Getting the Pretty Back

by Molly Ringwald

  My own mother made the choice to be a stay-at-home mom and raise her children without the help of a relative or a nanny. I can count on one hand the number of times that we had a babysitter. It happened so rarely and was such a novelty that it felt like a holiday when it did occur. I remember the name of only one of our babysitters: Cherry. How beautiful and glamorous she seemed to me with her long center-parted hair, straight as sheets of glass, and her Bonne Bell Lip Smacker.

  Throughout our childhood, we had our mother’s clear, undivided attention, and all of us flourished like hothouse flowers. She was a room mother for me and my brother and sister, organizing field trips, decorating cookies, driving us to our swim team practices, Little League games, and dance lessons, as well as driving my father (who happens to be blind) to and from his work as a jazz pianist. In her “spare time,” she took a class as a mechanic so she could service our car, a used 1966 turquoise Rambler. She expertly sewed our Halloween costumes, Easter dresses, school play costumes; baked her own bread; preserved the fruit and vegetables from our garden; cooked meals (a different one for each child, since our tastes varied); and read us a bedtime story every night. She always stopped at a crucial moment in the narrative, just when she knew we were hooked, announcing that it was “lights out,” and then she would hide the book—I remember my brother, Kelly, and I searching all over the house for Island of the Blue Dolphins, never managing to find it. Every night was a treat. As far as I was concerned, my mother was Superwoman.

  Years later, after we moved from our smaller town in Northern California to Los Angeles, where rents ran three times what they did up north, my mother decided that she needed to get a job to supplement our family’s income. Since she married right out of high school and never attended college, she went to a temp agency to find out what kind of a job she could get.

  I was at home when my mother returned, after walking around all day in heels that she was unaccustomed to. (My mother stopped wearing heels and skirts some time before I was born. I can never picture her in a skirt, just as I can never picture my father without a beard.) She entered quietly, holding the heels in her hands.

  “How did it go?” I asked, excited. I was twelve years old, and the thought of my mother doing anything outside the family seemed positively exotic to me.

  “I’m unqualified,” she said, shaking her head. “It seems I’m unqualified for anything. Anything at all.”

  I watched her heartbroken as she trudged back to her bedroom and closed the door. This was my mother. My mother who could do anything.

  “The problem,” my mother says now, “is that I picked a profession that becomes obsolete. I always knew that I wanted to have kids and be a homemaker…but I never counted on you kids growing up. You have to have something outside of your children, you know? They didn’t tell us that back then. Or maybe they did, but I didn’t hear it.”

  It seems strange to me now when I think of how both of my parents impressed upon me the importance of having a career—any career, as long as it is something that I loved. Additionally, they encouraged me to have pursuits outside it, things that could nourish me and help keep me from placing too much importance on my career. Why then didn’t she follow her own advice and ensure she had other sources of nourishment? Part of it, certainly, had to do with her upbringing—she is a member of a generation renowned for its stoicism and self-sacrifice—but the rest is still a mystery to me. I asked my mother what she thought she would do after her children grew up.

  “I didn’t think about it.”

  Didn’t think about it? How is that possible? This is a woman who scrupulously budgeted, counting every penny for our family, a woman who began saving for our college education the second we came out of the womb. How is it that she didn’t think about herself? When I was the last child to leave the nest, my mother fell into a huge depression. All the years spent thinking and caring for everyone else had finally caught up with her. She entered therapy for the first time, and as she says, she cried nonstop for two years. The therapist, a kindly woman, fifteen years my mother’s senior, nodded her head in agreement. Life was hard, hers harder than most in many ways. She passed the box of Kleenex and then said the same thing she always did, “What are you going to do about it?”

  It took a couple of years, but at the age of forty-eight, my mother went to a culinary institute and perfected something that she was already good at. She made friends, went into business with my father, and ran a successful catering business on the side. The depression vanished. Was it the schooling? Was it succeeding at something for herself? Was it making friends? My mother insists that it’s the electrical shock she accidently gave herself when she was crossing over a field at her sister’s ranch in Petaluma. “That electrical shock fixed me right up!” she swears. “And I didn’t even have to pay for it!” Yes, it’s true that my mom loves a good bargain, but she also has a great sense of humor.

  Although my mother now sees her friends with some regularity—going out for dinner, taking in shows at the Sacramento playhouse, where my parents buy seasons tickets, along with their friends—I can remember a time from my childhood when it was rare for my mother to spend time outside the family.

  In this, she is far from unusual. There is something that happens in every woman’s life. It starts in middle school (sometimes even earlier) and then is repeated at various times, with varying degrees of intensity, over the years. The dumping of friends for a relationship. I have perpetrated this on my friends as the “dumper” and also been the “dumpee,” finding it suddenly impossible to get my friend on the phone after that friend has exchanged a mutual “I love you” with his or her significant other. Once that happens, you can consider yourself dumped. At least for a time.

