Might As Well Laugh About It Now

by Marie Osmond

  That’s how my sweet mother was, even in the final weeks of her life, never putting herself first.

  A hospice nurse once told me that when a patient passes on, there is a strong sense that the spirit of the person stays near their body, though not in it, for at least a little while.

  The morning my mother passed away, on Mother’s Day of 2004, I could feel her spirit there in the room. As the medical people began to roll away the monitors and remove the respirator, it was as though my mother stood next to me, thanking her body for being so good to her, carrying her through seventy-nine years of living. It had a profound effect on me. I so often ignore that a woman’s body is not only a miracle because it can give birth, but because it is so resilient. The body never gives up on us . . . it will do anything to keep the heart beating, but we so often neglect it.

  My mother’s words, “Take care of yourself,” resided in my memory, but I still didn’t take the time to take them to heart. That is, until my heart was affected, both physically and emotionally.

  One November afternoon, I was rehearsing my 2006 Magic of Christmas tour with the band. We were going through the opening number, “We Need a Little Christmas.” The choreography involved moving at an energetic pace across the stage, lighting up Christmas trees as I went with the wave of my arm. I guess that was the magic part!! David Copperfield, I’m not.

  By the time I got through the song and to the other side of the stage it was obvious to me that I was “hauling out” a lot more than the holly. I was hauling around a kindergartner. After all, forty pounds is the weight of the average five-year-old. I came off the side of the stage huffing and puffing like the Big Bad Wolf but without enough breath to blow anything down.

  My oldest son, Stephen, handed me a bottle of water.

  I tried to make light of my breathlessness, though it was frightening me.

  “I need more than a little Christmas. I need a little oxygen!!”

  He wasn’t laughing. He had something to tell me. He had been elected by the rest of my children to give me a message.

  “Mom,” he said, “we think you’re beautiful no matter what you weigh, but we want you to start taking care of yourself.”

  I tried to calm his worries. “Sweetheart, I’ll be fine.”

  He continued. “You don’t understand. We need you. We want you to be around for us and for our kids, too. Please, Mom. What would we do without you?”

  The band started to cue up to rehearse the “Christmas Waltz,” but I couldn’t go onstage to sing because tears choked my throat. I understood exactly what my son was telling me, even though I wanted to deck him down a size or two!

  I understood because I still wanted my mom around. I wanted her to be there for my kids. I wanted to talk to her about my disintegrating marriage, my concerns for my teenagers, and how to help my little kids cope. I wanted to share with her the new stupid joke of the day, my new line of crafts and fabric, have our scriptural discussions that I loved so much, and every other thing big and small that only a mother and daughter can do together. I’ve always wanted to follow in her footsteps and become a happy grandma. But in the area of self-care I was still ignoring her strong plea that I must take a path different from hers.

  My mother believed, as I do, that if you can’t change your circumstances, you always have the option of changing your attitude. In this case, I could still change my circumstances, but I knew I had to change my attitude first.

  If I didn’t feel an urgency to do something for myself, I needed to do it for my children. Abby was only in preschool. At age forty-seven, I was still missing my mom; why was I risking leaving my own daughter when she was only four? I had to make the time to put my health first.

  Still, in the beginning, I had no idea how I would find the time to make it happen. I couldn’t carve out an extra hour in my day; it just wasn’t there. I didn’t have time to buy a juicer and peel vegetables. When I asked people about dieting, they would make suggestions like counting points, going to a weight-loss group, or taking herbal appetite suppressants or even medication. I didn’t want side effects, or to have someone watch me step on scales. Like most women I know, it wasn’t about laziness—it was about busy-ness. We eat for energy. Dieting has always made me feel too tired.

  I needed an answer to show up at my door. And amazingly, it did. After looking over weight-loss options on the Internet and doing some research on several of the top weight-loss programs, I decided to go with NutriSystem, mostly because it was easy and healthy. I loved that I didn’t have to think about measuring portion sizes. I like food too much to constantly analyze it. I knew I wasn’t going to stick to any diet if I had to process the process. With NutriSystem, I could just grab and go. For me, it’s like buying shoes. I love shoes, but if you made me pick out the parts—the insole, the upper, the heel, the leather—I’d just try to find something else that I liked to do.

  NutriSystem set the portion sizes, packaged the food, and checked the nutritional value, so all I had to do was order what I liked, pick up my delivery from my front porch, and stock my shelves. It’s real food, like lasagna, and bean and rice soup, and macaroni and cheese, so I didn’t have to decipher ingredients or try to trick my taste buds with substitutions. Please! I’m not a woman who wants to pretend that rolled oats are cheese. With NutriSystem the oatmeal is the oatmeal and the lasagna is actual lasagna! And I could be real about what I could handle. The only real effort I ever had to make was ordering a drive-thru garden salad. That was tough! There was no going cold turkey on anything, including sweets. Caramel popcorn and the chocolate crunch bars got me through without one minute of crabby withdrawal from milkshakes, and the NutriSystem ice-cream sandwiches are not only my favorite treat, but my kids’ as well. The most significant thing I learned from the NutriSystem program was the necessity of eating three meals a day. My body responded very quickly to this healthy consistency. Over the years of irregular eating patterns I had thrown my metabolism into famine mode. No wonder my body would hold onto any calorie I consumed.

