Around 11 p.m., I reached over for a glass of water next to the bed and a huge contraction hit and I threw the water all over the place. AND SO IT BEGAN! Real labor! FUN TIMES!!! We called Debbie, a certified midwife who was acting as a doula for my birth. In case you don’t know, a doula is a birth coach who comes over and hangs out with you and gives you support and lets you know when she thinks it’s time to call the doctor or go to the hospital. I labored at home for many hours. I thought I would want to get in my giant whirlpool tub, but as soon as I got in, it was really unpleasant for me, so I jumped out. I took a lot of hot showers, letting the water pound my lower back. For some reason we still don’t know, I was having back labor mostly. Which means I was feeling all of my contractions in my lower back. Most of the time, if you have back labor, the baby is in the wrong position, but my baby was right-side up, causing me extreme back pain. So that was fairly brutal. Around 7:30 a.m., on her way to work, Emily BB came over with a turkey sandwich for me. I had been craving them but hadn’t eaten them in my pregnancy because of listeria concerns (no cold lunchmeat!).
But since the baby was clearly coming out that day, I felt fairly safe that I could eat a turkey sandwich without the fear of exposing my unborn daughter to listeria. When I was almost eight centimeters dilated, our doula suggested we head over to Cedars. I called Leigh Ann on the way and she wanted to know if she should come to the hospital immediately. I told her no, I thought it would be a while, it was only eight in the morning. I had already been in real labor for nine hours. We were assigned a private room and a nurse named Tranell who was a true angel. My water still hadn’t broken and almost as soon as we got to the hospital, my contractions all but stopped, which is something that happens sometimes when women get to the hospital. Debbie wanted me to walk around, but that sounded terrible to me. I tried my best to relax so I could get back into labor. Eventually, Dr. Crane’s colleague came in (he had been delivering a baby down the hall) and he broke my water with what can only be described as a crochet hook. Then my contractions were back and stronger than ever. I was in so much pain. I wanted the drugs. I needed the drugs. This was too much pain.
I looked at Marc. “I need the drugs. I can’t do this. I have to have the drugs.”
“Okay. I’ll get them to get you the drugs. But I want to just say this. If you take them, everyone was right and YOU COULDN’T DO IT ON YOUR OWN.”
I looked at him with true fire in my eyes. “FUCK YOU, OF COURSE I CAN DO THIS ON MY OWN.”
“I know you can.”
“Okay!”
“Okay.”
“GET ME SOME ICE CHIPS!”
My labor went on and on. I hadn’t slept in over twenty-four hours. I was exhausted, but there was no way I could sleep. The contractions were so painful. Some medical students came in to see me, because I guess when you’re in a hospital choosing to give birth without an epidural, you’re kind of like an exotic animal and they want everyone to be able to have a look. By the time Dr. Crane showed up and I started pushing, I was beyond delirious. There are actually no words for how out of my mind I was. Time didn’t exist anymore. The world stopped turning. It was just me and this room that I lived in now, with its view of Jerry’s Famous Deli taunting me, the sun setting and turning the hills of West Hollywood purple and pink and beautiful and here I was, with this baby, this huge baby, trying her best, heart rate never dropping on her little fetal monitor, just taking her sweet-ass time making her way into the world the way she wanted to because that is who she is and has always been. I needed a full episiotomy. Again, if you haven’t had a child I apologize, but a full episiotomy is where they cut your vagina down to your rectum. It’s as fucking awful as it sounds and with no epidural, they just spray some lidocaine on there, numb it up a bit, and cut. Marc was in charge of playing music that made me happy. As it turns out, it was a lot of Whiskeytown and Arcade Fire. Tranell’s shift was over and a new nurse came in, but when Tranell came to say goodbye she changed her mind, “No. I have to stay and see this baby be born. I’m not leaving you.”
Unable to really speak, I smiled gratefully at her, and she and the other nurse each took a leg to hold back. I would push and then I would pass out until it was time to push again. I was having full-on hallucinations, about surfing and giant waves and bright colors and light taking me and floating on clouds and talking to people. I was almost done. She was almost out. I pushed so hard and lay back. I opened my eyes and I was in the boardroom of Sterling Cooper. Dressed as Peggy. At the end of the table was Don Draper and Pete Campbell.
