Someone rushed up to us and handed Liam a Build-A-Bear. (Great, my son was now being rewarded for his wonderful behavior.) Liam paused to examine his new friend, and just like that, the tantrum was over. Calm was restored to the red carpet. I looked at Liam. He was puffy-eyed and red-cheeked, and his hair was mussed. In my head I made some Nick Nolte mug shot joke. Poor Liam was still trying to catch his breath. I thought maybe tapping into his new love affair with Stella would pull him the rest of the way out of his funk. I said, “Look, Liam, Buggy wants to see your new Build-A-Bear.” He turned toward us and the twenty paparazzi and smashed Stella on the head with the bear. He wasn’t joking. He was mad. Turns out I had tapped into his love-hate affair with Stella. Luckily, Stella just giggled. Good times, good times. And after that cathartic bear bonk, Liam was fully recovered.
If Liam pulled this kind of stunt at a movie premiere, I’d question our judgment in taking a child to an adult event, but this was a charity event at Build-A-Bear. We went because we thought it would be a fun family outing for a great cause. The red carpet tantrum—it had to happen. It’s practically required for admission to Mommywood. I had been initiated.
Dean and I talked about it later. What was the right parenting approach to that moment? Some parents might say you should parent the way you parent regardless of the cameras. We’re hip to that; we do it all the time in front of the reality show cameras. But in this case we decided that minimizing the moment was more important. Protecting Liam from the exposure took precedence over walking him through the tantrum. Every parent has to choose her battles. Ours were not going to be fought in public. I decided that the red carpet tantrum is a close cousin to the airplane tantrum. You just try to get through it with minimal trauma to all concerned. And (if you ignore the bear bribe and the abuse of Stella) he kind of worked through it himself and recovered quite quickly. Though maybe I should consider full-body armor for Stella. If they make it in pink.
So Long, Jägermeister Shots
Most of our life isn’t on the red carpet, of course. Remember? Ninety percent normal. Like most couples who become parents, Dean and I talk about how having kids has changed us. I love the way our days begin. Our morning ritual is that when Liam wakes up, we bring him into our bed. We put him between the two of us, give him his morning bottle. (Yes, he still gets one bottle in the morning. Don’t judge me!) We all watch cartoons together. As soon as Liam finishes his bottle, he leaps off the bed to sit in his little chair and watch TV from there. Sometimes when Liam’s sitting there, happily in TVland, Dean gets a little…frisky. I whisper, “Liam’s here. Liam’s watching,” and generally manage to put him off. But one morning I succumbed and we started to have sex. What can I say? There’s just something about SpongeBob. We were under the covers being really quiet. But at some point I turned over and saw that Liam was standing at the side of the bed watching us.
Oh my God. Had we scarred him forever? They say TV is bad for kids! One minute he was sitting in his chair innocently watching SpongeBob and the next he was staring at us, and we were not rated G. Actually, a talking cleaning product is pretty creepy. It’s hard to say which scene was more disturbing. We stopped (of course!). Dean said, “Oh, he’s fine. Good for him!” But I promptly got on the web and started Googling “primal scene” to find out what kind of damage seeing his parents having sex would do to a then one-year-old. The news wasn’t good. All I could figure out was that some child Freud treated had an image in his head of his parents having sex and became a neurotic known as the Wolf Man. Good-bye, Monkey, hello, Wolf Man. Or maybe Liam thought Dean was hurting me and would rise to protect and defend me. I was sort of hoping Liam would have a mild case of oedipal complex and would shift his affections from Dean to me. But this wasn’t exactly how I had planned for it to come about.
This incident aside, I didn’t think having children was cramping our sex life the way everyone said it would. Dean and I were sitting around a table with some of the producers from our show. We were talking about sex after babies, and one of the other married men at the table said, “What sex life after kids?” Dean and I have sex three to four times a week! Impressive, right? But Dean isn’t so convinced. He always says, “Remember when we met? We had sex three times a day every single day.”
