With work, that girl and I were one again, and I allowed myself to feel the traumas I’d been through. The sessions left me scooped out, and my kids got used to me being extra huggy on certain days. Not just needing the sureness of them but valuing it.
Any homework she gave me, I wanted an A-plus-plus-plus, so when my therapist prescribed an antidepressant, I took it right away. But I didn’t like how it made me feel and went off it under her supervision. I sensed that, for me, I needed to work to figure out the roots of my problems, and they weren’t chemical.
“I think it’s situational depression,” I told Eric on one of our post-therapy walks around the neighborhood. “It was just a long situation.”
Without alcohol, the clarity I had feared turned out to be a continual gift. When I was drinking, I had been confused by how I was going to juggle work and parenting. Because it was exhausting, the way I would drink. It took time away from real life. Now I had room for so many wonderful moments that I would have missed, either because of the carelessness with which I treated my body, or because I was too numb to appreciate them. I took mental snapshots to keep in my heart: sober for the first time ever in my studio and seeing Maxwell grab a guitar. Ace in pajamas he put on himself, proudly putting a sticker on his bedtime chart. My husband and I rediscovering each other, feeling that same gratitude over finding each other that we had when we first met. That my husband stopped drinking with me was powerfully romantic, even if Hallmark doesn’t have a card for it. Or maybe they do. It saved our marriage, or at least saved us from the stupid fights that didn’t need to happen. Things said that didn’t deserve to be said because it was the alcohol talking, not the heart. I was sober and I was feeling. This was what it felt like to be living. This is what I was running away from?
I began to open up to people and came out of hiding mode. One of the first tests was a girls’ night out at a restaurant. I think we were all nervous about how we were going to handle me not drinking when we were all together. The first minutes were strange. Everyone could read how anxious I was. Then the waiter came over with the wine list. They all started to say it at once: “I’ll have water.” I cried happy tears, and just like my birthday, they each told me how grateful they were that I had saved myself.
Still, I dreaded hosting Thanksgiving and Christmas, unsure that I could handle the holidays sober. I was so happy my father had beaten that bout of cancer. Still, seeing my parents together but apart would be like surgery with no anesthesia once again. There was no alcohol in the house, so I didn’t know what I would do.
Instead, at each gathering. I watched them be careful of each other, still doing the dance of trying to avoid prolonged contact but doing so in a respectful way. It was you, Jess, I thought. They were more over each other than I was over them being apart. It was me who needed to catch up.
I collected days sober along with all these new memories. When I hit ninety days, I went right into the studio after to write. A new song, “Heartbeat,” came out so easy, and I finally felt unblocked. I could put words to feelings again and make them mean something for other people. That was what would matter now, and my prayer was constant: “Lord, use me.” I’d been selfish with my time and careless with my life. Now I wanted to give back and have a life of purpose again. In my life, I want to be a role model for people—especially my children. They have to know that they can always count on me. I am so grateful that I stopped in time and resisted the forces that were carrying me away from them.
I made plans with my friend Koko, whose husband is in the service, to do something to help military families. In April, to honor the Month of the Military Child, we went to a Dillard’s in Nashville to host a day of pampering for army wives and daughters from Fort Campbell, right on the Kentucky-Tennessee border. We gave them all hair and makeup services, and I got to style each one in our spring 2018 line and our Girls line. I brought Eric along, and even though he was right there with me, I kept retelling him all the stories women shared about what their families had gone through. He was looking at me differently. He’d seen me, the real me he remembered, back in action.
But sometimes I still threw him. The following month, I announced that I wanted to take the kids to Disneyland.
“Are you kidding?” asked Eric. He is not an amusement park kind of guy. He also knew that I’d been thinking a lot about my failed Mickey Mouse Club audition and all the times I’d worked Grad Nites, watching kids my age go off to live normal lives. “Why would you want to go back there?”
“It will be part of my healing,” I said with a completely straight expression. “I need to face my demons.”
He gave me a look of Seriously, is she okay? and then I let myself laugh. “I think the kiddos will love it.”
We got in late in the afternoon and plann
ed to do the park the next day. We were at the pool in the hotel, and this middle-aged woman came up to me. She was frantic.
“Oh my God, Britney Spears,” she yelled in a midwestern accent. “I love you so much.”
My kids were in the pool, staring at the scene. I was like, of course this would happen to me. Britney steals even this Disney moment, right there in front of my kids.
“Ma’am,” I said calmly. “I am sorry, but I am not Britney Spears.”
“Yes, you are,” she said. “We are taking a picture.”
“But I swear I’m not—” She already had her face next to mine, her arm outstretched to get a good selfie with Britney. I was not about to say, “I’m Jessica Simpson.” So I smiled and laughed about it for the rest of the night.
The next day I wore the vintage Mickey Mouse shirt they gave us at the first day’s tryouts in Dallas. I brought Ashlee along, just like I’d done back then, and she brought her two kids. I wore Minnie Mouse ears and kept them on the whole time. My excitement had a lot of people looking at me, and instead of shrinking, I smiled and said hi to everybody, hugging characters along the way. Eric had never seen this side of me, and I was the most overenthusiastic Disney mom there ever was.
“I think you’re having more fun than the kids,” Eric said. I had only gone in and out for work whenever I’d visited, so I hadn’t realized how much walking was involved. I’d worn heels, of course—sky-high platform heels—but by the end of the day, I had to give in and buy some twenty-dollar Star Wars flip-flops from a little kiosk. As I was inside trying to decide between Princess Leia or Yoda Havaianas, I heard a voice behind me.
“Oh, my God, I am so embarrassed.”
I turned. It was the woman from the pool. She was with a man I guessed was her husband because they matched. “I literally thought about this all night,” she said, coming closer. “You’re Jessica Simpson.”
Open Book Page 31
