I whispered to the nurse, “Oh no, my baby is only two months old. There’s not a shot in hell I’m pregnant. I’ve been a migraine sufferer my whole life. It’s fine to treat me.”
But the nurse wanted the pee, and I wanted the headache to subside, so I complied.
I FELT LIKE a character in Days of Our Lives, suffering from my fiftieth brain tumor, the one that would surely be my demise. I lay in the darkness of a hospital room, an ice pack on my forehead, murmuring, “Where’s the doctor? I just need the pain meds . . .”
An older man with white hair came into the room. My chart was hanging on a clipboard at the foot of the bed. He looked down at the clipboard.
“Mrs. McDermott? I just want to let you know . . .” he said.
“Yes?”
“That you’re . . . you’re pregnant.”
IT WAS LIKE an out-of-body experience. I remember thinking, Wow, this is what it’s like to be really shocked by something. Like a surprise party. Or like finding out you’ve been left 0.16 percent of your gazillionaire father’s estate. (Love him. Still bitter.)
I looked at Dean. He looked back at me. Oh. My. God.
“That’s not possible,” I told the doctor.
“The test shows that you’re pregnant,” he said.
“You don’t understand. I just gave birth!”
The doctor looked at me with mild impatience. I could see that he thought I was crazy, but I still needed him to understand that he was wrong.
“We could do a blood test,” he said. “The blood test will tell us definitively.”
“Yes, please,” I said. “You’ll see.” The blood test might not have a little window with words saying “not pregnant,” but I knew it would prove me right. I was sure it would be conclusive.
They took blood. The thirty minutes we waited for the results passed like an eternity. My head pounded like I was the cartoon Tom, and Jerry had just crashed my head between two enormous cymbals.
Finally the doctor returned. “Well, you’re definitely pregnant.”
“I’m so confused,” I said. “Tell me how this happened.”
He just looked at me.
“We only had sex once!” I said. Oh. We only had sex once. Or twice.
THEN, AS IF I wasn’t already reeling with this news, the doctor said, “Because you’re pregnant, we cannot treat you.”
No!
I thought back to when I’d been pregnant with Hattie. I’d had a migraine at the very beginning then too, before Dean even knew I was pregnant. The ER near our house had treated me that time. But this conservative doctor wouldn’t do it.
I texted my obstetrician, Dr. J. He wasn’t going to be happy with me. The pack of nursing-mom-appropriate birth-control pills he’d prescribed for me were lost somewhere in our house. Months later, Dean would discover them nestled in a toolbox in the garage. We’re still confused as to how they ended up there. I don’t use tools.
Dr. J was flummoxed at this news, but he got on the phone with the doctor and told him it was okay to administer pain medication. Afterward, we texted and Dr. J said, “Take your time. Digest this news. I want you to know that I totally support you whatever you want to do.”
I was horrified. Terminating the pregnancy was not an option for me. Did I want to be pregnant right now? No. Did I want another baby? Not so soon! But there was no way I was going to mess with fate.
The nurses left to get my medicine, and for the first time Dean and I were alone with our embryo and my pounding head. Dean said, “This is another blessing.”
They finally gave me the pain medication. I lay there for hours, waiting for the pain to fade, processing what was happening. I felt like I’d just come back from outer space and was being sent back up in a rocket the next day. Oh my God, I was embarking on this journey again. I was scared. Hattie was only two months old, and I was already one month pregnant. I was still nursing the baby. People were still congratulating me on the birth. I hadn’t even begun to think about losing the weight. But I was bouncing back pretty well. I felt great (other than this migraine). This baby was meant to be.
AFTER THE DISASTROUS up-fronts, back in Malibu, we weren’t exactly settling into life on the farm. I had pushed so hard to move to the house, and one weekend later I knew we’d made a huge mistake. Now we were expecting a fourth child. We already had Patsy and Hattie in one bedroom, and Liam and Stella, plus Jack every other weekend, in the other. Where would the new baby go? In the trailer? Under a tarp outside with all the still-packed boxes? But we had just moved. We couldn’t admit defeat . . . yet.