Okay, but come on! Who can maintain that? Dean says, “When we first met, you couldn’t keep your hands off me. If I came on to you at three in the morning, you were into it, but now you’re always tired. You seem more in love with your bed.” Well, duh! Before we had kids we could sleep in till one in the afternoon on Saturday. Then I’d lounge in bed while Dean made breakfast and mimosas. If we didn’t have anywhere to be, and we often didn’t, we’d lie by the pool, snack, listen to music, and talk about all the things we were going to do in life. Now we’re doing those things, our dreams are coming true, and there isn’t much time left over for having new dreams. Or having sex.
From the day we met, Dean had it in his head that having children would destroy our sex life. After I recovered from Liam’s birth, if we missed a day of sex he was like, “Oh my God, it’s happening!” If we have sex three times in a week, he’s like, “It’s happening!” Sometimes he worries that we had kids too soon, that we should have taken more time for ourselves. Well, sure. We were married for exactly two months before I got pregnant.
I think our postkid sex life is fine, but I do think about how having kids has made me less adventurous. Sometimes Dean will say, “Where’s that girl I met in Ottawa?” It’s true that the girl he met used to do Jägermeister shots, do the splits in the middle of the floor, or pee in a potted plant without a moment’s pause. That side of me, my wild streak, is pretty much gone. The most daring thing I do now is train my son to honk my boobies, risking nothing except likely public humiliation. It used to be that I’d be out with friends, laughing and drinking, and when someone said, “Another bottle of wine?” I was like, “Sure, why not?” Being out with friends is fun, but the fun drains away when you start calculating the damage. There are children waiting for me at home. I can’t be reckless. My kids need their mom. And I’m tired. Bed always sounds nice, often nicer than another glass of wine.
A couple of times Dean and I have gone to dinner and I’ve had some wine and gotten a little loud and funny, maybe a little crass. Dean says, “There’s the old TT,” and it makes me feel bad. Who is the old TT (Dean’s nickname for me)? Some loud mouthed drunk girl? Is that who he misses? But I know that part of me is the girl who liked to pretend she’s a stripper or dance around and do the splits and flash Dean my boobs. I liked to be silly and let loose. What happened? Then I remember that I’ve been pregnant for two years. Maybe when I’m back to my old body, I’ll be back to my old self. Or some version of my old self. Instead of gyrating on a bar, I’ll be shimmying along the monkey bars at the playground. I’ll be back, but in a more family-friendly form.
In some ways I’m not that girl Dean met in Ottawa less than three years ago. I handle myself very differently. But I think that’s a good thing. Whenever I’m out without the children, I’m constantly thinking about them and wanting to get back to them. They need me. They depend on me. I have to think of them first. I like my friends. I love having date nights with Dean. But at the end of everything I want to go home and be with my family. I definitely feel that all the time.
When Dean was in his twenties he rode a motorcycle. (I know, such a stud!) It was a Yamaha FJ1200 and he rode it everywhere. It was his primary means of transportation and he was really good at riding it. But when he married his first wife, the motorcycle sat dormant in the garage. She hated it, and he finally sold it. He always talked about how much he missed it, but he never rode one or thought to buy one. The cliché is that men enter marriage with interests that are fun, maybe a little reckless, and the women make them stop. I never wanted to be that woman—the one who reels a man in, keeps him home, dampens his good time. Add to that the fact that I’m a second wife. You always hear, “My first wife wouldn’t let m
e do this or that. My first wife didn’t want to do this with me.” I want to be the cool, supportive one. He liked motorcycles? So did I! He wanted to buy a motorcycle? So did I. He wanted me to ride it? I’d love to but I was very, very busy organizing toothpicks. (Although we would be cute, leathered up to cruise the streets.) When Dean’s first Father’s Day with Stella rolled around, I rented him a motorcycle for a week. So cool. So thoughtful. So supportive of his need for speed. Such a bad idea.