  In an unexpected way, I felt better and better every day, in addition to losing an average of a pound or two each week. My energy balanced out because I wasn’t swinging wildly between starving myself and then consuming whatever was on hand, from a half-eaten candy bar to the leftovers of my kids’ peanut butter toast and blueberry pancakes. I could step into the pantry in the morning and put one or two NutriSystem meals or snacks right into my bag and head out.

  My mom loved good, memorable quotes and used to write them into her newsletters. One was from Ralph Waldo Emerson: “Once you make a decision, the universe conspires to make it happen.” I think that one has stayed around since the 1800s because everyone who tries the advice finds it to be true after a little while. In this century, it’s referred to as quantum physics. I’d just call it being positive.

  Three weeks into my NutriSystem program, I had lost about six pounds. It was a miraculous mood booster, especially because my knees hurt less with each melting pound. Once I started to feel a little lighter on my feet I wanted to start toning up, too.

  To start off, I’d take brisk walks with the kids, which had a double benefit. Of course it was aerobic, and without the distraction of video games and cell phones and TV, it was also a great way to really get to hear about what was going on in their lives. One of my favorite activities is reading, but I had to find a way to make it active. So instead of sitting on the couch, I bought an iPod and began to download audio books to listen to as I walked while the kids were in school.

  Then one afternoon, the call came in from my manager, Karl. ABC wanted to have me on season five of Dancing with the Stars. It gave me pause—really big “deer in the headlights” pause. Only a few months before, I was losing my breath with a wave of my arm onstage. Was I really going to have the courage to ballroom dance on live national television?

  My children were my biggest cheerleaders.

  Stephen said to me, “It’ll be like having a perso
nal trainer work with you every day and you’ll get paid for it. Why would you say no to that?”

  I ran the idea by three girlfriend coworkers the next day during a doll design meeting.

  One of them said to me, “Well, you used to dance on the original Donny and Marie show, right?”

  “Not like this!” I answered. “Besides, we didn’t really dance, we more or less just grooved to the beat and pointed.”

  “They’ll probably have celebrities on there that are ten or twenty years younger than you,” another added. “I’d hate to compete with that. What if there’s a model?!”

  We all gasped! Of course they would bring in a model. It’s tele-vision.

  “And the costumes!” I responded. “Between the low cuts and the high cuts, I’ll look like a cut of pork roast.”

  We all shuddered at the possibilities.

  The most practical friend in the group sorted out the options: “Look at it this way. You have no time. You’re getting divorced. You’ve got eight kids and you’re already crazy busy. You’re in your midforties and, even though you’re dropping a few pounds, the costumes can be revealing and you’re still overweight. I think the answer is perfectly clear. Right?”

  A hush fell over all of us sitting at the table.

  “You’re right,” I said. After a long minute of consoling looks from around the table, I stood up. “I’m going to do it.”

  They all looked stunned. But it only took a moment for them to understand, as only the truest of girlfriends do, that sometimes you’ve got to prove to yourself that you can still take on a challenge, even against all of the odds.

  Almost in unison, all three of them said, “Go for it.”

  I did. And the universe conspired to make it happen!

  It’s Only Sand

  Well, photographer Richard Avedon once told me that I have an “Audrey Hepburn neck,” but this is extreme!

  Somewhere inside this block of clay had to be my face. I made a promise to my doll collectors that in 2008 I would sculpt myself as a baby. It was a promise I wanted to break.

  As I looked at my creation on the table in front of me, I thought, “Self-portraits should be left to brilliant artists like Frida Kahlo.” Or I could call this doll “Baby Frida” instead of “Baby Olive Marie,” because so far I’d sculpted one long brow that went from ear to ear. If I stopped using tweezers for several months, this had a chance of resembling me someday, but not me as a baby.

  I used the water in a china saucer from one of my mother’s favorite holiday pattern collections to dampen my clay-covered fingers, and smoothed over the forehead area, again, for the seventh time.

  The delicate poinsettia pattern on the inside edge of the china became coated with a gray-colored paste within seconds. I’m certain I could have found an old yogurt container or put the water in a plastic bowl, something with no sentimental value. But I chose this particular china saucer. It helped me channel happy memories of childhood. My mother would have approved. She was never overly delicate with her collectibles, including her china.

  I had set up a doll-sculpting area in my house, covering the carpeting, tabletops, walls, and chairs with plastic sheeting, yards and yards of it.

  One lesson I learned quickly, after the first time I ever sculpted a doll, is this: The clay that is used to sculpt heads really has legs! It can travel. Far! I’ve had a waffle come out of the toaster a week later with clay dust stuck to it.

  I considered leaving the plastic up permanently, even after I finished sculpting. With four children under age twelve, two teenagers at home, and an ever-expanding animal kingdom, it would be a real time-saver when it came to cleaning the house. I could just hose off the sheets of plastic. I wouldn’t be the first Osmond to live that way.