Aside from the space, we weren’t exactly fitting into the community. I couldn’t figure out the Malibu women. They wore Uggs and sweatpants with Cartier bracelets and diamond-faced Rolexes. They wore six-carat engagement rings alongside woven friendship bracelets with a made-with-their-kids look. They were super casual, their professionally sun-kissed hair thrown up in messy buns as if they didn’t care. Their cozy, washed-a-million-times, perfectly worn sweatshirts were from Free City and cost two hundred dollars. And they were universally tall, blond, and tan, with great bodies and so much plastic surgery that I couldn’t tell if one was thirty, forty, or fifty. They were basically the beachy version of Beverly Hills trophy wives. Here in the ’Bu, instead of shopping, getting Botox, and drinking cabernet in the afternoon, they walked on the beach every day, did yoga, and drank green drinks. Beverly Hills had its high-fashion moms who wore blazers and jeans, diamond necklaces, and heels or designer flats. A Malibu woman wouldn’t be caught dead wearing a blazer. But they were all the same to me. It was winter and my summer fling with Malibu was so over.
And it’s not like Malibu was knocking on my door, wanting to be best friends. Our first week in the house, we had filmed Tori & Dean for one day, shooting the final scenes of the season, and, although we didn’t know it at the time, of the show. When the show premiered, Oxygen came to our house and had live cuts of the family watching the premiere in Malibu. That night there was a truck parked in front of our house, with a satellite with a live feed.
Late that night I was in the kitchen, wearing a tank top and underwear, getting myself a glass of sparkling water with lemon. A man I’d never seen before opened our wooden gate and walked toward the kitchen’s sliding door. I’m a girl who, when house-hunting at age twenty-six, assumed the place I lived would have a guard’s room because I thought that everyone had guards on staff, in need of their own rooms. I screamed, “Dean! Dean! There’s a man coming to the door. I don’t know what he wants!”
Dean came out from the bedroom and went into the front yard to talk to the stranger. I listened from inside.
The stranger launched into an angry tirade. He said, “I’m your neighbor from across the street. So I don’t know who you people are, but my kid says you do some sort of TV show. You’re filming here. I don’t know what you’re doing. We’re not like that here in Point Dume. We don’t have people like that here.”
I flashed back to the neighbor we’d had way back when we’d lived on Beaver Avenue. He’d seen our cameras and said, “You might be making porns in there.”
Our Malibu neighbor went on with his disjointed tirade. “Everyone knows everyone. The lights from your truck were on. My kid couldn’t sleep. I’m having a Christmas party next week. Everyone comes to it. I’m sure you’d like to bring your wife to it. It’s the party of the year. But we’re not like that here in Point Dume.”
His tone was bullying. He was right in Dean’s face, pointing his finger right at him.
Dean said, “Get your finger out of my face.”
Then our new neighbor got pissed off. “Oh, you’re going to be like that? I see how you people are. You know what? On second thought, we don’t want your types at our party. You’re not invited to our party.”
The neighbor stalked away. Dean came back in. “Welcome to the neighborhood,” he said.
When my friend Madison heard that we weren’t adjusting to Malibu, he decided to help us
out. Madison is one of the real estate agents on the Bravo show Million Dollar Listing. He is young and handsome and perpetually tan. We’d become friends through my production company, and he was the one who’d helped us get our summer rental next to Kelly Wearstler. He hadn’t found our current house for us—when he saw it he said he would have talked us out of it. We text all the time, and when I expressed doubts about Malibu, he said, “Don’t worry. I’m going to show you around. Malibu is a pocket of heaven.” According to Madison, we just had to get to know the right people. There were great families, but we had to know how to navigate. I became Madison’s pet project. He would help me come to love Malibu.
Madison really wanted me to meet all his favorite Malibu girls, and he said the best way was to take a certain dance class in the upscale Malibu Lumber Yard, a shopping complex adjacent to Malibu Country Mart that was a former lumberyard. I don’t go in much for group activities, much less any form of exercise, but I finally dragged my postpartum, pregnant self to this dance class.
It was a super-fast-paced class. Like Zumba, I think, although I’m not fully up to speed on workout-class trends. I was miserably out of shape. My pregnancy was still a secret (this again!), so I told the teacher that I was trying to lose the baby weight, but I was actually worried that all this jumping around was going to shake the embryo loose (which would turn out to be a much more real concern than I knew).