Dean had so much fun riding the motorcycle that week that before I knew what was happening, he’d bought himself a brand-new motorcycle, a 2008 Ducati SportClassic 1000 with Termignoni exhaust pipes, Dynojet Power Commander, CRG levers, and Motovation frame sliders. I don’t know what any of that means, but it proves how into it he is, right? Now as for all that talk about me riding the motorcycle with him, who did we think we were fooling? I’m not a thrill seeker. I’ve never liked roller coasters or skiing or anything particularly fast. I may have been a little more raunchy and late-night pre-kids, but I never even pretended to do scary stuff like skydiving or scuba diving or motorcycle riding. That wasn’t the old me, it wasn’t the married me, and it certainly wasn’t the mom me. I wanted to share Dean’s life, so I went on his motorcycle with him one time. It was scary. I held on for dear life. I survived. Done.
Dean does things that my friends say they’d never let their husbands do. A midnight scuba dive. The motorcycle. And after a couple of months with the motorcycle, just riding wasn’t enough for him; he started taking motorcycle racing lessons at a track. You know, where they go so fast around turns that the bike is practically sideways. I went to watch once. It was too scary. I can’t go back. But Dean is fearless. He’s a daredevil. If I got him a skydiving weekend, he’d be psyched. He’d do it all if he could. Dean’s the best father I could imagine. But he doesn’t worry about dying and leaving nobody to raise his children. He doesn’t consider the time he spends on his hobbies as time taken away from them. Is that the difference between moms and dads?
Dean saw a TV series called Long Way Down, in which Ewan McGregor and his friend took a marathon motorcycle ride. Dean wanted to know if it was okay with me if he undertook a long-distance ride. I said, “Yes and no.” Yes, of course I didn’t want to control him. I didn’t want to stifle his dreams. I’m terrified of motorcycles but I wasn’t his mother. I wasn’t about to stop him from owning one and using it. But no, it was not okay with me on the inside. I felt jealous. I wanted to travel too. With him. Dean said, “Why can’t we do it together? Where would you want to travel?” I told him I wanted to go to Milan for Fashion Week. Dean liked that idea. We could stay in Milan, then spend a week in the countryside riding motorcycles together. Or he could ride and I could relax. It sounded amazing.
Then I said, “And the kids will come.” But Dean wasn’t imagining it like that. He wanted us to have some time alone. He said, “Remember you said having kids would never change us?” He was right. I didn’t and I don’t want to stop living our lives. What I want is to incorporate our children into our lives. The reality is that I just don’t want to be away from the kids. And the reality for Dean is that Liam is a daddyholic. I sit there staring happily at the children while Liam is tugging on Dean, pulling him this way and that. It’s more work for Dean.
If you don’t let it get to you, figuring out the details of a life that keeps changing is the fun part. I’m not worried about the future. Whatever happens, Dean and I will find our balance. We love our children. We love each other. Time, vacations, adventures—they’re all secondary to love.
Unresolved Issues
After Liam was born, it seemed like my mother might have a relationship with him. Mom started making regular dates with him. He went over to her house once a week. She read books to him and played with him. This may seem like normal grandparent behavior, but it was a great step forward for me and my mom. We had a deeply conflicted relationship, but as far as I was concerned, that didn’t mean she had to have a conflicted relationship with Liam. She might not be maternal, but maybe she would end up being a wonderful grandmother. Unconditional love could skip a generation. That would make me really happy. I was excited. Being a mom was a new chapter in my life, and I was ready for it to be a new chapter in my relationship with my own mother.
Liam and Paola went over to my mom’s to play once a week for all of three weeks. Paola said that my mom’s friends gave Liam lots of gifts and that she kept them for him at her house, so he’d have something to play with in the room she had for him. Then one day when they came home Paola said, “They took pictures of her with Liam.” The next week my mother canceled her plans with Liam. She said she was sick. She canceled three weeks in a row, but soon the photos of her with Liam went up on her website.
