Pretty Mess

by Erika Jayne

  I moved into his apartment in a brick building on the Upper West Side, at 100th Street and Amsterdam. The apartment was a recently renovated one-bedroom, with a loft over the kitchen—just like the one I was moving out of.

  While we were living there, I missed a few days of my birth control pills. I thought I could double up on the next ones and it would work out fine. Well, it didn’t. My period was late. It dawned on me in an acting class while we were doing some exercises. Somebody was performing a boring scene, and for the first time I wondered if I was pregnant. I didn’t feel pregnant, but then again, I had no idea what being pregnant felt like.

  That afternoon, I went home and took a home pregnancy test. It was positive. A few days later, I went to my OB/GYN, Dr. Cox (a great gynecologist with the world’s most ironic name). She confirmed that I was pregnant.

  I was just kind of fascinated by the news, because it didn’t even seem like a possibility to me. It was never part of my plan. I’d never really even held a baby before. Being a mother wasn’t something that I was thinking about, even in the abstract. But from the moment I found out, I knew that I was going to keep my baby. In a weird way, I knew that he needed to be born.

  When Tommy got home, I told him the news. He was as surprised as I was, but he was very sweet about it. We decided then and there that we were going to get married, start a family, and do right by our child.

  My mother wasn’t nearly as thrilled. Renee had gotten pregnant with me at a young age, and that derailed a lot of her dreams. I think she was upset when she saw the same thing happening to me.

  Renee said, “This isn’t going to work out well. Your life will be changed forever, and I don’t think this is the responsible thing for you to do. You should have thought better.” She said that once I had a baby, people would look at me like “a used car.” My grandmother wasn’t thrilled, either. No one was trying to talk me out of having my son, but they were all giving me their bitter truth—that I had a very difficult road ahead of me.

  Tommy and I got married at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Manhattan in December 1991. The wedding was big, obnoxious, and pink. My bridesmaids—who included Trish and Tracy from the girl group The Flirts, with whom I had recorded—wore puffy pink gowns. They were the same color as a Sweet’N Low packet. They looked like cupcakes as they walked down the aisle.

  In hindsight, those dresses were hideous, but mine was gorgeous. At the time, I was doing some modeling for a company called Timeless Bridal. When the bridal boutique buyers came looking for gowns, I would model the products. From them, I bought an incredibly elegant ivory silk gown sprinkled with tiny pink rosettes. It was really classic and had great movement. My grandfather Hollis walked me down the aisle. I even had a beautiful veil with ivory satin trim and a row of matching rosettes across the top.

  The location was perfect. I’ll never forget the sight as I walked from the altar to the doors of St. Patrick’s Cathedral on Fifth Avenue, along with having our wedding photos taken in front of the giant Christmas tree in Rockefeller Plaza.

  We moved apartments again, this time down to Battery Park City, at the tip of Manhattan. Tommy’s mother lived down there, and with the baby on the way it made sense. It was a brand-new development, so that was where everyone was moving to start families in Manhattan. It was a doorman building at 280 Rector Place, and we were the first people to live in our apartment. It was a one-bedroom—without a loft, finally. When the baby came, he slept in a crib in our bedroom.

  When I got pregnant, I weighed 118 pounds (about twenty pounds less than I weigh now). For the first time in my life, I started to cook all my own food. I was going to the grocery store every day and making my own pasta, preparing my own salads, and cooking my own meat. I was very disciplined and keeping my diet very healthy for the baby and me. Then, on Friday at noon I would allow myself my one small indulgence: a can of Coke and a Snickers bar.

  When I delivered my son, I was only 128 pounds. When I was pregnant on the subway, no one ever got up and gave me their seat because I didn’t look pregnant at all. People were worried that I didn’t gain enough weight, but then I delivered a perfectly healthy six-pound, eight-ounce baby. I would like to take this opportunity to thank my son for not giving me stretch marks on my tummy.

  My pregnancy was easy, but I did have terrible morning sickness. Once it got so bad that I had to get off the subway and run to one of the garbage cans on the platform at the 72nd Street station. I barfed out what seemed like just about everything I had ever possibly eaten. I must have been hugging that disgusting can for about fifteen minutes. Several women walked by and asked me if I was okay. Only someone who had gone through pregnancy would know exactly what that struggle was like.

  Seven months after my wedding, I was about two weeks from my due date. I woke up with a terrible backache. I called my mother and she said, “Erika, you have to call the doctor. That is early labor.”

  I called Dr. Cox and she said, “It sounds like it’s happening. You better come into the hospital so we can check it out.” I had what is called “back labor.” The ache was from my son’s head pressing on the small of my back. I told Tommy to go get a cab to take us from our apartment downtown all the way up to New York Hospital on the Upper East Side.

  “But in Lamaze class they said that you should walk around,” he told me.

  “Just get me a cab!” I said, freaking out a little.

  “No. We’re broke and you need to walk around,” he insisted. We walked to the 6 train station at Wall Street and took that for what seemed like an eternity to the hospital. No one got up and gave me their seat even then. I was in labor on fucking public transportation.

