Dean and I wrangled a couple of lounge chairs and got settled. In a matter of seconds everyone was staring at us. Now, people don’t react the way you think they might in these situations. It’s not like they glance over, notice who we are, watch for a bit, shrug their shoulders and go “huh” in a vaguely anticlimactic way, then go back to their lives. No, they stare at us, stare some more, take a sip of a beverage without breaking eye contact, and then just keep staring. Sometimes when we’re at a restaurant, people will walk up to the table and stand there staring at me like I’m an animal in a zoo. They don’t say a word, they just stand there with mouths open, hands on hips. It’s always funny to me. It reminds me of the moment in Mary Poppins when, after Julie Andrews does some sort of magic or another, she tells the boy, “Close your mouth, Michael, we are not a codfish.” Dean often says, “Yes, it’s her,” just to break the silence. I guess I’m used to it because it’s been happening for as long as I can remember, but in a way I’m also not used to it, because no matter how often it occurs, being stared at makes me uncomfortable. I think that would be true for anybody.
At the pool, nobody walked right up to me to stare. Instead, out of nowhere, the cameras appeared. Suddenly everyone was taking family photos at the pool! They’d snap a few token shots, then send their kids to stand strategically in front of us so they could pretend to take photos of them while really snapping us. Using the kids, always in good taste. (This is another way those poolside photos come about—sold to magazines by any Joe with a cell phone camera and a hungry wallet.)
Patsy always reminds us to be gracious to the people who can’t help staring; she says these people are our biggest supporters. They’re our fans. And I get what it’s like to see someone in real life when you already feel like you know them from the screen. I get starstruck too. Once I saw Jerry Springer and asked him to take a picture with me. And when Erin Moran hugged me with unforeseen exuberance at the Sixty-second Annual Mother Goose Parade, I was secretly thinking, “Wow, Joanie Cunningham just accidentally brushed up against my boob.” Starstruck, yes. But I can’t say I ever stand in front of celebrities and stare at them as if they’re not real. It’s staring! It just feels odd.
Dean took Liam into the pool, and the woman in a flowery caftan next to me caught my eye. “They’re so cute,” she said. I thanked her and smiled. She pointed at Stella. “What’s her name?” When I told her, she said, “Oh, that’s right.” She looked over at the pool and said, “And he’s Liam.” Then she gave me a conspiratorial wink and said, “Don’t worry. I’m not going to tell anyone.” Everyone else was already staring at us. I loved that she was whispering like we were sharing a big secret. Thanks a lot, flowery caftan woman.
I escaped into the kiddie pool with Liam, and Dean took Stella in the big pool for the first time. She loved it. But she was only four months old. The doctor said they’re not supposed to swim until six months. This was worse than Liam in the hot tub. I knew for certain that we were violating the doctor’s orders. What was wrong with the pool? What was it going to do to her? Didn’t they basically spend their first nine months in the equivalent of a very small heated pool? It was all about fertility, wasn’t it? It always was. The hormones in milk would bring on early-onset puberty. The wrong baby bottles would destroy their fertility. Probably at that very moment the chlorine was making its way up her vagina and destroying my chances of ever having grandchildren. But before I could get even more paranoid, I noticed something floating near Liam. At first I thought it was a dead leaf. I went to scoop it away from him, but the moment it was in my hand, a horrible realization dawned on me. I wasn’t holding a dead leaf. I was holding a piece of poo. Now this was a photo op I prayed nobody would exploit.
Liam’s poops in the pool were like a ritual. By now I knew how to manage the poopy swim diaper. But this was a whole new ball of wax. (Except I would have been a lot happier to deal with wax.) I had never experienced this before. The poop was not contained. The water around Liam was starting to get murky. The whole pool was a hot zone. Children were splashing around, blowing bubbles, oblivious. Moms and dads were smiling and laughing. And cameras, everywhere! Everything seemed to be moving in Technicolor slow motion. Any minute those happy faces would darken with realization. There was no other option. I had to get out of there—and fast. I grabbed Liam, signaled Dean (you know, that universal husband-wife sign language for “our kid just shit in the pool and we are out of here”), and just fled. Yes, I made Dean call in the incident once we got back to the room. I don’t know what subsequent action was taken. I can’t make any guarantees. But that, parents, is why you should never, ever go in the kiddie pool.
