Inside Out

by Demi Moore

  I was only in the bathroom for three or four minutes, but when I opened the door, I felt very calm about entering whatever the next phase of my life would be. I had shed such a heavy load, I felt almost light-headed.

  IT IS NOT unusual, from what I hear, to go from feeling like your spouse’s lover and best friend to feeling, over time, like he is just someone with whom you negotiate logistics. That’s basically what happened with Bruce and me. Only we barely had time to be a couple before we became parents. We had a whirlwind, truncated infatuation that morphed into a full-on family all in our very first year. When reality set in, I don’t know if we really knew each other. Soon it was just a life of coordinating details, trying to sync our schedules.

  In some ways, I think our marriage was prolonged by our frequent, extended separations. In the first two years of Tallulah’s life, I was in eight films, and so was Bruce. My production company, Moving Pictures, was in full swing. And we had three little girls under the age of ten, who were our first priority. It’s not surprising we barely had time for each other.

  With each of us going full tilt on our careers, we had a perfect kind of distraction for our energy. When we were together, we had the kids in common, and we focused on them. Bruce was tormented, I think, by his ambivalence about being married throughout our time together—at least that’s where I felt he was during our entire marriage. I felt pain for him and frustration for me and then, eventually, deep hurt. We’re all longing to be wanted, to be reassured, and he couldn’t give me that because he really didn’t know what he wanted. Honestly, I think both of us from the outset were more passionate about having kids than we were about being married, and in the end, the kids were—and always will be—what we have together.

  Of course, his ambivalence wasn’t our only problem. There were elements of Bruce’s personality that were similar to my mother’s: they were both unpredictable and sometimes impulsive, and that made me feel unsure of my footing. I never knew what mood he’d be in or whether his feelings for me would have changed since the day before. I was used to this from growing up with Ginny, and I recycled my coping mechanism on Bruce, by becoming completely self-sufficient. Same dance, different partner.

  I always maintained a kind of emotional buffer, like a moat around a castle, so that I wouldn’t be dependent on him or get too wounded when he shifted from hot to cold. It never occurred to me that strength and independence could be a weakness until the day Bruce came into my office, the retired gym in Hailey, and told me, “You know, I feel like if I wasn’t here, you could just go on without skipping a beat.”

  He’s right, I thought. The defensive armor I’d become accustomed to wearing was so ironclad, there was no room inside it for someone else. And I realized—too late—that this was a limitation as well as a protection. I recognized how my inability to express need was cheating him out of the chance to fulfill mine. By maintaining my childhood resolve not to be a burden on anyone, what I was really doing was avoiding exposing any vulnerability. When he would ask, “Do you mind if I go do this?”—an overnight trip with the boys to Vegas, for instance, or another gig with his band—and I’d always say, without a moment’s hesitation, “Go ahead—we’ll be fine,” part of him was glad he’d married someone so accommodating. But part of him was hearing, on the deepest level, that his presence didn’t matter. That I didn’t need him.

  So Bruce and I were trapped in our dance. He felt locked out by my self-reliance, which hurt him in ways he couldn’t face and fed his ambivalence about our marriage. My response to his uncertainty was hurt of my own that I couldn’t face, which fed my self-protective independence. And on and on, toward infinity.

  While I was caring for my mom, Bruce and I decided to separate. We made the decision together while he was with me in New Mexico, visiting with the girls. We wanted to wait to announce it publicly until after my mother passed, so that her funeral would be focused solely on her, as it ought to be, and there wouldn’t be the distraction of the media onslaught that would inevitably follow any word of our split. We knew the tabloids would be all over us no matter how the information came out, but we figured that releasing the story ourselves, together, when we were ready as a family, would create a different kind of energy.

  Unfortunately, that’s not the way it happened. We got a call from our lawyer within days of our decision, saying he’d learned that the tabloids had—somehow—been tipped off, and they would be running a story about our breakup the very next day. It felt awful, as it always does when you learn that someone you trust (Because who else would know? We had hardly told a soul!) is quite literally selling you out. Usually, whatever the story is that the tabloids have gotten ahold of is a little bit right and a lot wrong, but that little bit that’s true is just enough to make you feel totally exposed, especially when they claim that their source is “someone close to you.” That “someone” could be as removed as a guy who overheard someone you know talking at a restaurant, or it could be a person you think is a dear friend who is getting paid to reveal your secrets. It makes you question the loyalty of everyone around you and leaves you with a terrible feeling in the pit of your stomach. Anyway, I had a pit in my stomach, a dying mom, and a marriage that was ending when we got that call from our lawyer. We didn’t want to give the tabloids the satisfaction of breaking the story, so we announced our split that day ourselves. (Gratifyingly, our preemptive strike did achieve the desired effect. “The couple confirmed the breakup late Wednesday in a brief press release that was disappointingly [for Enquiring minds] bereft of details,” a journalist wrote at the time on E! News. “The hand-out said Bruce and Demi were ‘ending’ their union. And that was about it.”)