  My grandparents on my father’s side covered every fabric object in their house with plastic slipcovers, from the lamp shades to the ottomans. There was nothing quite like a Saran Wrap snooze on grandma’s couch. On hot summer days, when your skin adhered to the plastic, or pools of sweat gathered under your kneecaps, it would take a minimum of two other family members to get you pried up off the sofa. For my grandparents, comfort was secondary. The plastic was a mental health choice. They could wipe down the house after the grandkids left and still have furniture that looked brand-new.

  My grandmother might have needed crisis counsel ing if she saw me using my mother’s china for a mini-sink; but using it helps me feel my mother’s presence. She loved my dolls, and she believed that you should use and appreciate those things that bring you joy.

  When my brothers and I were growing up, there were many, many meals shared on this china. At least once a week, usually on family night, we would set the table with her best glassware and real silverware. It was Mother’s way of teaching us what was important—give to those whom you love most the best that you have to offer. Possessions are never more important than people.

  It was a lesson my mother learned at a young age from her own grandmother. She passed along to me a story of when she was a little girl and she dropped and broke a china plate from her grandmother’s collection. Frightened that she would be in trouble, my mother approached her grandmother and, with tears in her eyes, asked forgiveness. She remembered distinctly the impression it left on her when her grandmother dried her eyes and said: “Toss it out, Olive. It’s only sand.”

  The china was obviously beautifully refined and expensive sand, yet I think that my great-grandmother had it right in the big picture. After all, a diamond is only some highly organized carbon; cashmere once grazed on a plateau and bleated; a pearl is the result of a splinter in the backside of an oyster . . . and the most beautiful porcelain doll started out as a block of clay.

  My mother was the one who started me on collecting dolls. She was so very happy, after giving birth to seven boys in a row, to finally have a daughter to dress in pink and load up with beautiful dolls. Sharing a household with nine men, I think my mom and I would have collected anything that had its mouth sealed shut!

  It was the perfect hobby, especially while touring the world as a child. There is a universal quality to dolls no matter what the language or the culture. My mother and I would explore each new location by starting out in a doll shop. It didn’t matter if we were in Malaysia, Japan, Sweden, or Mexico, we could find some common ground with strangers through dolls. After all, dolls have been around as long as there have been children. Archaeologists uncovered dolls in ancient Egyptian tombs that have held up for three thousand years. (One doll was found in a well-preserved lattice armchair, with a plastic slipcover on it. Kidding!)

  I have to wonder if the little Egyptian girls took a sharp stone to the flax hair on their dolls and cut it all off into an uneven style, like I did with scissors to my first Barbie. My daughters all gave at least one radical haircut to a new doll at some point in their preschool lives. Jessica went for the ever-attractive mullet look on her baby doll, and Rachael’s doll was graced with a spiked punk rocker do. Brianna liked the clean, close crew-cut look, and at age three, she did her own hair to match. The top of her little head had about one quarter inch of hair left. The sides were still long. She had to wear a comb-over style, held in place with a barrette, for months on end. Abby has always gone for the bald-headed dolls from the start. She would color the hair on with Magic Markers—her very own version of Nice ’n Easy for dolls.

  More times than I can count, women will stop me in the airport, a store, or at an autograph signing to tell me: “I had the Donny and Marie Barbie dolls when I was growing up!!”

  Then they get a sheepish look on their faces and add, “I cut all your hair off.”

  Most often they tell me that they cut the Marie doll’s hair off when I went to a short style in between seasons of the show. Sometimes they tell me that they cut it into a pixie; others chose the ever-popular bi-level style, and a few have admitted to giving me a flattop. It’s okay. I don’t take it personally. They would have cut Donny’s hair, too, except it wa
s only molded plastic.

  Donny and I were the very first celebrity Barbie dolls. My mother had traveled to New York City in 1975 with Jimmy, who was being sought after to star in a Broadway show. When she realized that Mattel was doing a trade show the same day as her meeting with producers, she decided to stop in and look at all of the dolls new to the market. At the Barbie booth, she scanned all of the various dolls and then suggested that they make “Donny and Marie” dolls by using the same bodies and changing out the heads. (Leave it to a practical mother of nine.) The Mattel executives jumped on the idea. It was a big seller for them.

  As a mother myself, and also as a woman, I appreciate that my mother asked that my doll be given the “Francie” body, instead of Barbie’s. Francie was Barbie’s “modern cousin.” She had a more realistic figure. It would have been pretty uncomfortable to be a sixteen-year-old girl whose doll had a body like the original Barbie.

  My Marie Osmond Collectible Porcelain Doll line was as great a source of joy for my mother as it has been for me. She would watch every one of my QVC shows whenever she could and give me ideas for new series, costumes, and hairstyles.

  She and my daughter Rachael would watch the other doll and teddy bear shows on QVC to keep me posted about what was hot and what was not. It was good market research for each of their age groups. Having a great eye for design just like her grandma, even as a young girl Rachael could always pick out a terrific idea and spot the flaws in the ones that would never fly.

  One afternoon, when Rachael was about eleven, I came home to find her watching a teddy bear show on QVC.

  “Hey, Mom,” she said, as I walked through to the kitchen. “They’re selling a bear on here that’s dressed in a fur coat.”