  I gave birth to my son at 6 p.m., and it was an easy delivery. He was not crying when he came out. He was just kind of looking around, with his big blue eyes, which were sensitive to the light. He was turning his head back and forth as if he was thinking, Where the fuck am I? Finally, they smacked him on his pink behind and he started crying.

  When the doctor put him into my arms, it wasn’t like I was meeting a stranger for the first time. I felt like we were two souls being reunited after a long break. Like meeting an old friend. Oh, hey. There you are, I thought as I held him in the hospital. Welcome back. We named him Thomas, after his father.

  After he was born, the first phone call I made was to my grandmother to tell her the news. Renee was just across town, but I didn’t call her. Twenty-five years later, I think that still bothers my mother. Maybe she shouldn’t have called me a used car? Maybe then she would have gotten the first call.

  As I mentioned, I had never really held a baby before. But instinctually, I knew how to do everything. My mother and grandmother were shocked at how quickly I learned to hold him, swaddle him, feed him, and figure out just what he needed. I loved having the little one. He was so portable. I could just wrap him up and take him out. It helped that my son was a very easy baby. He was never colicky, never fussed much, and was sleeping through the night pretty early.

  Everything else about life as a young mother wasn’t very exciting, though. I had to put my career goals to the side while I was taking care of the baby. Most of my friends from before were still young and more interested in going out than in taking my baby to the park.

  When we moved to Battery Park City, I was pretty isolated. There was nothing down there except one Gristedes grocery store and it wasn’t even that good. Some of the sidewalks weren’t paved yet, because they were still constructing buildings down there. There was just dirt with a rope next to the open space. I would be walking around with the baby completely by myself. We could go down to the water, but in the fall and winter that wind would tear through us, making me miserable, and upsetting the baby.

  Like a sugar cube on your tongue, the girl group I was working with, The Flirts, had dissolved. My bridesmaid and friend Tracy was finally using her economics degree to work with her father trading semiprecious metals down in the Financial District, which was not far from ou
r house. I would walk over to her office—the same office that John D. Rockefeller had—and we would go out to lunch. But if the market got hot, I’d have to sit there and wait for her to finish trading, which could take forever.

  Other than that, I didn’t have any friends in the neighborhood. Sometimes when we would go to the park, other women would ask me, “Oh, who do you work for?” Assuming that because I was so young, I had to be this kid’s nanny. I would point to Thomas and answer, “This guy.”

  I would take him out almost every day. Often we’d walk over to the World Trade Center, because there was an indoor mall and we could walk around without being stuck in the weather. I can still visualize every step, feature, storefront, and doorman on the walk from our apartment to the World Trade Center.

  One February day it was snowing. I decided not to go on our usual walk but to stay inside instead. I was watching TV and holding the baby when I heard a huge explosion. I felt the building sway a little, as if the foundation buckled. That was the first bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993. It killed six people and injured thousands. The snow was the only reason we weren’t in the building that day. The blast was so loud that even at home in the apartment, I could feel its percussion.

  There were many moments of joy in that apartment. One day when my son was three months old, we were sitting on the edge of my bed and looking at the mirrors that covered the sliding closet doors. I was holding him up and talking to him in baby talk. He looked at our reflection and giggled. It was his first laugh. I know it’s awfully clichéd, but no sound before or since has ever made me so happy.

  In general, however, things weren’t great. My life had gone from being totally focused on my dreams and my future to taking care of a newborn and all of the responsibility that entails. You are never fully prepared to be a parent, no matter how much you think it out. But only an optimistic child at twenty years old would think she could pull this off while simultaneously being a performer. What a dummy! In the back of my brain, I felt like I was letting everyone down and not living up to anyone’s expectations.

  Things were strained with Tommy and me. There was just a lot of pressure. He worked hard to support his new wife and baby, and I’m sure he was unhappy. I don’t think this was something he saw himself doing. We were all trying to do the right thing, but sometimes the “right thing” is possibly the wrong thing.

  Marriage is tough enough when you’re responsible, have a steady income, and you’re a well-developed human being. I was twenty years old and temperamental. Growing up, I had learned some bad habits about how to treat people. Sometimes I wasn’t very nice to Tommy. No one was ever violent, but there were a lot of arguments. I was overwhelmed and unhappy, so I would pick fights with him for no reason other than to get attention. I knew no other way to communicate my frustrations.

  I feel like my marriage came apart because of me, not because of anyone else. I can take responsibility. I knew I was a good mom. I thought I was adult enough to be a wife and a mother, but really I wasn’t. Tommy bore the brunt of that. It was this constant pressure, and it was hard for both of us to take.

  We broke up when my son was a little more than eighteen months old. I came out of a divorced home. I did what I knew, which was to take my son and leave.

  We moved out of our apartment and back into Renee’s up in Tudor City. Looking back on it and talking with my mother, I think I probably should have been treated for postpartum depression after my son was born. I just felt incredibly overwhelmed with a sense of anxiety. I had stopped eating and by the time I moved in with my mother, I was very thin.

  Once I got to Renee’s, I became even thinner. I had thought enough to get out of my marriage, but I had no plan after that. The yawning expanse of my uncertain future seemed like it was going to swallow me whole. I had no job, no career, a child to take care of, a ruined marriage, and I was twenty-one years old. I felt doomed.