  The most extreme case of dumping occurs when one has a baby. After you have a baby, the days of straight-up spontaneity are pretty much behind you until you send your kids to college. After my first daughter, Mathilda, was born, my social life came to a grinding halt. Every moment I didn’t spend with her or at work, I spent catching up on sleep or trying to figure out a way to make my body look like it did before. (Which, in my case, seems an impossible feat. I find myself looking at other actresses of my generation in the magazines and thinking, I must have gone to the wrong celebrity school. Why do their stomachs look flatter after having had children?) In any case, every moment that I spent away from my daughter felt “stolen” and undeserved.

  At the other end of the spectrum, however, there is nothing like a baby to help justify not doing all of the things you need to do to take care of yourself. Maybe other people have always been better about dividing their time, but it took me a while to realize that I was a better mother when I took the time to recharge my batteries. I am more energetic when my body is healthy. I am happier when I find the time to enrich my brain—when I actually read the books on my bedside table. When I go to an off-Broadway play. When I just sit with a friend over coffee for half an hour and talk about nothing.

  Sometimes I miss the days of heading out into the street and not knowing exactly where I’m going, running into a friend at a neighborhood café, drinking wine in the afternoons (admittedly, this is something that seems to be hard at any age unless you live in Europe). It’s an oxymoron, but we need to plan for spontaneity with our friends. We know about the importance of “date night” with our significant other, so why not also have a date night with our friends? It isn’t easy, but your friendships will thank you for it. Pick a day (or night), depending on your job, and trade off deciding what you are going to do—even if it’s just going to see a movie, hitting the sales at Bergdorf’s shoe salon, or getting your nails done. The time spent with a friend is invaluable. You need it, and your friends need it too. It is very exciting when your friends have babies, but when you are the one without children, it can become disheartening after a while to always be rescheduled, postponed, put off. It is important to remind your friends that you are still you, just as it is necessary to remind your
self.

  * * *

  I DON’T UNDERSTAND HOW A WOMAN CAN LEAVE THE HOUSE WITHOUT FIXING HERSELF UP A LITTLE—IF ONLY OUT OF POLITENESS. AND THEN, YOU NEVER KNOW, MAYBE THAT’S THE DAY SHE HAS A DATE WITH DESTINY. AND IT’S BEST TO BE AS PRETTY AS POSSIBLE FOR DESTINY.

  —COCO CHANEL

  * * *

  That being said, the one place that I think should be avoided as a “date with friends” idea is the gym. Yes, it’s good to have a gym buddy—I know that I benefit from a little bit of healthy competition—but dates with friends should be spent doing something you both love. If you both love bench-pressing, by all means, party on. But most of you probably are closer to me. When I think of what constitutes a good time, aerobics, StairMasters, and chin-ups have absolutely nothing to do with it.

  Date night with friends is about indulging yourself. One of the reasons for the massive success of a show like Sex in the City, other than Sarah Jessica Parker’s undeniable charisma, is that it promoted dates with your friends. There is something that we get from our female friends that we can’t get anywhere else. There is a firsthand knowledge that they have. You don’t need to explain everything. One thing I love about getting together with a girlfriend is the fact that they know exactly how PMS feels. They will never try to tell you it doesn’t exist, but by the same token, a girlfriend will never assume it’s “that time of month” if you are acting erratic or feeling morose. Girlfriends will never lie to you if you ask them to honestly tell you if you look fat in those jeans. In fact, a really good friend will tell you without being asked, and it’s never embarrassing or degrading when a girlfriend tells you this. Somehow it’s OK to be objectified by a really good friend, ’cause you know it’s for the greater good. (Of course, good girlfriend etiquette demands that you also are informed when your butt looks really cute in those jeans.)

  Sometimes life intervenes and it is absolutely impossible to spend time with your friends. For example, I think that there is a six-month grace period after you have a baby or adopt. Other times, life just takes us in wildly different directions, and we have to accept it and let those friendships go. And as painful as that can be, sometimes they miraculously come back to us.

  When I was six years old, I entered at a new school. I didn’t know anyone there. I had recently recorded a jazz album with my father’s band, which brought me all kinds of attention in the local jazz community, and pretty much ensured my freak show status at school. There were two older boys who would track me down daily and taunt me, imitating my little squeaky voice from the record. How had they even heard it? I would wonder. How did they know the lyrics? Whenever I saw the boys coming, I would look down and run in the opposite direction.

  Near the end of my first week of school, a little girl with long blond hair and blue cat-eye glasses came up to me on the playground. She was holding my album in her hands. I tensed up, fearing that I was about to be teased.

  “Hi! I’m Jenny! Would you autograph my album?”

  She handed over a clearly well-played LP. I took it and signed “Love, Molly” with little musical notes sprinkled around my name.

