Inside Out

by Demi Moore

  When Ashton and I got together, he became interested in Kabbalah, too. We shared a yearning for a spiritual life. He was raised Catholic; I was baptized Catholic but raised not much of anything. But we were both really questioning what we were meant to be and do, how we fit into the grand plan. We were convinced that, however that was, our union was a step on the right path.

  The girls were seventeen, fourteen, and eleven at the time, and, as I’ve said, he really wanted to be the world’s greatest stepdad. He was also a vibrant guy in his twenties who wanted to go out and have fun, and we did a lot of that, too. We went to Lakers games; we hung out with his friends from That ’70s Show; I introduced him to everyone I knew in L.A., which by then was a pretty wide swath of the entertainment industry.

  Ashton was very good at connecting with people—networking, to use an old-fashioned word for it. He was good at it in person, and he was good at it online. He was one of the first people to have more than a million Twitter followers; he understood the power of social media way before most people, and he got me into it for a while, too. Originally, Ashton and I were just playing, seeing what it did and what it meant. But then I realized that Twitter was a way for me to interact directly with people without the media middlemen. I think people had seen a disproportionate number of pictures of me in the tabloids frowning or looking angry as I tried to ward off the omnipresent circling photographers; I saw Twitter as an opportunity to show people a side of myself that is much lighter and warmer. And all of a sudden people were getting to know me, not a tabloid image of “Gimme Moore” or whoever the press had decided I was that week. I was connecting with them, sharing something real. And it was a two-way street. Once, when Ashton was out of the country, and he knew I was asleep, he sent out a message to all his followers to start a “love tsunami” by flooding my Twitter feed with messages of love all at the same time. I was still in my pajamas when I noticed my Sidekick—the device of the moment—was blowing up with thousands of love tweets.

  Ashton was great about stuff like that. He left Post-it Notes around the house with messages like “Remember you are magical” or just plain old “I love you,” and they meant so much to me that some of them stayed up for five or six years. It was such a gift to live with someone who so clearly wanted me to feel good, to have fun, to experience pleasure.

  He took me to Mexico for a romantic Valentine’s Day trip, complete with a rose petal path leading through the master suite to a candlelit tub. This was our first solo vacation together, and we really went for it. We had couples’ massages, and read together under a canopy on the beach. But most of the time we just lounged naked in bed.

  One night, we put some clothes on and went out to dinner. Ashton was enjoying a glass of good red wine when he said, “I don’t know if alcoholism is a real thing—I think it’s all about moderation.”

  I wanted to be that girl. The girl who could have a glass of wine at dinner, or do a tequila shot at a party. In my mind, Ashton wanted that, too. So I tried to become that: a fun, normal girl. I didn’t think, This is a kid in his twenties who has no idea what he’s talking about. I didn’t think, I have nearly two decades of sobriety under my belt, and that’s a huge accomplishment. Instead, I cast about for justifications for his argument. Plenty of people party too much in their youth and then develop a perfectly healthy relationship with alcohol, I told myself. I used food as a way to torture myself at one point, and since then I had changed my relationship with eating—but obviously without giving it up altogether. Could I do that with alcohol, too? Back in our room, I took a beer from the minibar.

  That first weekend when I opened the door to alcohol again, it was such a novelty to have a buzz. And that’s all it was—I had this under control, I told myself. We left Mexico and flew to Chicago, where Ashton was taping Oprah. I was watching from the greenroom as he gushed about me during the taping—I could see the women in the audience swooning.

  We went to Florida next, for a big NASCAR race in Daytona, where Ashton was the honorary starter. There was a hotel room set up for us to use during the race. I slipped back into the room by myself and dipped into the minibar for a beer. No one was monitoring me, of course, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was doing something wrong—you can’t be sober for twenty years and not feel like you’re going to get in trouble if you have a drink. The words AA uses to describe alcoholism are cunning, baffling, and powerful. Can I really get away with this? I thought. If I just drink beer? I drank it all weekend in furtive, deliberate sips.

  Our final stop was Miami, where Sean Combs had offered us his house on the Intracoastal Waterway—it was incredibly beautiful, and it was just the two of us. It was there that I noticed my period was late, and I mentioned it to Ashton. “Although we’ve been traveling and sometimes that throws things off . . .” I hedged. There was nobody we could send to the drugstore to get a test, and no way either of us could risk buying one ourselves. But I already knew in my gut. It was a long and exciting twenty-four hours.

  I sent Hunter a message, and he had a test waiting for me at the house when we got back to L.A. the next day. When I saw the plus sign come up, I was in shock, then excited, then worried, and then I worked through the whole cycle of emotions all over again. But when I told Ashton, his reaction overrode my mixed emotions: he was thrilled.

  Six weeks later, in Parrot Cay, he proposed. He asked me to go down to the beach to watch the sunset, and then he got down on one knee and presented me with a beautiful vintage Cartier ring. I was overwhelmed. I told him I needed to think about it. I didn’t want him to feel he had to marry me just because I was pregnant. But I loved him. And I knew he loved me. And I knew this baby would cement our family, bond us all on the deepest level.

  By the end of the night, I’d said yes.