Then sTORI telling was published, and I never heard from my mother. I knew writing about our relationship in the book was a risk. I hoped we would try to preserve our fragile peace. I hoped that, if she read it, it would help her see certain things from my perspective and lead her to understand our relationship better. I hoped that she would recognize that I didn’t say anything just to be hurtful or scandalous but took what I wrote seriously and only disclosed what I felt was needed to put my story across. I hoped if she were upset we could talk about it. At the very least, I hoped that she would continue to have a relationship with Liam.
I wanted to talk to my mother about the book before it came out. I thought about it. I planned to do it. I even drafted emails in my head. But in the end I didn’t do it. I couldn’t. I was afraid, or angry enough to feel justified in telling the truth, or hopeful that she’d read the book and understand me better than I could explain myself in an email. A little of all of those. I didn’t reach out to her, and I didn’t hear from her. We never spoke directly about the book, or how she felt about what I said about her in it. We didn’t fight. We didn’t express our feelings. We just didn’t speak. So motherhood hasn’t changed that: I’m still left guessing what’s in my mother’s head. And I imagine that the room she had set up for Liam, with those gifts from her friends, sits unused and ghostly.
Right after Stella was born, I ran into a friend of my mother’s at the Century City Westfield Mall. She was very pleasant. We chatted a little, then she said, “You should do the right thing. It’s her grandchild. She should see him.” I said, “My mother is welcome to see Liam.” She gave me a knowing look, like, You know that’s not true. But it was true. I said, “She even has our babysitter Paola’s phone number.” She shook her head as if she could see through my lies. “But is it the same babysitter? Is it the same number?” I said, “Of course it’s the same number.” After that encounter I figured my mother was telling her friends that I wouldn’t let her see Liam. I would always let her see him. I always hope that the situation will change. Hint, hint, Mom.
I didn’t call my mother to let her know when Stella was born. We had exchanged emails when I got pregnant. Then I emailed her when I found out it was a girl, and I never heard back. She didn’t come to Liam’s first birthday party. And I kind of gave up after that. So not calling her when Stella was born wasn’t exactly a dramatic shift in the status quo. Soon enough my mother issued a statement saying she was happy at Stella’s arrival and happy that Liam had a little sister. Her statement told me that she knew I had a baby. It told me that she knew the baby’s name. After all these years, we’re still communicating through the press. Mom posted the photos of Stella that appeared in OK! magazine on her website, and, as of this writing, that’s the closest she’s come to meeting Stella.
How I define myself as a mother is a reaction to how I was parented. I think that’s true for everyone. But as I rear my own children, I find myself attached to and sentimental about the traditions I grew up with. From the moment I gave birth to Liam, I felt a connection with my mother that I’d never known before. I hoped that feeling would grow over time, but I’m still where I was, wishing for something that may never come to light. I think about how I lost Nanny,
then my father, even Mimi, and how after they were gone, I regretted not having spent enough time with them. I don’t want my children to have any regrets about their grandmother. I certainly don’t want them to feel like I kept them apart. I would love for them to have a relationship with her—if it’s substantially different from the one I had. But I haven’t stepped up to make that happen.
Children of the Gays
My relationship with my mother has never been good. That news is long out of the closet. In response I put my heart into my friendships. My friendships are the core of who I am, and a major part of who I am is Queen of the Gays. But some of my best gay friends were single. Living blissfully diaper-free lives, they were less than interested in discussing the virtues of nursing bras or whether certain teethers were made out of toxic plastics. For all the times over the years when Mehran and I have visited friends with newborn babies, I had never seen him hold an infant. It’s not that he was uninterested. He was terrified that he’d drop it (he always called newborns “it”), and he’d spend the whole time trying with all his might not to bolt out of the room. Mehran and my other gays are like family to me, the family I chose, so I wanted them to be a major part of first Liam’s—then Stella’s—life. But I was afraid that once I had a child myself, my fag-hag status would plummet so far down that it would take me and my Christian Louboutins years to climb out of the baby ditch.
Mommywood Page 16