  We would have preferred to have had more time to deal with our own feelings and to sit down with our children to tell them in the most loving, supportive way possible what was going to happen. Instead, we were rushed and upset. You want to be able to work through a situation like this (or, really, any situation) from the inside out, not the outside in, but we didn’t get that chance. We made what we thought was the best decision for all of us, and luckily the children were so young when we told them about our separation that they couldn’t really comprehend what it meant. It was hardest for Rumer, of course, who was ten and had the clearest sense of what was about to change—of what we were all losing.

  Chapter 17

  Recently, I did an on-camera interview with a young man who was a total film buff, and he told me how much he loved G.I. Jane, how he’d watched it recently and felt it really held up. Then he said, “They were so rough on you in the press back then—and it was a great film! What was that about?” I told him, “You have no idea how nice it is to hear that you could see that was going on.” G.I. Jane never got its due, in my opinion—quite the contrary. Between its savage reception, and Bruce and me splitting up, and my mom dying, I was totally wrung out by the end of 1998.

  Unfortunately, I had already contracted to do a movie in France called Passion of Mind well before Bruce and I made our announcement, and before I knew my mother was dying. I was miserable in Paris. I’d taken the girls along and put them in school there for the four months we needed to be in France, but to get to the movie location on time, I had to leave our rented house at five thirty a.m., before they were awake. By the time I returned, they’d always gone to bed. There was almost no point in their being with me. This was no way for us to live at a moment when there was this huge change taking place in our family, the biggest upheaval so far in my children’s lives. They needed more of me than this, and, frankly, I needed more of them. I made a decision: no more movies; no more running around. I wanted to be at home in Hailey with my girls. If I couldn’t give them a mother and father who were married, I wanted them at least to have a stable home and a consistent routine. For the next five years, I became something I’d never been before: a full-time mom.

  Bruce and I did everything we could think of to make the split as easy as possible for our children, but of course
there were challenges. Scout, who had always been the most independent and outgoing of the girls, the epitome of confidence, was suddenly terrified to spend a night away from home. It was like she was afraid that if she left the house something else would change while she was away.

  Meanwhile, five-year-old Tallulah would eat only white food. We tried to steer her toward a better diet by taking away bagels and cream cheese, and she responded by not eating anything . . . for days. It was her reaction to things feeling out of control. This was the way a kindergartner was able to find some power, and she was remarkably stubborn. (I finally gave in and let her have the bagels. It may not have been the ideal choice, but I also couldn’t let her starve.) I was concerned about her using food as a source of control and where that could lead; I recognized all too well the possibility that this could turn into something bigger. These issues weren’t necessarily out of the norm, but if I hadn’t been there to address them, they could easily have escalated.

  The move to Idaho was best for my girls, but it wasn’t easy transitioning to being on my own without the distraction of work. I fought feeling sorry for myself and using the wrong things to push away that feeling. From the beginning, I made a pledge: I would not use alcohol or drugs to get through my divorce, and the same went for food. I remembered what I had put myself through before trying to control my body and my emotions, and if I gave in to that again, I knew it would destroy me.

  Bruce stayed in the guest house in Hailey for a while after we decided to separate. Eventually, he moved into his own house, about ten miles away on the road to Ketchum. When the house and property across the street from us became available, Bruce bought it. We then had a true family compound where the children could easily go back and forth between their parents, and enjoy the luxury of Bruce’s heated swimming pool, even in the dead of winter. It was ideal.

  It’s a funny thing to say, but I’m very proud of our divorce. I think Bruce was fearful at the beginning that I was going to make our split difficult, that I would express my anger or whatever baggage I had from our marriage by obstructing his access to the kids—that I’d turn to all of those ploys divorcing couples use as weapons. But I didn’t, and neither did he. I had no desire to replicate the destructive way my parents had used my brother and me as pawns. I’d seen what that could do to people, and I knew from the inside how that felt to be entrapped within as a child.

  It wasn’t easy at first, but we managed to move the heart of our relationship, the heart of what created our family, into something new that gave the girls a loving, supportive environment with both parents. They were never put in a position of having to choose between us for this holiday or that birthday; we were each able to put our own things aside and share those times with them. I am convinced we would have very different children now if we had handled things more selfishly.

  I experienced the most conventional family dynamic I’d ever known in those years. I was the stay-at-home mom whose life revolved entirely around the girls, their schedules, their breaks, their schools, their activities; and Bruce was the one working, the breadwinner. That Bruce was no longer my husband was irrelevant because he was the active father of my children; we felt more connected than we did before the divorce.

  Our house in Hailey is a very long ranch, and Rumer’s and Scout’s rooms were down a long corridor at the other end of the house from the master bedroom. The distance was too scary for them in the dark of night when they were little, so the children slept in the master bedroom for many years. We all piled in together—probably not the best thing for a marriage, but very cozy, and, regardless, that’s what we did. After a year or so of continuing that sleeping arrangement when the girls and I were alone in the house, I realized I couldn’t even entertain the thought of spending time with someone else unless I could figure out how to get the girls out of my bedroom. It was just too big of a step for Scout and Rumer to go the whole distance to their rooms, and Tallulah only ever slept with me, so I came up with the idea of creating a “sleeping room” near mine: there were three mattresses on the floor and the bedtime essentials—toothbrushes, books, pajamas, music box—and we used the room only at night. For daytime there was the playroom we’d created when we were doing our big renovation. We’d had an intricate birdhouse on a shelf in the living room, and on a whim, I asked one of the carpenters if he could re-create it as a playhouse. The result was an exact replica with a shingled roof, clapboard walls, and Dutch doors. It was enchanting.