  Recently, I happened to see an old clip of myself on an episode of Late Show with David Letterman. It was from 1994, and I was there to promote the movie Disclosure. Letterman said, “You just got a great life! You have a storybook life.” It was soon after Tallulah had been born, and he talked about my beautiful daughters. “And you’re a beautiful woman,” he continued. “You couldn’t be more successful, you’ve got a husband who’s doing okay,” he joked, “and every movie that you’re in turns out to be not only a good movie but very, very successful.” Some of that was, of course, hyperbole—a host flattering his guest to make her feel comfortable and to draw her out for the cameras. But some of it was simply the truth. I did have three great kids. I had a handsome, famous husband who was, indeed, doing okay. Many of my own films had done well at the box office. I was, without question, fortunate beyond measure. But I was still wracked with self-doubt and insecurity. The life around me was remarkable; the messages in my head were still pretty dark. A decade later, when I found myself engaged to my soul mate and expecting his child at forty-two, I felt, for the first time, like the luckiest girl in the world. I was finally at a point where I could take in all this abundance, truly appreciate it, and truly enjoy it.

  We started shopping for the nursery. My friend Soleil Moon Frye—whose husband was Ashton’s producing partner at the time—was pregnant, too, and we were excited to be in this together; to have a ready-made circle of new-parent friends.

  It was a girl. We named her Chaplin Ray, after a woman I met in Spain, who was my interpreter when I was doing press for G.I. Jane. I loved the name and I loved my newest baby girl.

  WITH EACH PREGNANCY, a woman tends to look bigger faster, and when I was pregnant with Chaplin I became colossal. We kept it totally hidden; only Bruce and the girls and our closest inner circle knew that I was pregnant. I didn’t want my youngest daughter to come into the world as tabloid fodder.

  And thank God.

  Almost six months into my pregnancy, right at the moment when we were going to start telling everyone, we went to the doctor’s office. He did his usual ultrasound, but this time, there was no heartbeat. I registered that deadly silence—instead of the now-familiar thumpth
ump! thumpthump! of Chaplin’s little heart—and saw the look on my doctor’s face.

  If you have never lost a baby, you may think of a miscarriage as not that big a deal. It’s hard to remember, but I’m sure I used to feel that way, too: like it was a bit of medical misfortune, a disappointing but not devastating setback. But when it is your baby, who you already love and think of as a member of your immediate family, it doesn’t feel like a minor defeat. It feels like your child has died.

  I was decimated. I shifted into survival mode. I tried to allow myself to mourn, but it was so confusing. How could I grieve a person who’d never been in the world? I didn’t even know who she was. I just knew that I wanted her back with every molecule of my being.

  Ashton did his best to connect with me in my grief. He tried to be there for me during the miscarriage, but he couldn’t really understand what I was feeling. First of all, he hadn’t carried this baby. And second, he was in his twenties at the time: he wasn’t remotely late to the game of fatherhood. His possibilities were not running out, far from it. I was suddenly acutely aware that mine were. I had been very lucky to get pregnant naturally in my forties. I was terrified that I wouldn’t be able to do it again. I had literally failed to deliver, and my grief felt bottomless. I went through the motions of life, but I don’t know that I was fully in it.

  I recently came across a note that Tallulah wrote me at the time. It said, “I’m really sorry you lost the baby. But I’m still here. And I love you.”

  IT WAS MY fault, I felt sure: if only I hadn’t opened the door to drinking, I never would have lost the baby. Even worse, I was still smoking when I found out I was pregnant, and it took me a few weeks to quit completely. I was wracked with guilt and convinced what had happened was my doing.

  Drinking became interwoven in my pain. I’ve had a devastating experience, I’m drinking, that’s okay. That’s what I told myself. But somewhere inside of me, I knew that there was nothing okay about the way I related to alcohol.

  Ashton, meanwhile, was back in his empire-building mode. I was just with myself—not working, replaying over and over again what I did and what I missed during my pregnancy that could have made this happen.

  But I still had a glimmer of hope. I could try again. Now we know we want this, it’s really clear, let’s get on with it!

  We decided to get married. Our Kabbalah teacher suggested it would be healing—that it would deepen our connection, uniting two souls as one. I threw myself into planning the wedding.

  THERE WAS CHATTER early on that our relationship was just an elaborate publicity stunt. It was ridiculously difficult for people to believe an older woman and a younger man could actually be happily in love—though nobody blinks an eye when the situation is reversed. (Bruce and his wife, for example, have a twenty-three-year age difference, and nobody’s ever made a peep.) But by the time Ashton and I got married on September 24, 2005, we’d already been through a lot of real challenges as a couple in the two years we had been together. It didn’t feel like we were rushing into anything, quite the contrary. We were celebrating a love that had already survived trial by fire.

  I went through herculean efforts to keep our wedding private, with the help of Hunter and Ashton’s dad, Larry. The guest list was small, just our closest friends and family, and most of them thought they were coming over for a housewarming party. The renovations on our Zen tree house had just been completed, and we had the ceremony there, in our living room. It was as intimate and low key as my wedding to Bruce had been big and over the top. Ashton’s father and his mom and stepdad came, along with his twin brother, Michael; his big sister, Tausha; and his niece, Dakota. Bruce was there, with the girls, of course, and, representing my family, George and DeAnna, and Morgan. Lucy Liu arrived after the ceremony was already under way and snuck to her seat with an expression of shock and delight on her face, housewarming gift under one arm.