  Renee, of course, loved me and her grandson. But she was not happy with how things turned out. “You know, Erika, you should have thought this out,” she would say to me. “You let me down. Everything I told you, all of my stories about being a young mother, meant nothing.” Thank God she was kind enough to let me move in. We ruined her life for a while.

  I was talking to my mother on the phone recently. She reminded me of the sweatpants I wore every day for a month when I first moved into her apartment after my divorce. They were dark gray, and my mother said I would take them off only to wash them and put them back on. I showered and everything, but I couldn’t bring myself to wear anything other than that one pair of worn-out gray sweatpants.

  When we talked about it recently, Renee said, “I was really worried about you, because I would look at you and see that you were really thin. You were caring for this child, but I could see that you were totally panicked.”

  Now that I was out of my marriage, I also made another big change. I went to my mother’s hairstylist friend and had him cut off all of my long blond hair. I had it cut short, just like Mia Farrow in Rosemary’s Baby. I think women cut their hair in times of change. When it was done, I felt brand-new.

  One of my friends said, “Why did you cut off all your power?”

  I thought, Who am I, Samson? Did I totally just cut off all my power? But he was right, I kind of did. I was definitely looked at differently than when I had blond hair cascading down to my waist. People see a different type of woman, and they react differently. I can tell you one thing: I wasn’t going to be welcome back at the go-go bars in Jersey with this new cut. With my new hair came a totally different persona. Before, I was the ingenue. Now I was just a minivan away from becoming a soccer mom. It changed the way I saw myself.

  Picking myself up and trying to piece myself back together went on for a while. I would go on auditions and wouldn’t get the parts. I would have to have my mom babysit because I didn’t have any money to pay a sitter.

  One time, I had done some job and left my son with my mother. When I got finished, I came home and there was blood on the back of his onesie and his hair in the back was matted down with blood. “What happened?” I asked Renee.

  “Oh, he fell and cracked his head open on the corner of the dresser,” she said, nonchalant.

  “Did you take him to the hospital?” I asked.

  “No, that’s for you to do,” she told me.

  I immediately scooped him up, jumped in a cab, and took him down to Bellevue, which was the closest hospital to our apartment in Tudor City. The E.R. doctor who treated him asked, “Hey, buddy, how did this happen?”

  “I’m just really stressed out,” my son replied, totally deadpan. Wonder where he’d heard that? Thank God the doctor had a sense of humor and laughed along with me.

  My stress came from being in a vicious circle, a no-win situation. I could not continue at this pace, in this city, on this track, and ever expect anything to change. I knew I would never get ahead, never make anything happen. And that’s when I chose to move.

  By that point, things had calmed down and Tommy and I were friendly again. I don’t remember the conversation specifically when I told him I was going to move, but he was always very supportive. It was never that I was leaving our son. I told Tommy, “I’m going to go get myself situated, and once I have everything figured out, I’ll be right back.”

  I never gave Tommy any reason not to trust me. Despite some hard times, I was always very responsible with our son and put his needs first. Even then, I frequently traveled back and forth from New York to LA. I would never be gone for too long, though I was working on establishing myself on the West Coast. Putting my son first was what moving was all about. If I was going to take care of him and provide the future for him that I wanted, I knew that I had to get away and find a better life and a more sustainable existence for myself.

  Tommy and I talked things out. He knew that I wasn’t running away. I just needed a shift and I would come roaring back when I was ready. And boy, did I come roaring back.
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br />   I really loved Tommy, and I think I always will. He’s still a part of my family now, and we’ll be connected forever through our son. Once I got settled in LA and we were coparenting, our son couldn’t put anything over on either of us. We talked all the time, and if he was punished at his father’s house, he was punished at my house, too, and vice versa. We were always on the same page and respected each other’s decisions. Once, when Thomas was still young, he said to me, “I don’t know why you and Dad ever got a divorce. You never fight.” And that was true, we never fought in front of our son. Once our marriage was over, we never had anything to fight about.

  I still talk to Tommy, even after he and his mother moved out to Las Vegas in 2013. Usually we’re texting about our son and his job and making sure that he’s checking in with one of us and that he’s always okay. He’s twenty-five, but we’re still nervous Nellie parents.

  One time Tommy said to me, “I would like to look at my son just once and see something of me in him.”

  He’s right, our son looks much more like his mother than his father. “Well, I guess I just have stronger genes than you,” I joked.

  But when it comes to personality, our son is his father’s child through and through. He has the same cutting humor that his father does and that same made-in-Manhattan swagger that made me fall in love with Tommy all those years ago.

  More recently, after the premiere party for my first season on The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills, I was in the backseat of my SUV headed home. I was in Hollywood, where my son was on patrol. I texted him to see if he was free. He responded that he was around the corner and he’d be by in a few minutes.

  I told the driver to pull over on Hollywood Boulevard, right between Grauman’s Chinese Theatre and the Dolby Theatre. It was about two in the morning. The Walk of Fame was totally empty and there was not a soul around. It was one of those cold, foggy winter nights that make LA look even more like a film noir than it already does.