  There were all sorts of projects to do on the property, which I finally had time for. We had a little playground near the house and as the girls grew, I added more swings and climbing equipment. Their classmates would often come over en masse to play out there. An offshoot of the Big Wood River runs behind the house, and I had stones laid along the shoreline to prevent erosion. When the river was low, the mud was high, and the girls loved to cover themselves with it. When the water was high, the girls swam and tootled around in an inner tube in our backyard pond. Winter comes early in the mountains, and the girls would skate on the river and carve ice caves right off the deck of the house with their friends.

  I made good friends of my own in Hailey, who saw me as a neighbor and fellow mom, and nothing more. Scout’s dearest friend since she was eighteen months old, Sarah Jane, is the daughter of a hysterically funny, no-nonsense, and totally irreverent woman named Sheri—Sheri-O, we call her—who became (and remains) one of my closest confidants and favorite partners in crime. She is a great golfer, and Bruce used to love spending hours with her on the course. Our girls called themselves Hamster Jane and Skunky LaRue.

  Hailey really felt like our home.

  MY KIDS GAVE me permission to play. When I wasn’t working on the house, I was spending hours putting together American Girl bedroom sets and making forts for stuffed animals. And I had an excuse to shop for toys.

  My time to play as a child was very limited, and now I was making up for it with an enthusiasm that verged on obsession. I remember going to the Target in Twin Falls with the girls—Hunter worked some magic so we could stay after hours, and it was amazing being in there on our own; it felt like being at Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory. Within seconds we had zeroed in on the toy section.

  My eyes locked on the Cabbage Patch dolls. I pulled down three supposedly identical variations—to anyone else, they would have all looked like the same doll. But I started scanning back and forth between them, checking which had the sweetest expression, which one had the eyes at the ideal spacing, looking back and forth and back and forth for . . . what?

  What was I looking for?

  I didn’t go to a therapist after Bruce and I split. I bought toys. It was an addiction, but it was also a lifeline: in recent years, as I’ve cleared out storerooms stuffed with toys and dolls I accumulated during that time, I could feel the pain they held. I realize now that my obsession with collecting kept me from doing something that could have been much worse. At the time, though, I think I would have told you things were good: Bruce and I were getting along. The girls were thriving. I started dating a martial artist I met after he did a demonstration at Scout’s eighth birthday party; Oliver gave me the chance to rediscover myself as a woman—not as a wife or mother. For once, I had removed all expectations from a romantic relationship.

  Hunter was a constant companion. He was more than an assistant; he was like a member of our family. He had been with me for the most intense period of my career, and for the death of my mother, and now, here he was, walking by my side through the divorce, witnessing my toy-shopping insanity without judgment. Not that he’s without a sense of humor: “I’ll be nicer if you’ll be smarter” is one of my favorite Hunterisms. His sarcastic wit was his funny but loving way of delivering a dose of the truth.

  And the truth is what I was after. I think during those years in Idaho, when I stepped away from Hollywood at the peak of my earning power and my success, I was really trying to figure myself out. I had no interest in working. (The only th
ing I said yes to was a voice-over gig for a Chevy commercial because I was able to do it by driving down the road to a recording studio in Ketchum and then swinging by the girls’ school in time for pickup.) I had moments when I thought, Will I be okay if I never work again? Will this be enough?

  I was searching in all directions for an answer. I read every self-help book I could get my hands on. I met with a Tibetan monk. I worked with a shaman from New Mexico. I had a Cherokee medicine woman come to conduct a ceremony at my house. I went trekking in Bhutan with Oliver. I hosted a weekend workshop exploring the power of intuition and intention with my old friend Laura Day. I was open to finding the truth wherever it might be—and I looked under every spiritual sofa cushion. My quest for insight and meaning was my work, at that time.

  FOR ALL OF the advantages of living in a small town, it can also be restricting. Rumer, who was finishing elementary school when Bruce and I separated, had a hard time not only with our split-up but with finding a way to fit in socially with her schoolmates. That situation did not improve in middle school; as she was poised to begin high school, she decided she wanted to try something new. In 2002, she started her freshman year at Interlochen, an arts-focused boarding school in Michigan that’s like the Juilliard of high schools. She was the youngest voice major they’d ever accepted.

  Around that same time, I got the opportunity to branch out myself. Drew Barrymore called. She was producing a sequel to her movie Charlie’s Angels, which had been a big hit two years before, starring Cameron Diaz, Drew, and Lucy Liu. She wanted to know if I would consider playing a new character named Madison Lee, a former Angel turned renegade, a good girl gone bad. “The part was written just for you,” Drew told me. I liked her a lot—in fact, I liked all the people who were involved with that film. But I was reluctant to leave Hailey and the cocoon I’d created there. Drew didn’t give up. “Think about it,” she said. “The shooting schedule is only twenty days.”