I understood that Dean didn’t get to experience the celebrity whirlwind for all the years I did. I didn’t want to take that away from him, but I also didn’t want that to be our lives. I thought back to a few weeks earlier when we’d been invited to a premiere. Dean RSVP’d yes right away. When he told me we were going, I said, “You said yes? I hate premieres.”
Dean said, “You do?”
Yeah, I do. I used to like premieres. Once, when I went to Interview with a Vampire, I wore a cropped angora midriff top and leather pants. I brought Jenny as my date. We were waiting on the press line when Jenny got body-slammed. She went down, sprawled across the red carpet. She was lying there, horrified, when an arm came out of nowhere. A deep voice said, “I’m so sorry.” Jenny looked up and saw that it was Brad Pitt. She said, “It’s okay.” He helped her to her feet. To this day, when Jenny gets sentimental about the good old days she says, “Remember when Brad Pitt almost killed me on a press line?” and sighs dreamily.
But those days were over for me. I’d had that experience and I was done. Now Dean wanted to go to premieres all over again. Why would I want to get all dressed up to watch a movie when we could put on sweats and watch it in our den on a Saturday night?
I said, “We went to Star Trek. Wasn’t that enough?”
Dean and I have been together for four years, and in that time he has become a household name through our show and in motorcycle circles. Our social life used to be powered by my celebrity, but things are changing. When he was in New York, Dean was on the Today show. He said, “The publicity trip was about my movie. The press was following me. I felt important.” Another time he was invited to a gifting suite here in L.A. He went without me, and afterward he said, “It was cool. They invited me. They gave me things. Who doesn’t like that?” I liked to hear that he was having fun. But to me he was always important. And he’s already a successful actor in his own right, with or without the perks.
Dean and I met as equals, working on the same movie, but at the time I was careful to talk about the imbalance in our careers and celebrity. I’d been in Hollywood for a long time. I had celebrity through my family, through my shows, and, well, just a disproportionate share of celebrity in general. Dean got it. He knew what I was worried about. It’s hard for actor couples when one gets more attention. It’s not a great feeling, and it can be the downfall in relationships between people in our business. The relationships often fail. Dean said he was content to take the back seat. He said, “I’ve been doing this for a long time. You’ve been famous forever and you’ve worked hard for it. That’s the way it’s going to be. I’m not going to be jealous of my wife.” I know he still feels that way about the differences in our careers. This wasn’t about competing with me on any level. But midlife, success, love, desires, attention—complex emotions circle around us, and no matter how much we talk things through, we can surprise ourselves. For some reason motorcycles mean so much to Dean that he continues to ride them in spite of the danger and my reaction. I don’t understand what that reason is; I might never understand it, but I know it is very real and important to him.
We didn’t really resolve our fight about the motorcycle event except that Dean didn’t attend the event that night. Then just after dinner Santiago came over to drop off Dean’s truck. Instead of saying, “Thanks for returning the truck,” Dean sat down with Santiago and they talked for two hours. The kids were ready for bed and Dean wasn’t there to say good night. We’d just had a fight about this. The whole point of Dean staying home from the event was that he spend time with the family! The whole point was that I wanted him to want to be with his family. He hadn’t gone out, but he might as well have.
As Dean and Santiago shot the breeze, I was upstairs seething. But instead of going down to Dean and telling him what I needed, I sent Liam to do my dirty work. I said, “Tell Daddy to stop talking.”
Liam dutifully trotted to the top of the staircase and yelled, “Hey, guys, shut up. Stop talking. Daddy come!” Liam came back to me all proud and we high-fived. Great, Tori, way to use your child to communicate with your husband.
Why was Dean doing this? He knew my issues. I’d been very clear. There had to be anger that he wasn’t expressing. He still wanted what he wanted. And maybe he didn’t want to feel like I was controlling him and his time. I didn’t say anything; I waited and watched. The next night he asked to take me out on a date, wherever I wanted to go. He wanted to make me happy. He wanted to be with me. But he wanted to do it on his terms.