Pete said, “I don’t think she can do it, Don.”
And Don took a drag of his cigarette and said, “Oh she’s gonna do it, Pete. She’s gonna do it.”
And then I was back. Marc said I was only out for a few seconds, but when I came to I was saying under my breath, “I can do it, Don. I can do it. I’m gonna do it.”
Marc turned on Arcade Fire’s “Wake Up” and Dr. Crane got the baby’s shoulders out. It is a pain that has no description. It enveloped my body in a radiating white-hot poker of fire—unable to focus, unable to breathe: all-consuming pain.
“Give me your hands. Here. Reach down. You want to pull her out??”
And with the help of Tranell and my other nurse and Debbie and Dr. Crane, I reached down and put my hands under her little armpits and pulled a giant purple and red butterball out of my throbbing, exhausted body and up onto my chest. I looked around to find Marc. He was there next to me.
“Marc. I’m not crying,” I said. “Why am I not crying?”
“It’s okay. Just give yourself a minute.”
She needed to be suctioned out a little, but she was perfect. And giant. Nine pounds, seven ounces and twenty-two inches long. She was on my boob, not crying or eating, but just kind of looking right at me, intense and focused in a way that a newborn typically isn’t. I looked at Marc. “She’s my Birdie. Our big Bird.”
It had taken seventeen hours of hard labor and three hours of pushing, and here she was. I had been waiting for her my whole life.
FREE FALLIN’
(Tom Petty)
Birdie Leigh Silverstein was certainly not the first baby in the world to be born, but it sure felt like it to me. I had hired a baby nurse, on the advice of Abby, to help me in the early weeks of the baby. She proved to be literally no help at all. First of all, she hadn’t planned that I would be early, and she was unavailable in the first few days of my homecoming with Birdie, which were the days I really needed someone to try to help calm me down. Then, when she finally showed up to work, I disliked her immediately. I didn’t like how bossy I felt she was, and I didn’t think she was paying enough attention to Birdie. A few times in the night, when she was supposed to wake the baby up and bring her to me to feed, she slept through it, and I was the one who woke up in a panic that the baby had missed her 3 a.m. feeding! What the fuck?! That was her only job! She was supposed to stay for three weeks, but we let her go after a week and half. I was happy to see her go and leave me with my baby. Clearly I was the only one who could take care of her.
I was so overwhelmed and scared and hormonal. My brain never stopped spinning. I was afraid Birdie wasn’t eating enough, that she was sleeping too much or not enough, that the perfume my mother-in-law wore was going to give her asthma, that her belly button was infected, that she was too hot, that she was too cold, that her swaddle was wrong, that my boob was too big, that she wasn’t getting enough milk, that she had acid reflux, that she could die at any second.
My one job in this world was to keep Birdie alive, but I actually had to get another job, too. My other house still hadn’t sold, and now we were totally underwater on it. The housing market was crashing and taking me with it. I had no income. Marc was trying his best, but he was carrying our new huge mortgage and my credit card debt and his credit card debt and the writers’ strike hadn’t been the greatest thing for him and Abby, in terms of new jobs. They had taken a big rewrite job that had been lucrative,
but we were in a bit of a situation, financially speaking. Which is how I found myself agreeing to go to an audition exactly seven days after giving birth, for a new Ryan Murphy show called Glee. I would get to sing! And they were aware I had just given birth and was larger than normal, but they were getting the show going right away, and it seemed like it was being fast-tracked, so it would probably be immediate work. I had to wear my postnatal diaper to the audition. I left Birdie for an hour to go sing “Sweet Child of Mine” for Ryan Murphy. I didn’t get the part, obviously.