The teacher was good at what she did. And Madison had clearly suggested that she play friend-matchmaker for me. After class, when we were chatting, she said, “You know Alecia, right?” No, I didn’t know Alecia.
“You know . . . Pink? I should introduce you to her. You guys would really hit it off.” I didn’t know Pink. I don’t have many celebrity friends. I’m friends with Jenny from the west side. But the teacher clearly thought that my best options for new friends were other celebrities. She threw some other celebrity-mom names at me. She said, “Brooke. Minnie. They all come here. I get them back into shape.”
Of all the celebrity moms she knew, she was most enthusiastic about Pink for me. I tried to imagine the two of us bombing down Cross Creek Road together, pushing strollers. Hmm. Our husbands did both have tattoos. I couldn’t really see it, but I do love her song “Just Like a Pill.”
Madison so wanted me to love Malibu, but instead I missed Encino, of all places. I had thought the streets in Encino were ugly. I’d bitched about our Valley life. Now I longed for the frozen yogurt on every corner, the karate, dance, and princess classes for the kids. Where were Malibu’s family-friendly chain restaurants—the Buca di Beppo, the Chili’s? Where were the cheap Chinese nail salons? Stella and I liked to get Minx Nails, which are like fun stickers that decorate fingernails. At CVS the Sally Hansen knockoff ones are maybe ten dollars for a set. But at the one and only nail salon that finally opened in Malibu, some Zen décor and foot bowls later, the cute, silly mother-daughter Minx Nails excursion cost a total of three hundred dollars!
Malibu is a very small town. It has its own retro-chic vibe: farmers from the seventies living next to mansions with film producers and their trophy wives. The Malibu Country Mart and Lumber Yard had some of my favorite stores—Intermix, Alice + Olivia, Planet Blue. I thought I’d be happy walking around those boutiques. But who was I kidding? I couldn’t afford to shop there all the time anyway. And because there was only one area to shop, it was riddled with paparazzi. There was nothing for our family to do. We were pretty much isolated at home.
We soon found ourselves driving to the Valley, to the very area we’d left. We’d spend a Saturday at the Topanga mall, shopping, eating in the food court, and scrambling around the indoor playground. I couldn’t help thinking, I used to live ten minutes from this mall.
What possessed me? What made me think it was okay to move from a six-thousand-square-foot house to a two-thousand-square-foot house . . . with a baby on the way? I know I was swayed by the acreage. The chickens would have a huge coop. Hank the pig would love it. But why didn’t I spend more time thinking about where my children would sleep? When it came down to it, we hadn’t bought a house where we could live. It was a what-if house. An if-we-had-another-million-dollars house. I’d spent all my time fantasizing about tending to my chickens in a painted coop with a chandelier hanging inside. I hadn’t taken the time to think about whether we’d be happy there in the interim—before we could make all the changes I envisioned. To be honest, all I really asked the Realtor was whether the house was haunted. I didn’t want to live in a place where someone had died.
I thought back to the single time we’d met the former owners of the house. The Realtor had told us they were downsizing. They’d raised two kids here, picking blackberries in the backyard, and now for financial reasons needed something smaller. We were already in escrow, but we’d come to see the house one more time. The owners were already starting to move their stuff.
“Where are you moving?” I asked the woman.
“We’re moving to a house off Mulholland. It’s an extensive property, and we’re having trouble with the contractor who’s building it.”
This whole notion of downsizing was a lie. They weren’t downsizing. They were upgrading. The house was a money pit.
I wanted a farmhouse—but one that was completely updated with gleaming hardwood floors and modern appliances. I wanted a flower bed and a garden. I was having such a nice summer at our rental house in Malibu that I wanted that to be my life. But even that house was over three thousand square feet! My friends, including Jenny, claim I didn’t show them the house until I’d already bought it.
Sometimes I think I got lost in the madness of the reality show. The producer in me thought, What a great story line! All of us crowded in a small house, roughing it until we have the money to expand. We could do this, and we could film it too! Producers want conflict. But this was my real life. Why had I brought this on myself? I didn’t want to live a life of self-inflicted contrived conflict!