During the fight about the motorcycle event, when I told Dean I was worried about our relationship, he said, “We have a great relationship. When I was in New York everyone was talking about what a great relationship we have.”
I said, “Yeah, I was on Twitter missing you.” That was real. I did miss him. But people say we have a perfect relationship, we hear it, and we buy into it. When I watch the show I think that we’re perfect too. It doesn’t show me nagging. It doesn’t show him nitpicking at how I do things. We forget that there’s a difference between image and reality.
Dean and I are in a solid, committed relationship, but it’s not always perfect. Things change. Relationships have ebbs and flows. The tabloids had it all wrong. We weren’t in a loveless marriage. Dean never said any of those horrible things his former friend claimed were true. But that autumn was hard. We were in ebb.
Liam’s Word
I wasn’t just a workaholic. I was a momaholic. Part of it was my preexisting perfectionism, and part of it was wanting to prove that I was just another normal mom.
Over the summer Liam was still going to school. One of the moms came up to me and invited me to a playdate in Pasadena. It sounded great, but we were staying at the beach, which is over an hour from Pasadena, so I said we couldn’t come. The mom said, “Of course not. You don’t go to anything.”
I think of myself as an involved mother, and the implication that I wasn’t irked me. Here I was being realistic about our chances of coming to one playdate, and I was being told that this was my MO by the same mom who didn’t like that I was going to drive Liam the two blocks home from a playdate with poop in his diaper.
I’m a perfectionist, which means I try to do everything to the fullest, to a fault. As Liam began preschool, I started bringing Stella to the same Mommy & Me class that I did with Liam the year before. One day I was in Stella’s classroom and noticed a sheet in the back of the room with a pen hanging from it. It was a sign-up sheet, where parents could volunteer to help with holiday celebrations, bringing food or paper goods, doing crafts, and so on. Holiday parties! This was right up my alley. I immediately put my name down next to food for Halloween and Christmas. I would have signed up for Thanksgiving too, but the school hosted the feast for that holiday.
As I was writing, all the other parents floated over to see the sign-up. I glanced up from my sign-up frenzy to see that I was surrounded. I wanted to put my name everywhere, but now they were all watching. One of the moms said, “Oh, you’ve signed up for all the food through the end of the year.” I had? I looked back at the sheet. I had just signed up in two places. It didn’t seem like a big deal. The sheet had the rest of the school calendar. She was lucky I hadn’t signed up for Valentine’s Day, Saint Patrick’s Day, Passover, Easter, Leif Erikson Day. I was trying to be polite by only signing up through December! The truth was that I was too much of a control freak to leave any of the holidays in their hands. I knew what that would mean: store-bought food! Cue ominous horror movie music.
The year before, for Liam’s toddler class graduation, all the moms were to bring snacks for a celebration. I made little ham and cheese sandwiches and arranged them on the plate in a design. The other snacks included cookies still in the Whole Foods packaging and crudités in a plastic arrangement that had come straight from the grocery store. Moms are busy. Some don’t cook. I know such choices are perfectly reasonable. But I am Candy Spelling’s daughter. My hostess genes kicked in. I just couldn’t let t
hat happen again. Plastic grocery store containers, imagine!
The mom who had noticed my hyperactive sign-ups saw that I was embarrassed at her reaction and said, “I’m just impressed that you’d want to sign up for all that. Go for it.” So I left Stella’s class having signed up for all the food. Then I went to Liam’s class and did the same thing.
The night before Halloween I was up all night making food art for the school. I started by making white and orange worms out of string cheese with pretzel antennae. At first I laid the worms out on a disposable tin tray that was lined with wax paper, but that didn’t look good enough. The wax paper had to go. As I started carefully peeling the worms off the tray to start all over again, Dean said, “Only you. Why are you doing this?” He thought I was ridiculous, redoing the whole tray. But I said, “Let me do it! The worms don’t look good.” I used some food coloring to dye some shredded coconut green and laid it out on the tray as grass. Then I put the worms back on. Now they had a place to crawl and appear wormlike. Perfect. Next I made turkey and cheese sandwiches and cut them with pumpkin-shaped cookie cutters. I lightly brushed them with orange food color and gave them tiny olive eyes. I made English muffin pizzas with ghoulish rubber fingers sticking out. Dean and Scout helped. We had fun with it.
