Might As Well Laugh About It Now

by Marie Osmond

  This time, however, my thinking was very clear. My babies were all safe, which was all I really needed to know, and I had a commitment to keep. I did my talk to a group of about one hundred young women.

  Looking out at their teenaged faces and their attempts to be so mature and independent in attitude and fashion reminded me of my own trial run at being a grown-up, and how uncool it really was. In fact, it was blazing hot!

  It was the first time my parents were able to take a vacation together without any children along. My brother Jay had surprised them with a gift of a cruise and a guided tour of the Holy Land. We had convinced them to enjoy some vacation time, as Donny and I were in our late teens and Jimmy was always reliable, right from the start. He had already toured Japan and was being offered a television show there at the career-savvy age of fourteen. If the three of us could handle hosting national television shows, we figured we could certainly handle running a house on our own for ten days.

  One of my girlfriends had come over to stay with us while my parents were out of town, and one day we decided to fry some hamburgers. As teenagers who were terrified of fat, or anything edible that wasn’t cooked to death, we decided to cook our burgers well, well, well done. Think Cajun before it was cool! I am sure we imagined that high heat would burn off the calories before we even ate them!

  As we stood there talking, the top of the pan burst into flames from the overheated grease that had pooled around the burgers.

  My girlfriend screamed and Donny came running in from the living room.

  He jumped into action as soon as he saw the leaping flames.

  “I’ve got it!” he yelled, grabbing a dish towel and wrapping it around the handle of the pan. He jerked the pan up off the stove and started toward the sink.

  “Wait!” I shouted, afraid of what he was about to do. But it was too late. As he hurried across the room, grease slopped over the edge of the pan, sending flames to the floor. This probably wouldn’t have been a big crisis, but it was the seventies, when people carpeted their kitchens. (Ugly. No two ways around it.) The carpet began to burn.

  As I stood there in disbelief, Donny tossed the pan into the sink and turned the faucet on full blast.

  The fire flared up from the sink and ignited the bottom of the kitchen cupboards.

  I grabbed the family-sized box of baking soda from the pantry and ripped it apart to spread on the smolder ing carpet before the flames could spread farther, while Donny slapped at the cupboards with a wet towel. When the fires were finally out we stood speechless in disbelief. I was sick to my stomach for the rest of the day, so upset that I had ruined the brand-new remodeling my parents had done in the kitchen.

  My parents arrived home from Jerusalem about three days later. I can’t remember feeling worried that they would be angry. It probably would have made me feel better if they had been. I was mostly concerned about their disappointment at my irresponsibility—I looked for anger and disappointment on their faces when I showed them the kitchen, but it wasn’t there. What I saw was gratitude that we had been protected from physical harm.

  I think, in their wisdom, my parents knew that I had punished myself enough. Of course, they left the hole in the carpet. I always thought they chose to do that as an unspoken reminder to be more careful, but now I wonder if it was because it was so ugly that it was discontinued, and they were unable to match it again.

  I knew that my child who started the garage fire would be feeling the same way.

  I prayed that when I stepped off the plane the next day and took that child in my arms I would have the same expression on my face that I saw on my parents’ faces.

  When I arrived back in Utah and saw the house and the gaping hole that used to be my office, I had the most unexpected reaction. Though it was shocking visually, I was more shocked by what I was feeling: it was a strange relief.

  I had fallen way behind on keeping a scrapbook for each child and had been feeling guilty about that. Now I could help them figure out a way to make their own.

  My journals were all destroyed, but between my dyslexia and my exhaustion when writing them right before I fell asleep, I doubt anyone could have read them anyway. The memorabilia from my career wasn’t necessary; I still had the good memories without having to store so much stuff. Though I felt twinges of pain about losing some of it, like one-of-a-kind photographs of Donny and me with John Wayne, Groucho Marx, and Lucille Ball, I’ve never been one to hang on to past glory days.

  The only loss I felt more deeply was for some of the items my mother had left to me. As I was shoving aside some splintered and charred shelves, I found one small three-ring notebook that had survived the fire. It was a sketchbook in which she had drawn dress designs for my upcoming dolls. Her handwriting was undamaged. It made me laugh. I wondered if she had somehow saved it for me, sending the message not to cry about the past but to plan for the future! As she would say: “Don’t live in the past-ure!”

  That evening, the ten of us crammed into two hotel rooms, the girls in one room and the boys in the other. There’s nothing like trying to make oatmeal in a tiny hotel coffeemaker for hungry children. We had to do some power shopping to quickly replace school clothing and supplies for the kids for their first week of school. About a week later, we found a house to rent while ours was being emptied and then rebuilt. In an ironic twist, the rental was a very small house and we had to figure out how to live close together again. Each night, my children would pile into bed with me and we would read our scriptures and tell stories.

  When the holidays approached, I happened to cross paths with one of the firefighters who came to the rescue that September day. He had taken a picture of the fire on his cell phone and it was the first time I got to see the severity of the blaze.

  Looking at the photo, my Christmas card idea for 2005 came to me. I asked him if he could send me the picture by e-mail.