Or did this go beyond the reality madness? Why couldn’t I settle down in a home? What was I searching for?
At the same time as I asked myself these questions, I thought about the space, and baby number four, and what lay ahead. No matter how fickle I was about my real estate decisions, this time we really had to move. We had to move.
This time it wasn’t an exciting prospect. It was an overwhelming problem. We’d bought the house in Malibu before we sold our house in Encino. We’d ended up selling Encino at a loss. A big loss. We couldn’t afford to buy another house.
Song and Dance
I was panicked about wanting to move, having the new baby, and being able to afford all of it. Whenever I panic about money, I spring into action. We found out I was pregnant the first week of January. I quickly landed two jobs that were both supposed to start right away, at the same time in different cities, but after some rescheduling it was all set: The first week of February I would film a Christmas TV movie for ABC Family. It was called The Mistle-Tones, and it was shooting in Utah. The minute I returned, I’d start filming a new reality competition series, Craft Wars, for TLC. When it rains it pours. I didn’t mention to either job that I was pregnant. It was still too early—we had heard the heartbeat and my doctor said that everything looked good, but what if something went wrong? I was worried about taking on so much work with two kids, a newborn, and a secret pregnancy. But if I wanted to find us a way out of Malibu in time for baby number four, I’d have to work my ass off throughout the pregnancy.
When I was first offered the role of Marci in The Mistle-Tones, my reaction was: A Christmas movie of the week—cool! In the nineties, movies of the week had been my bread and butter (Mother, May I Sleep with Danger? anyone?). As I skimmed the script I grew confused. Wait a minute, the lead character was Holly! Who was Marci? I flipped back through the script. Oh. Marci was the second lead. I was bummed. I used to be the star of the screen for two hours. Now I was playing second fiddle. This was where my life had gone. And my character was very on
e-note—a bitchy, territorial leader of a singing group. I had a call with the writers. Could Marci be campy and snarky but also get in her own way? So she wasn’t just a straight-on bitch? The writers were on board with making her a bit more dimensional, so I felt better about it.
In the beginning, the producers asked if I could sing. Through my agent, I told them that I’d done a little singing in movies, but not much. They said not to worry—I had maybe one line in a Christmas song, like “walking in a winter wonderland” or something like that. That was my only solo.
Next thing I knew, I was told to meet with a voice coach in L.A., Eric Vetro. This voice coach was the guy. Voice coach to the stars. Yikes. As soon as Eric Vetro heard me sing one note, he’d surely send me packing. But as I sat waiting outside his music room, I heard his prior appointment working with him in the other room. It was some actress singing horribly off-key. I heard him say, “Okay, that’s great.” That made me feel better. I heard him say good-bye, and then the actress walked out of the room. It was Katie Holmes.
I’d met Katie Holmes years ago, in her Dawson’s Creek days, when I was still on 90210. A friend of mine at the time did a movie with her, Teaching Mrs. Tingle. One night he said, “Can I bring Katie from my movie out to drinks?” We went to Trader Vic’s, which was my go-to hang at the time. We ordered the Scorpion Bowl, their signature drink, which was served in a big white Hawaiian bowl with a bunch of straws for sharing. It was kind of gross when you thought about it. We were all swapping spit. But at least the alcohol killed the germs. Dawson’s Creek Katie was exactly what you’d expect. She was wearing jeans and a tank top. Her hair was down. She was shy but engaging, and altogether pretty adorable. It was a long time ago, but I remembered the night pretty well. She must have remembered too.
“Hi, how are you?” she said.
I said, “Oh, hi!” I didn’t know whether we should hug or shake hands. But the signal from her was immediately clear: Don’t even come close. I instantly got nervous. We clearly weren’t going to catch up on the last ten years. And we certainly weren’t going to talk about her husband, Tom Cruise. (I had a Top Gun poster of him in my room growing up, just like she did.) When all else fails, I always pull out the mommy card. It breaks the tension. “Your daughter is adorable. I have kids around the same age.”
Spelling It Like It Is Page 7