The next morning I brought the platters of food into the school kitchen. The woman who worked in the kitchen saw what I was putting on the counter and said, “Oh my God, this wins!” I thanked her calmly, but when I walked out the door, I did an air pump in the courtyard. I said, “I won! She said I won!”
Dean shook his head. “It’s not about winning,” he said. No, of course not. I knew that. I loved the process of making the food regardless of how it was received. But the praise also felt good. And I had to admit to myself that there was part of me that wanted to show the other moms that I wasn’t what they might assume—the spoiled Hollywood girl who never went on playdates and probably hired a caterer to do food for a preschool party. I was a normal working mom who tried to do it all.
A few months later, for the Christmas party, I went all out again. I made several platters, but my favorite was the chicken nugget snowmen with little hats from eggplant skin, olive eyes, carrot noses, and shaved carrot scarves. Their arms were pretzels. The buttons were green peas. Everything was glued on with cream cheese.
Most of the time it’s fun, but sometimes my Martha Stewarting gets out of control and Dean and I clash over my perfectionism. Liam had an “All About Me” day at school. He was supposed to bring in a poster board that showed his family members, his friends, and things he liked. On his “All About Me” day I would go in to spend the day with him at school, bringing along his favorite book, favorite toy, and favorite snack.
For the poster board I went to Michael’s, the local craft store, and spent two hundred dollars on stickers. Dean said, “If you’re trying to prove that you’re a normal mom, let me tell you. That’s not normal. That’s crazy.”
I ignored Dean (buzzkill!) and set about my work. I decided to give the poster the heading “Liam’s World.” As in “Elmo’s World.” I had purchased sticker letters in a large font. But as I was spelling out “World,” I realized that I only had one of each letter. Once I’d used the L for “Liam,” there wasn’t another for “World.” Now the poster said “LIAM’S WORD,” with a blank space where the second L should be. This was very bad. I was distraught. What could I do? I didn’t want to write in an L. It wouldn’t match. We had to go back to the store. Scout was trying to convince me to make an L out of the T when Dean walked back into the room. He asked what the fuss was about. I told him I was missing an L and had to go back to Michael’s. Dean said, “That’s ridiculous!” Whoa. I didn’t want to challenge Dean. But the T made a crappy makeshift L. I couldn’t stop staring at it.
Scout said, “You know she’s going back to the store.” But Dean wanted me to be done with it.
I said, “Choose your battles. Maybe you’re right, but this is who I am.” I put the poster aside until I had a chance to get more letters. But by the time I got back to the craft store, I had decided that “Liam’s World” was so last month. He had ditched Elmo for a new superhero obsession. So I trashed the old board and started from scratch. I labored over a new “Super Liam” board. When I was finally done, I emailed his teacher, telling her that I was ready to come in for Liam’s “All About Me” day. I told her how guilty I felt; it had taken me so long to get it perfect in the second round. I figured I was the only parent who hadn’t made a presentation yet. But she said not to worry, that half the parents hadn’t done theirs yet. I signed up right away, so I wouldn’t be last. Phew.
I know when Dean tries to curtail my perfectionism he wants to simplify my life. He sees me stressed out and trying to control every detail and thinks he can help me let go by telling me to let go. Sometimes I wish I could. Being a control freak isn’t ideal when you’re parenting young children. For school Stella did a project that involved putting stickers on a picture frame. She was piling them one on top of the next, enjoying herself thoroughly. I tried to show her how to distribute them around the frame, but she thought that was lame and went right along sticking them together. Inside I was dying.
It’s hard for me to let go, and it’s hard for me to just be. I’m constantly in and out of the moment. Helping the kids but thinking about work. Working but missing the kids. No wonder I keep ending up in the hospital.