  All my friends and business associates received the same holiday greeting from me that year. On the front of the card is the photograph showing firefighters preparing to hose down the side of the house. An inferno is leaping out of the windows and pouring from the garage door. I framed the photo in a red ribbon and holly berries design. Inside the card I had printed the following greeting:

  A SPECIAL CHRISTMAS OFFER:

  10 brand-new carols from the

  Osmond-Blosil Holiday Songbook:

  “It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like Crispness”

  “What Charred Is This?”

  “Spray Ride”

  “Over the Rear Wall and Through the Wood”

  “Here Comes Suzy Smokebake”

  “Siren Night”

  “Up on the Roof Top Reindeer Roast”

  “Away in a Danger”

  “Hark the Herald Angels Singe”

  “Douse the Halls”

  Order NOW and receive a bonus track:

  “All I Want for Christmas Is My Two Front

  Rooms.”

  Friends and family all responded with a lot of enthusiasm when they got the card in the mail. Some people even told me that it gave them an open door to laugh about their own troubles from the past year, too.

  When we finally moved back into the house in the early spring, I was, again, surprised by my unexpected reaction: sorrow. Though it was still a perfect house, I was starting to sense that it was never going to be a happy family home. I thought about the woman who had sold it to me. She had told me that she was going through a painful divorce and had to reprioritize. Her children were grown and she had no need for a big house and a lot of belongings. She’d never expected to be alone at this point in her life, but she was bravely making choices for her future. I distinctly remember the expression on her face, both weary and hopeful. I was starting to recognize the same expression on my face looking back at me from the mirror. A crisis often tests a marriage. I’ve watched many couples bond more closely through tough times, but that had not happened with my marriage. The inconvenience of having to rea
djust our lives because of the fire served to magnify for me all of the countless ways we were no longer in sync with each other and hadn’t been for years. The continuous attempts to repair our relationship always seemed to crumble into cinders. The smoke had now cleared, literally and figuratively, and I knew I had to look closely at my marriage and measure the damage, carefully.

  Bloomin’ Cactus

  My greatest happiness has always come from being a mother.

  Brian was a funny man. His dry sense of humor could make me laugh. He could also be ridiculous just for the sake of it: wearing a grass skirt and doing a hula dance for a crowd of tourists; or the time he dressed up as a giant spotted dog for Halloween.

  I’m a woman who loves to laugh. Brian’s quick wit won me over the first night I met him. We had come separately to a party hosted by my brother Jay. I was divorced from Steve and starting to acclimate myself to the thought of raising my son as a single mom.

  My parents had taught me to never give up. It was a motto my brothers and I applied to every aspect of our lives. Steve and I had made several attempts to go back and make our very young marriage work, but it failed. I was being scrutinized in the tabloids and the paparazzi seemed to show up wherever I went. I was emotionally exhausted. I wanted to sit and cry the days away and, at first, I did.

  One morning I was in my parents’ kitchen, focused on my hopeless situation, asking my mother the one constant question of the heartbroken: “How will I ever get over this?”

  She had been kind, sympathetic, and supportive about whatever choice I thought I should make from the first sign of my marital problems. On this particular day, however, I think she was worried that I was falling into the snare of self-pity, a habit that can become way too comfortable if it settles in as a way of life. Neither of my parents ever had any tolerance for a “poor me” attitude.

  “Marie!” my mother said firmly. “You have to dry your eyes, gather yourself together, and get on with it. You have a child who needs a happy mother.”

  I wasn’t expecting that from my own mother and it made me more upset. My tears soon turned to anger when she added, “So figure out a way to be happy. Pull yourself up by the bootstraps and grow up.”

  I was so mad that she wouldn’t sympathize with me, I could barely see straight. But within minutes I started to perceive the true situation. My mother was right. It was good shock therapy and it worked. You can’t stand by and let someone physically die if you know you can stop the bleeding; and she wasn’t going to stand by and watch my will to live drain out of me. She didn’t want my son to grow up with a negative-thinking mother.

  I applied my mom’s sage advice and turned my focus to my son and my work, and little by little it took my mind off of my emotional pain. The hurt and the anger about my divorce were crowded out by the joy of being a mother to a darling baby. He was the best gift. Still is.

  At this party, it was Jay’s intention to introduce me to another guest with hopes that it would spark a bit of interest between us. He had invited Steve Young, who, at that time, was the star quarterback for Brigham Young University. Steve’s amazing football career has since garnered him MVP awards and an induction into the Pro Football Hall of Fame. He’s got a Hall of Fame heart, too, and works extensively for Children’s Miracle Network. We’ve been friends for over two decades.

  That evening, though, I stayed a safe distance from getting to know him. I was telling myself that it was too early for me to start dating again, but my reluctance was more likely because he embodied rising success and I was feeling like a failure. Then again, maybe it was only his name. After all, I was still recovering from my first love, and now ex-husband, Steve.

  Brian was there at the same party. He didn’t seem at all intimidating to me. And he was funny. He wanted to become a music producer. He belonged to my church. The rest is history. They say fashion trends recycle every twenty years. In my case, history did, too.