Back home, I tried to be calm, but I had a very hard time. I didn’t want anyone holding Birdie except for me and maybe Leigh Ann. Marc was useless. He didn’t even try. I felt like I had to essentially force the baby on him in order for him to hold her, and after a while I didn’t even care if he did. He didn’t do anything right, anyway. I did the nighttime routine alone, just me and Birdie. I put her to bed, I woke up with her all night, I fed her, I changed her, I wore her, I took her to my postnatal yoga class with my friend Jennah and her new baby, Killian. When Birdie was two months old, we had to go to an engagement party. We left Birdie at home with my sister. I could only be gone for two or three hours tops, since she would need to be breastfed. Marc immediately left me when we got to the party and when I found him smoking with Lizzy Caplan and some guy friends of his, he was in the middle of saying, “Yeah. It’s amazing. She’s such a good baby and really our lives haven’t changed at all!”
I almost threw up. His life hadn’t changed, sure. I was a fucking wreck. Marc was still going to his Lakers games and to watch football with his friends on Sundays. He even took a guys’ trip to Las Vegas when Birdie was three months old, leaving me alone with her. I woke up in the middle of the night and looked out of our upstairs bedroom window to see three men sitting on my steps, smoking blunts. Seriously. I called the cops, but the dudes wandered off before they got there. I swore that as soon as we had money, I was getting a gate installed. I swore that as soon as I had money, I was leaving Marc.
I filled my days mostly with new-mom stuff, hanging out with the moms I had met in prenatal yoga, and we would go to the zoo or the Grove (an outdoor mall in L.A.) or a baby gym class and lay the babies on the ground and talk until it was time to head home for nap time. I tried to surround myself with as many people as I could, but I somehow always felt alone and scared. Even going to the grocery store was too overwhelming for me. In a Ralphs parking lot, I tried in vain to strap Birdie on in her Baby Bjorn by myself for fifteen minutes until I finally just gave up and returned home alone in tears, unable to complete even the simplest task, getting food for the week.
I finally broke down and told Marc one night that if he didn’t start doing something I was going to officially lose my mind, more than I already felt I had lost it. He agreed and committed to waking up early on Sundays and taking Birdie out of the house with milk I had pumped so I could sleep in. I looked forward to Sunday mornings, waiting all week with the knowledge that at least I would be able to sleep a little and maybe get my brain under control. We hired a babysitter for a few days week whom I really liked, but she got pregnant a few weeks after she started working for us and had that horrible debilitating morning sickness, so she had to quit, which I took as a further sign that I was the only person who was capable of taking care of my little precious Bird. No one else was to be trusted.
But for all of my crazy spinning thoughts and constant tears, Birdie was a sweet and unflappable baby. I mean, I barely would put her down, so she had no reason to cry but she was a baby who was so generally happy that strangers would comment that she was like a little Buddha or call her an indigo child. My biggest regret with Birdie is that I wasn’t able to enjoy her babyhood as much as I should have. I was so in my own head I couldn’t enjoy it at all.
• • •
My constant panic about Birdie wasn’t helped by our financial situation. My agents knew I needed a job, badly. My business managers didn’t know what to do about the house. The market was swallowing people whole. My house wasn’t worth what I owed on it, and no one in their right mind would pay it now. In a few short months, my investment had become a trash heap. We couldn’t rent it out, we couldn’t sell it. I fundamentally didn’t want to default on it, but I had no money. If I let it go to foreclosure, the banks would come after Marc and the house we were currently living in with our newborn daughter. We couldn’t lose that house. In order to try doing a short sale, I had to stop paying my mortgage for at least two months, which I did. I spent all my free time taking calls from different bank representatives, and trying to figure out who the fuck could buy this house from me. (The mortgage was two loans—I really don’t even understand why, but it was.) I personally found an actress to buy the house for what I owed on the first, and somehow we convinced the second to roll into an unsecured loan that I would pay off until it was gone. It wasn’t even a stupid short sale. Everyone ended up getting paid. But on Christmas Eve, my phone rang. It was the bank. They told me that it was too late and they were putting the house into foreclosure. I had done all this work, trying to figure out how not to have this happen. We had a signed contract approved by everyone and now they were foreclosing on the house? ON CHRISTMAS EVE?? I screamed at the woman on the phone and gave her all the paperwork and all the people who I had spoken to and all the approvals that had been given. I went into some sort of fugue state. And I just kept screaming, “ON CHRISTMAS EVE??!!!”