My perfectionism takes its toll on our lives. It inhibits Dean. This became clear to me when it came time to decorate our Christmas tree. When Christmas came around we bought a living Christmas tree. It’s a live tree, with roots still intact, that you “borrow” for Christmas and return afterward to the tree farm. They nurture it over the year, and you get the same tree the next year. I loved the idea that every year when Christmas was over, instead of dumping a sad, dried-out, dying tree, we’d be watching something grow alongside the children.
The kids’ homemade ornaments would go on their small individual trees, but for the tree in the family room I selected a specific color scheme that coordinated with the room decor. (Doesn’t everyone?) The ornaments—in brown, gold, copper, silver, and cream—were in boxes on the floor next to the tree, ready to be hung. But who had time to hang them?
Christmas was a bustling time in our house. I was still feeling sick, but there were many gifts to be selected, purchased, and nicely wrapped (though not as beautifully as my mom would do it). Our dining room became a gift room as I selected the perfect gifts for our agents, lawyers, business managers, publicist, and all their assistants, and all the assistants’ assistants. I bought presents for the people who work on Tori & Dean, people at Oxygen, Little Maven, HSN, Simon & Schuster. The more businesses you have, the more people you work with. Then there were our relatives, our friends, and our friends’ kids.
I was overwhelmed, and I got it in my head that the one thing I wanted Dean to spearhead was the tree trimming. I texted him a couple of times, saying in my passive way, “would love help with the tree,” to which he always responded, “Sure, just let me know, babe.” What I didn’t say and he didn’t get was that I wanted him to just get it done. I was trying to delegate, but apparently even when I made an effort to do it, I wasn’t very good at it.
A few days passed, and finally I came in one night and saw that Dean was chilling out, watching some hockey. How relaxing for him! But we had so much to do. It killed me that he was completely oblivious to the holiday to-do list that was expanding daily in my head. I got my jacket and purse, came back into the room all bundled up, and said, “The kids are in the playroom. Can you take over? I’m going out.”
He said, “Sure, where are you going?”
I said, “I’m going to CVS to get stocking stuffers for the kids.”
He said, “Now? At five thirty on a Sunday night?”
I said, “Well, there’s so much to get done before Christmas. I have to do something.” Then I burst out with my real point, telling him how m
uch there was to do and couldn’t he just do one little thing—the tree!—while I was out? Dean said he’d been waiting to do the tree with me because I was so controlling that if he went ahead with the decorations, he knew I’d find fault with his work and need to do it all over again.
Now, wait just a minute. We knew I was controlling, but I had never been controlling about the Christmas tree. Well . . . not yet anyway. I wanted to be presumed innocent! Anyway, once I gave him artistic freedom, Dean went in to decorate the tree. Calmer now, I took my jacket off and went into the kitchen to make shepherd’s pie and mulled wine for dinner. I had the shepherd’s pie halfway into the oven when I remembered that the last time I made shepherd’s pie, I ended up going to the hospital at ten thirty that night. I had a nascent shepherd’s pie superstition. What if I made this one and ended up in the hospital again? It half crossed my mind to dump the whole pan, but that would be silly. After a moment’s hesitation I put it in the oven.
I’m controlling and Dean is an extremist. From the kitchen I heard him shift into work mode. I could hear him instructing Liam, powering through the tree trimming in his über-focused way.
When they were done, I came into the room to see how it looked. Dean and I stood in the doorway together appreciating his handiwork. My boys put together a really beautiful tree. We didn’t have a tree topper, so Dean tied three stars together very prettily. He’s good at stuff like that. “It looks amazing,” I said.
“Are you sure?” he asked. “I know you have a specific way you like things.” But it was true. I honestly didn’t want to move a single bulb. I had delegated. Dean had helped. It was almost Christmas and maybe we were finding a healthy balance.
But that night I ended up in the hospital with a migraine. Damned shepherd’s pie.
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