  In December of 2007, almost one year after I filed for divorce from Brian, I was getting ready to shoot a commercial for NutriSystem. The NutriSystem representatives seemed extremely happy with my success at weight loss, and the outpouring of compliments by the crew, associates, and friends had me wondering . . . what the heck were they thinking about my size before?????

  Anyway, one of my favorite people in the world was doing my hair. She has been in my life since I was fifteen years old, beginning when she was the hairstylist on the Donny and Marie show. She knows me so well. She’s heard all of my hopes, dreams, issues, heartbreaks, and headaches for years. I’ve listened to hers, too, and always appreciate her subtle ways of teaching me through her own experiences. Now, as an adult, I count on her wisdom more than ever, and on this day she had another gem.

  We were talking about divorce and its reasons. Having been through three divorces herself, she said: “In a second relationship I think women look for what was missing from the first marriage. Often it blinds us to seeing the complete picture because we’re so happy to experience what we had lacked for so long.”

  I know that was true of me with Brian. Laughter had been missing from my life for over a year following my first divorce, and Brian was like a buffet table of humor in the beginning of our relationship. I thought humor was the balm that would make everything better. I was a twenty-five-year-old woman who didn’t step back long enough to see the big picture.

  It was a rebound relationship in the most classic of ways, but I still tried to make it grow and work for years on end. I had always believed in the scriptural wisdom of being “equally yoked,” and it was soon obvious the two of us were not. Nonstop domestic bliss is, of course, a fairy tale; but having the same priorities plays a huge part in a good marriage. More often than not, Brian and I weren’t even on the same map, much less the same path.

  Following the bleakest days of my experience with postpartum depression, during the second season of the Donny & Marie talk show, Brian and I separated for six months. Depression of any kind can bring a side effect that is impossible to ignore. It lowers your guard and magnifies whatever issues you might have submerged in self-denial. For women, depression often means that we can no longer rise to the occasion of making it look easy, cope with the struggles, or use any of our energy for keeping the peace. It is too draining to pretend to be happy. For me, this meant that I couldn’t figure out a way to live with our massive differences anymore.

  Brian moved back to our Utah home while I stayed with the children to finish out the television season in Los Angeles. I talked with a therapist to understand and work on my issues. When I saw Brian again, I felt he had made many changes as well. For the children’s sake, above all, we felt highly motivated to try saving the marriage.

  We got back together during the months I was writing my first book, Behind the Smile. At the time, I thought I was being optimistic when I wrote these words in one of the final chapters: “I still had fears about renewing the relationship. But, little by little, we let the walls down and chipped away at the awful fear that it would only be a matter of time before we fell into the patterns that had given us reason to separate.”

  But now I read within those words an intuitive sense of our future.

  Following the house fire in the fall of 2005, I started to contemplate our situation with eyes that had been cleared of the smoke of blind hope: the structure was gone—what was left inside? I couldn’t stand the possibility of my children coming from a broken home, but I also knew they were growing up with two parents in a broken relationship. I knew that had to be damaging in and of itself. I prayed continuously for an answer. And I desperately hoped that God would fix what was broken in my marriage, especially if I continued to try.

  About a year later, I was touring with my Magic of Christmas show. Six of my children made a stage appearance to sing a family song with me. Jessica prefers to be behind the scenes, and she is great at stage managing. Michael organized the microphones and was a pinch-hit drummer. We had a great time, all crowded i
nto one bus, traveling to a new city every day and performing at night. It’s a lot of hard work, but when it’s a holiday show, the audiences are always ready to have a great time and that joy reverberates onstage and is carried onto the bus. Brian started the tour with us, but didn’t finish. It was clear to everyone that we were unhappy together. By the time the holidays were over, so was our living in the same house.

  One afternoon, after Brian had left the tour, as I was putting on makeup for a show, I overheard my oldest son, Stephen, talking to his sisters about our marriage.

  He said, “I really believe that you have to work at marriage. But I would rather make a good marriage really great than try to make a bad marriage good.”

  It was painful to hear my son’s assessment of the marriage, but his honesty gave me a new perspective.

  With respect to my parents’ advice to never give up, I would now add my own experienced adage: “Never give up yourself in order to try to make someone else happy.” It doesn’t work. I know change is possible, but I’ve learned that it will only last if you want it for yourself, first. In good marriages, compromises are made so you can both stay happy, not just so the other person will stay happy.

  After losing so many of my mom’s sweet needle-crafts and handmade items in the house fire, I was devoted to keeping her Christmas cactus plant, which had survived any long-term damage, alive and well. My mother had such a green thumb and would sing and talk to her plants every morning. Every year her Christmas cactus rewarded her attention with a respectable number of blooms. When we left on the Christmas tour, I gave specific directions for the care of the cactus to a friend who was watching the house for us. Returning on Christmas Eve, I was so disappointed to find it pale and without a single blossom. It seemed to be matching my spirit of sorrow about the inevitability of my marriage ending. I thought over and over about my parents’ marriage and how they not only loved each other, but walked the same path, strove to improve themselves together and separately, and always encouraged each other in all things. And in their closeness, they laughed. Every day.