  Jenny and I quickly became best friends. She would come over to my house after school and join me when I performed with my father’s band at local shows. We would have slumber parties at her house. (Incidentally, it was Jenny’s older brother Douglas who was my chief taunter at school. Mystery solved. But in his defense, it must have been beyond aggravating to a twelve-year-old boy to have to listen to the thing as many times as this record seemed to have been played in their house.) Jenny and her five siblings and numerous cats and dogs lived in a wonderfully cozy home. Her parents made the choice not to have a television. Jenny’s mother says now that it wasn’t so much a choice as a decision not to buy another one after their TV broke. “I never realized it could be so quiet until it broke and we didn’t have to listen to five children argue over which channel to watch!” The television was hardly missed. There was no shortage of things to do at the house. There were always plenty of art supplies around, and the backyard was full of interesting diversions—Jenny’s father was a collector and restorer of Packard automobiles. The whole family was remarkably academic, and all of them have grown up to be doctors, lawyers, and high-level political consultants.

  One day when we were seven, Jenny and I were in the backseat of my family’s car, talking about what we were going to be when we grew up. I stated emphatically that I was going to be an “entertainer.” I was going to be a famous singer and actress. There was very little doubt, as far as I was concerned. Jenny thought this was a good idea. Then she announced that she was going to be a nurse. This seemed like a good idea to me too. My mother glanced at us in the rearview mirror and said, “But why a nurse? Why not a doctor?” My mother still likes to claim credit for Jennifer becoming a successful ob-gyn—never mind that she was top of her class at Berkeley, ditto Stanford—my mother thinks she can trace it all back to that fateful conversation. Who knows? Maybe she’s right. Jennifer doesn’t discount it.

  When my family moved away, Jenny and I tried to stay in contact. She would visit me in Los Angeles, I would visit her occasionally in Sacramento, but eventually our lives became too separate. By the time we were teenagers, I felt that we had little in common. We barely spoke anymore. We didn’t have a big falling-out, we just sort of gradually fell apart. I acted in a movie when I was nineteen where I played a pregnant teenager. There was a scene where my character took a sip of champagne at a family get-together. When the film was released, I received a very angry letter from my friend (who was in premed at the time), telling me how irresponsible the scene was and citing numerous statistics in regards to fetal alcohol syndrome. I felt unjustly accused and started many letters to Jenny telling her so, though ultimately I never sent them. Instead, I decided to simply let it go. What was there to say? We had definitely grown apart.

  Losing a friend can be painful, especially if it is acrimonious in any way. My friend Meredith cites losing a close friend of hers as the single most painful event of her life. She had a friend in college she was so close to that they were almost like one person—finishing each other’s sentences, confiding every thought and secret. After the friendship ended, Meredith felt like a part of herself was missing, as if she had a phantom limb. I asked her if she ever tried to find someone to replace that one special friend.

  “I couldn’t,” she says now. “I don’t even know if I would want to. I find myself parceling out bits of information to many different friends, rather than just one. Maybe it’s just a defense mechanism, but it’s what I do. If I want to talk about books, let’s say…maybe I’ll call Panio. Cooking…I’ll call Jane. I don’t think I’ll ever give that much of myself to just one friend ever again.”

  Sometimes we have to let our friends go and trust that if we are meant to get back together, we will. Otherwise we learn to cherish the time that we had together and know that nothing that we do has to diminish those memories. And sometimes our friendships do find their way back to us, or else we find our way back to them.

  At the beginning of my thirties, I faced something that I didn’t know how to handle. Even now, I don’t really know how to talk about it. A late-term miscarriage. That’s the short way of saying what happened to me. It would take a much longer and heavier book to properly explain what it was and how I felt. Suffice to say, I was desperate. Desperately sad, confused, and terrified that there was something terribly wrong with me and that possibly I would never be able to have children. All of my doctors in New York City seemed incapable of explaining to me what had gone wrong and, worse, equally incapable of reassuring me that it wouldn’t happen again. Well-meaning friends handed out platitudes such as “It’s nature’s way…” I wanted to scream at them, “What do you know about nature and her ways? Go write a Hallmark card where people actually want to read things like that.” I wanted real answers.

  One late night, a few weeks after it happened, I found myself calling Jennifer�
�s parents—recalling their number by heart. I felt like I was six years old again. They miraculously have the same telephone number they have had since I met her in 1976. They gave me her number in Michigan where she was practicing obstetrics, and within minutes I was on the phone with her and telling her the story, bawling my eyes out. She calmly listened, took my medical history, and wouldn’t get off the phone with me until she was sure that she had uncovered every stone, examined every possible avenue, and left me with enough hope to believe that in spite of this, I would carry another baby to term—that I would be a mother. She put me in touch with other doctors in New York whom she trusted. I have to say, there is nothing quite as comforting as having a friend that you have known since you were six years old take your medical history.

  Since then Jennifer and I have been in regular contact. Even though we don’t live in the same state, there is a bond and mutual respect that will never be broken. And when we do see each other, we get to watch our daughters play together—her eldest with little cat-eye glasses and long hair, mine, tall and lanky with big brown eyes—there is no better feeling.

  The older we get, the harder it can be to make new friends. Not impossible by any means, but certainly trickier. When you are a kid, it seems like the easiest thing in the world. I sometimes watch my daughter enviously when I see her make friends on her school’s playground in the simplest way. A curly-headed blond girl with the most adorable lisp sidled up to her one morning and tapped her on the shoulder.