After our pool adventure, we stayed in retreat. Then, a few days later, Liam woke up in the middle of the night crying. We brought him into bed with us, but he kept sitting up and moaning, “Home, home.” He had bed head. It was cute, but he was not a happy camper. And finally he moaned, “Home, home, home, goddammit.” I wanted to laugh so hard; I don’t know where he’d picked that up. But it got his point across: Liam was done with vacation.
We all slept in after a long night. In the morning Liam was in bed, watching cartoons, when he sat on Stella’s head. That was it. We were done.
In spite of his meltdown, Liam was a pro, comfortable on planes and in new spaces. I wanted Stella to see the world too, so as they grew up we could all have adventures as a family. The whole first year of Liam’s life we traveled constantly, for work and for fun. We went to Europe on business when he was two months old. By four months he had been in London, Scotland, Toronto, and New York.
My father swore off planes at the age of eighteen when he narrowly avoided traveling on a plane that crashed with no survivors. Consequently, my parents never took us anywhere requiring a plane trip. By the time I could travel and had the means to do so, I was terrified of flying. I got homesick when I stayed in hotels. It’s hard to break out of what you grow up thinking is normal. I always tell Dean that it’s important to me that we see the world with our children.
I know that someday Dean and I will take vacations alone, but I really want the children to grow up traveling the world, seeing and learning things. We’ve worked hard. If we can afford to take our children, I want to do that and not keep all the adventures to ourselves. I want them to feel safe and comfortable. I don’t want my fear of flying to be passed down to another generation. But mostly I just want the kids with us. I want to stare at Liam and Stella constantly. They’re so amazing to me. The desert was the beginning of something. Baby steps.
Stepmommywood
The whole time we were in the desert there was drama about my stepson Jack’s tenth birthday party. A week before Jack’s party he decided that he didn’t want me to come.
I went into my relationship with Dean knowing that the man I fell in love with had a child already. It was part of the deal, and it sounded great to me. I loved the man. I loved his child too. The two feelings were inseparable. When I first met and fell in love with Dean in Ottawa, before I even knew what would happen when we went home to L.A. or whether we’d find a way to be together, I started carrying around a picture of Jack. I thought of Jack as my new son. Not in a possessive or competitive way. I wasn’t planning to be his mother. I was just gung ho. I wasn’t worrying about the details. In that lovefest moment I didn’t think through how the relationship would actually work. I’d never had a baby, much less a child. How could I begin to imagine what it would be like to have a stepchild? And then to have babies?
When Dean and I first met, he and his family lived in L.A. For the first year that Dean and I were together, Jack spent every other weekend with us, as well as every other Tuesday and Thursday night. After Dean and Mary Jo settled their divorce, she moved her family to Canada. Then we saw Jack less often. He came for long holidays—for Christmas, for a month during the summer. It was hard for Dean to see him less often, but the three of us had a great time on those visits. Dean and I were in our fun, honeymoon phase and we ma
de each day of Jack’s visits special, going to play baseball, going to Chuck E. Cheese, and so on. I felt like I was reliving my childhood. Actually, this was a whole new world to me. I was living the childhood I wished I’d had.
Then, soon after Stella was born, Mary Jo decided to move back to Los Angeles. She told Dean that she wanted Jack to be near him. This meant Jack’s time was split much more evenly between his two parents. Now Jack was moving back and forth from her house to our house every week. When he was visiting I had three children to take care of. I want to be careful here. I love Jack, and I don’t want to write anything that will ever hurt him. What I want to talk about is how in a family with children from different marriages, there are times when everyone has to shift gears.