They ended up calling back the next morning. There had been a mistake. The sale was approved, after all. They wished me a Merry Christmas. I told them to go fuck themselves. Not really. But in my head I did. In reality I just mumbled a half-hearted “Merry Christmas to you.” Then I hung up the phone and sobbed.
I had been called into an audition for a show that was picked up straight to series by creator Rob Thomas called Party Down. I knew one of the stars already cast Adam Scott from the NBC table read years ago and I had become friendly with him and his wife socially. I thought the part was perfect for me. They agreed. I had lost a considerable amount of the baby weight but still had more to go, but I actually liked the idea for the character, you know? It’s superrealistic for girls who move from the Midwest where they did sketch comedy to Los Angeles and within a year they’ve lost like twenty-five pounds and gotten a nose job. I thought it would be a really interesting added layer to the character. Rob and Adam agreed, and I was their first choice for the part. I was so excited. I loved the show and thought it would be so good to get back to work. I could probably even hire a nanny! I would have to! Lorrie was so excited about it, as was my new manager Steven (I had cut ties with Mark; his bro personality didn’t work for me). But no one was more excited than I was. I was going to work again!! On something really great!
I was rocking Birdie in her glider when Lorrie Bartlett called. “Hey, Biz, how ya doing?”
“Good, just sitting here with the little Bird.”
“Hey. So, there’s no good way of saying this so I’m just gonna say it. Biz, it’s not gonna go our way. The network.”
My heart sank as she paused, because my agent was about to tell me something really fucked up, and I knew what she was about to say, “They . . . really don’t feel that physically they can give you the part. It’s the network. Not Rob Thomas or Adam. Honey, they just feel like the weight is an issue.”
I didn’t even try to stop myself. I just started crying, tears rolling onto my baby girl’s perfect little head. “Oh . . . I understand. Yeah. It was dumb of me to gain so much weight anyway.”
“I’m so sorry, honey. Rob Thomas has an email he’d like to send you. Is it okay if I pass along your address?”
“Sure. Bye, Lor.”
I hung up and rocked Birdie and sobbed. What a fucking dumb, bad actress I was. So broke. So miserable. So scared. So fat. The heads of a third-rate cable network thought I was too fat to play a waiter in a show about struggling comedic actors trying to make it in Hollywood. This is the same network that
HIRED an executive AFTER another network had fired him for PUBLICLY ASSAULTING his girlfriend! Hollywood is the fucking most disgusting, most vile place on earth. But I couldn’t do anything else. I had to act. I had no other skills. I hadn’t even graduated from college. I had tried to write a movie, and we know how that turned out. I had tried to write a book, and the literary agent I gave it to thought no one would care about my “pregnancy-scare and date-rape stories.”
“From you, I think people would want to know more about, like, Katie Holmes,” she had said. Her dismissal of my past legitimately almost discouraged me from ever writing again.
And now here I was: the only thing I had to do was keep this perfect child alive, and could I even be tasked with that? My husband sucked. I was exhausted. I couldn’t stop my brain from thinking that all of the worst things ever were seconds away from happening all the time. And I was too fucking fat to work as an actress. The email came. It was kind.
Busy,
I want to let you know that you’re everyone’s first choice on the Party Down team. All the producers’. Adam Scott’s. The casting director’s.
I loved your audition.
I’ve also been a huge fan since Freaks & Geeks.
The cancellation of that show hit me harder than the cancellation of my own show, Cupid, a year earlier. I knew that “small story” television died along with F&G, and I’m a writer who likes small stories. I got my start teaching high school, then writing Young Adult novels. I’d always wanted to do a pure-character, non-soapy teen show, and once F&G went away, I realized I wouldn’t be fulfilling that goal, so I tried to sneak a teen character study into Veronica Mars. I gave them “big story,” and I got to wedge in a story about a counter culture teen girl. But back on topic—
This Will Only Hurt a Little Page 22