  I wore a beautiful, simple ivory Lanvin gown my friend Alber Elbaz had magically made for me in just a few weeks’ time. Ashton wore white too, for our traditional Kabbalistic ceremony under a chuppah. I walked around Ashton seven times to symbolize the circle of love, and he smashed a glass with his foot—a reminder of the fragility of relationships. Of how easy it can be to break them to pieces.

  Chapter 20

  We did everything together. We loved playing games, and one of our favorites was Mexican train dominoes—we started doing that two or three nights a week, and we played by the Salma Hayek rules: everyone’s train comes from the same central line of dominoes, and you’re in a cutthroat struggle to block your opponents. Penelope Cruz and her roommate, Daya, introduced us to the game; Heather, Guy, and sometimes Bruce would come, and our friend Eric Buterbaugh, who did the flowers for our wedding. We had a weekly Kabbalah class at our house on Wednesdays; TJ, Ashton’s old roommate, and the rest of their fantasy football league came on Sundays. We had family dinners together every night—Ashton organized his schedule around them. All of the friends coming and going felt like part of our extended family.

  Every year, we all went to Parrot Cay the day after Christmas. It was a ritual I started with Bruce: we’d get up and ski in the mountains in Idaho in the morning, and then get on a plane and be swimming in the ocean by nightfall. It was there that I drank in front of the girls for the first time, at the bar by the swimming pool. I ordered a beer. Ashton ordered a cocktail. I was mindful of how much I was having at first, vigilant about how I was feeling. And then our new friend at the bar—Fratboy Phil, we were calling him—said: “Have you ever chugged a beer through a straw?” We had a competition to see who could do it fastest, and I won. We repeated this process three times. It didn’t occur to me that Phil was six feet four inches and probably three times my weight. I was hammered. In the golf cart on the way back to our room, I was slumped in the front seat and Rumer was laughing about how silly I was being. “Oh Mom, I love you,” she said, to which I drunkenly replied, “I feel the same.”

  It was funny to them when I drank that time. But it didn’t stay funny. I had always been so careful with my kids to be stable, even-keeled, gentle, even in the way I casually addressed them. When you drink you become more direct and uninhibited—or at least I do—and to them, compared to the way I’d been throughout their childhood, I sounded harsher. And it was just new, different: they’d never seen me, or adults generally, partying. I remember at Rumer’s sixteenth birthday party, Tallulah was terrified because some of the people were drunk, and it was so unfamiliar to her she didn’t know what to make of it. But I was able to reassure and comfort her: I was still her same old mom, and she would always be safe with me.

  ASHTON AND I still wanted to have a baby, and we thoroughly enjoyed trying the old-fashioned way. But after a few months, we threw in a little intrauterine insemination, just to be safe. When that hadn’t worked after a year, we moved on to IVF.

  The daily shots and constant trips to the doctor’s office that in vitro fertilization requires can make even a young woman feel desperate and out of control. I didn’t care for our first doctor, who kept emphasizing my age. We found another fertility specialist I liked a lot, and I did fairly well with the hormones.

  But every time I got my period, proof that another cycle had failed, I felt myself reliving Chaplin’s death, and I went into a terribly dark place.

  I kept that completely secret. I soldiered on. From the outside, I looked like my usual optimistic, practical self. Inside, I was dying.

  On paper there was no reason why I shouldn’t have been getting pregnant. I was making plenty of eggs. They were fertilizing. But it just wasn’t happening. I must have gone through four or five cycles, all of which ended in heartbreak. Every time, you get your hopes up. You’re getting shots in your stomach and your butt every morning and every night. You’re constantly getting ultrasounds and having your blood drawn to find out when you’re ovulating, when your uterine lining is just right, and so on. You’re organizing your whole life around getting preg
nant, and when you find out that—yet again—you’re not, it’s crushing. It takes a toll on a woman when you spend years of your life in that state.

  To his credit, Ashton was fine with having a baby however: we could use a surrogate, or we could use a donor egg. But my ego was attached to having a biological child I carried. That’s what I’d always done before. Intellectually, I knew that one can connect with a baby on the deepest level without carrying her. But emotionally, I wanted to have that experience with Ashton. Just as I wanted to be the carefree girl who could have a casual drink, I wanted to be the fertile woman who could have his baby. I was starting to worry that maybe I was, as the tabloids so kindly reminded the world at every chance, past my sell-by date.

  Throughout the course of this awful period, I think I began to take my relationships with my daughters for granted. Obviously, I wasn’t going to bother them with the details of my IVF; it wouldn’t have been appropriate. But to them, I had become secretive. In Idaho, they’d felt like we were all in it together, but now it seemed like Ashton and I were shutting them out. To make things even more complicated, they were at the age when kids naturally start to separate from their parents. And as teenagers, Rumer and Scout were racing with hormones, while I was pumped full of them from my IVF.