When you have a baby, you start at the beginning. You watch a child grow. You have a history together. When you suddenly have a ten-year-old living with you, you’re starting midstream. He’s already half-formed. He has a history without you. There are traditions and rules and behaviors in place and you’re just jumping into the middle of his life. It’s pretty mind-blowing. No matter how much Dean and I talked about Jack, it was impossible for me to feel prepared. And I’m sure Jack felt the same way. We had to stumble and feel our way toward a relationship that worked for us, one that can’t have been easy for him in the first place. It’s a constant, ongoing effort to find the balance between being a mother figure to him and not over-stepping the bounds of a stepmom. Kids need boundaries to function, but how am I supposed to know what those boundaries are? I’m raising infants!
Here’s another challenge: should Jack live by the rules of our household, or should we follow the rules of his mother’s household? Family dinners have always been important to me. In my mind, at dinnertime everyone is given the same nutritious meal—say turkey meatloaf, broccoli, and mashed potatoes—and everyone eats what they want of that meal. But Jack’s mother might believe in giving him choices. Or she might believe in the Clean Plate Club. Or she might want him to be a vegetarian. So he sits down to a table with one set of ideas, whatever they are, and is expected to abide by another. It’s tough to know how and what lines to draw. I wanted to be a good parent-figure while not intruding on his birth parents.
In theory, I should look to Dean, as Jack’s dad, to draw those lines. But Dean still feels guilty about the divorce, while I can be emotionally removed. I think sometimes Dean’s too lenient with Jack. Meanwhile, Dean says I’m quick to reinforce rules with Jack but that Liam needs boundaries as well. When it comes down to it, I actually think the hardest part isn’t being a stepmom. It’s caring for kids who are so far apart in age.
Jack didn’t want me to come to his birthday party—he’s a kid, he’s still dealing with mixed feelings about me—but we thought it was best for me to be a constant, positive presence in his life. At first we came up with an alternate plan. Instead of my coming to his party, we would have a family dinner: me, Dean, Mary Jo, Jack, and two of his friends. The only time I’d ever met Mary Jo was when I went to her house because she wanted to discuss how we cared for Jack. I became so paranoid that she had it in for me that I had a kitchen knife hidden in my purse in case I needed it for self-defense. I was honest, maybe too honest, about that encounter when I wrote about it in sTORI telling. Mary Jo never said anything about my book. Jack never said anything either, until one day he said, “Everyone says Tori wrote this book trashing her whole family.” Dean said, “Did you read the book?” Jack said, “No.” Dean said, “Well then, you can’t judge.”
It’s a no-brainer that I would never say anything negative about Mary Jo in front of Jack. But when Jack said to me, “My mom says you’re the ugliest living thing in this world,” I had a feeling Mary Jo and I didn’t read the same rule book. (Er, I’m pretty sure her rule book says something about it being very uncool to fall in love with other women’s husbands.) I just said, “Yeah, that’s not very nice to say about people. But I think your mom’s very pretty and you can tell her I said that.”
This family dinner would be the first time I’d seen Mary Jo since the knife-in-my-purse encounter. It would be the first time I’d ever seen Mary Jo with Dean and Jack. It would be the first time we all tried to be a big, integrated, crazy modern-day family.
We went to Miceli’s, an Italian restaurant in the Valley famous for its singing waiters. When we walked in, I gave Mary Jo the warmest “Hi” you’ve ever heard, being sure to make eye contact. I wanted to set a friendly tone. We all walked to the booth. Mary Jo sat down, and then I slid in right next to her. I didn’t want to wait a beat. I figured, if I just pretended we were all friends, out to have a nice, celebratory dinner, it would kind of be true. Mary Jo was fine. She was perfectly nice. If the way we acted in each other’s company that evening was the way we acted in our separate homes, I was sure Jack would have a seamless transition into a split, but warm and loving, family.
And yet. Even though to all appearances it was a normal dinner, I somehow felt inferior to Mary Jo. I have no idea why. She was so proper and mature. When I giggled I felt like a silly schoolgirl. When we got our food, I looked down to make sure I had my utensils in the right order. I felt twelve. It was nothing she did or said to me, and granted, it was an uncomfortable situation all around. For some reason I just felt like I wasn’t smart enough or cultured enough. Later, when I told Dean, he just said, “Welcome to my world.”
But we all had to admit that the dinner went smoothly. Our family was nothing Jack had to be embarrassed about. There would be no drama if I came to his birthday party. So we decided that I would go after all. It was a laser tag party at a space in the Valley. I was nervous about what my role was and how Mary Jo would treat me, but as it turned out, it wasn’t Dean’s ex-wife whose behavior would surprise me, it was my ex-costar.
The first thing that happened at the party was that everyone gathered in a briefing room to learn how to play laser tag. There were about twenty people there. I already knew that at Jack’s new school he had befriended another boy whose name was Jack too. One day when Dean went to pick Jack up from school, he met the other Jack and realized that it was Jack Perry, son of my former costar Luke Perry.
We knew Jack Perry was coming to the birthday party, and when I entered the briefing room I saw Dean sitting with Liam in his lap, a space next to him, and then Luke. It had been a while, and I was happy to see Luke. In fact, I figured he probably came to the party in part because he thought I was going to be there. I squeezed into the place between Luke and Dean, said, “Hi!” and leaned in to give him a kiss and a hug. He sat there. Stone.
I pulled back. Luke stared straight ahead at the woman giving the laser tag lecture. I sat there in the seat right next to him, half listening to the instructions (even though I didn’t plan to play) and half completely puzzled. I tried to work out why he’d given me the cold shoulder. Maybe he was busy trying to focus on how to play laser tag. No, now he was checking his BlackBerry. Maybe he thought we’d catch up later? But when the woman finished, he slipped out of the briefing room without saying a word to me. I was completely mystified. And uncomfortable. As if this birthday party hadn’t been awkward enough to begin with.
My friend Scout was sitting next to Mary Jo for the instructional section. When it was over, she turned to him and said, “Are you playing?”
Scout said, “No.”
She said, “Can you hold my purse?” and handed it to Scout. Then Mary Jo went off with the kids to play laser tag, and Scout came out of the room holding Mary Jo’s purse, bewildered.
I took Liam into the arcade room to see all the flashing lights. Luke continued to ignore me. When we crossed paths, he walked right by me as if I were a wall. At one point he came up to me and Dean and started to talk to Dean. I figured I’d been imagining things, that he was there to talk to me and Dean together, but when I turned to him, he walked away. At one point I came out of the arcade room holding Liam and saw Luke looking my way. I made sure I caught his eye. Ha! He’d have to say someth
ing to me now. And indeed he did. He said, “Where’s the bathroom?” in an angry tone. Maybe the laser tag pizza didn’t agree with him. I said, “I don’t know,” then suddenly felt guilty about not knowing the layout of the laser tag facility. He rolled his eyes and walked away.
My friend Scout was with me at the party for moral support. I told him what was going on and he said, “It’s gotta be the book.” I racked my brain. What had I written in my book that made Luke hate me? I couldn’t think of anything. Finally Scout said, “The Christmas party. You wrote about him punching out Nick at your parents’ Christmas party.” It was true. I had written about Luke fighting with my then boyfriend. But in that story Luke was my friend and hero. He was protecting me from a bad boyfriend. I admired him and was grateful to him for that act.
If the problem was that Luke wasn’t wild about my book, well, he wouldn’t be the only former costar to have a less-than-thrilled reaction. Ian Ziering did some interviews saying he was upset about my book, that I blew things out of proportion. He said I shouldn’t have spoken badly about the experience. Of course the news magazines ran his comments as if we were in a huge blowout: “Ian vs. Tori.” But the next time I saw Ian was at the Silver Spoon Dog and Baby Buffet, which is basically a celebrity free-gifts party, in Century City. I was extremely pregnant with Stella, and Dean and I were being interviewed by Access Hollywood. Out of nowhere, Ian appeared and jumped into our shot, all smiles, patting my pregnant belly and saying, “Hi, Mama.”
As for Shannen Doherty, she was on the cover of Us Weekly with the headline Shannen “Defends Herself Against Tori Spelling’s ‘Lies.’” I got emails from friends and fans saying, “Oh my God, I can’t believe she said that,” but I wasn’t concerned. I know I told the truth as I saw it, and she probably felt that she was doing the same. Regardless, I’m pretty sure that her accusations caused a spike in the sales of my book.
Mommywood Page 12
