I Don't Know What You Know Me From: Confessions of a Co-Star (24 page)

I ordered SiriusXM for my car so I could start listening to parenting channels during my ninety-minute commute. Oprah had a great program that was really helpful. The psychologist lady during one show said that what you were supposed to do was just “be” around your kids. So I would ask my steps the regular questions, I would get the regular answers, and then I tried to just “be,” but I started to feel boring. I would find myself staring off into space a lot. Playing with my phone, telling them about my day, and realizing that they don’t care at all. I was really excited to get some professional insight on these talk shows, but I always seemed to arrive at my destination just as the host/guest would say, “And here is the ultimate thing you should do, Judy, to make them love you and be the greatest stepparent in the world …” OK, I am exaggerating, but it was sort of like that. I always missed the summary, or the answer to the call-in question that was my exact same question!! It was always, “We’ll be back after this break with the answer to that amazing question! Don’t go
anywhere!” FUCK YOU, RADIO HOST! I AM IDLING IN A PARKING SPACE AND LATE FOR A MEETING, I NEED THE ANSWER NOW!!!! When are they going to invent DVR for radios? Yes, I know I could probably listen on my laptop, but when? I can’t have it playing while I cook, because I need total concentration in order not to ruin every meal completely, and I can’t play the shows while I’m cleaning, because I don’t want anyone to hear my tricks and learn my secret—that I have no idea what I’m doing and I’m scared and don’t want to mess it all up. I finally gave up and went back to listening to music or Doctor Radio, another commuter obsession of mine. I may not be getting parenting tips anymore, but I love hearing doctors break down diseases like takotsubo cardiomyopathy and pica.

In the beginning, the hands-down, 100 percent hardest thing about being a new stepmom was feeding my new stepchildren. I am kind of getting it down now, three years in, but it had been my greatest struggle, my greatest fear, and my greatest use of swear words. It is hard to feed kids who are not your own and who you have never spent any time with until now, when you suddenly spend all your time with them. The hardship is compounded when you’ve only ever fed yourself for your entire adult life, and barely even that. I don’t want to throw my kids under the bus, because they are so awesome, and they are trying hard to eat my food, but they were hard to feed. Or easy, depending on how you look at it. Easy, if I only fed them the beige food they loved best. Hard, if I wanted them to eat green food, or anything that was mixed together or from a foreign country. They didn’t like fruit. No veggies. No casseroles (a midwestern staple), no lasagna, we could swing a taco night, but nothing more foreign than that. And no leftovers, not even Halloween candy. I’m not kidding. If the Halloween candy wasn’t eaten days after Halloween, it would sit in the pantry, uneaten, until I would have to throw it out so I
didn’t binge. It mystified me. But that is not my only food-related problem. My second-biggest problem was remembering to feed them. It would completely slip my mind because I was just used to myself. I need to eat when I am hungry, but I can also wait. I can grab some nuts and a banana to tide me over, or even substitute that for a meal if I get wrapped up in whatever else I’m doing. This is a no-no with kids. You have to feed them meals, the main ones. And they get hungry after school, before soccer/baseball/basketball practice, and when they get home from practice, they are starving and literally about to pass out in the kitchen while I scramble to put something together that is hot and not a turkey sandwich, which I already made them for lunch. It was all new to me, and it was hard. Food has taken on a new meaning for me now that I have steps. It is now a necessity. It is a major part of my thinking all day, every day, and on the weekends, planning for the week ahead. Food is not for enjoying anymore or to experiment with. It needs to be a fastball down the middle (a baseball reference I have picked up since spending countless hours at Little League). It is for fuel, for health, and mostly to stop them from banging the cabinet doors open and closed at 10:00 p.m. while I am concentrating on Pinterest and wine. If they’re still hungry at 10:00 p.m., I feel like a failure. I feel like the worst stepparent and American in the history of stepparents and Americans when I am throwing food in the garbage because I know they won’t eat it if it’s left over. Also, when you’re used to cooking for only yourself and the occasional dinner for two (and I mean
occasional
), it seems impossible to cook a meal for four people. I don’t even have a clue about how much food to buy. I don’t know if I’m supposed to double recipes or if they are already written with four hungry people in mind. What about supermarkets? I never pushed a cart in them; I only ever needed a basket. I was basket-at-market girl, not cart-pusher girl. I had no idea where anything was in the
market. It would take me hours to shop—I still take forever, but I am starting to shave seconds off my time. In the beginning I would lose myself in the store, looking for one special thing in the recipe, not realizing that (a) I could make it without and (b) no one was going to want to eat what I made anyway. Then I started the phase where I let Dean Johnsen cook for the kids, and I made a healthy meal for the two of us. That worked for a while, but it didn’t really solve the meta-problem of getting the kids to eat healthier and expand their palates to include more exotic foods. It made me laugh when my friends would say, “Just put some avocado and sprouts on a piece of toast.” Uh, yeah, that’s not happening. It’s a process, and it’s getting better, but there’s a ways to go yet. I’m getting better at cooking meals for all of us, at not taking it personally when they hate something or don’t want to eat it, at not wanting to cry when Lucas puts a bite of food the size of his pinkie nail on his fork and examines it for seventeen seconds before putting it in his mouth. Lucas, if you read this, I
promise
I am not trying to poison you. (Speaking of poison, I do think it’s a small miracle the four of us haven’t had food poisoning from any of my meals yet. Knocking on wood right now.)

Another major adjustment I had to make was learning to deal with the highs and lows surrounding sports. Well, actually, the adjustment started with just attending sports. Besides hockey games with my dad when I was little, I hadn’t really attended any sport competitions that didn’t involve a guy also taking me to dinner before and drinks after. This was way different. The first time I went to one of Lucas’s Little League games was a really intense experience. Dean and I had only been dating for a few months. I had already met the kids, and it wasn’t Dean’s weekend with them, so we were going to go away to Santa Barbara. But we just had to make one stop on the way to watch Lucas’s game. It was a championship game (which meant nothing to me at the time)
against the rival team (again, meant nothing to me then). To add more fun (read: pressure) to the afternoon, I was meeting Dean’s mom (also named Judy)
and
ex-wife for the first time. Dean had told me that no one really took the games that seriously, it didn’t matter who won or lost, it was all about the kids having fun, getting out in the sunshine, and getting some exercise. Liar. Lucas’s team lost, all the kids were crying, and the coach of the opposing team donned a court jester hat and was prancing around the baseball diamond cheering and screaming. Lucas was clutching his dad around the waist, trying to hide his tears. I waited with the ex-wife, Dean’s mom, and Emilee a ways away. Dean finally talked Lucas into feeling a little less suicidal and then came jogging over to me, all smiles until we got in the car and he said, “Ready to go get drunk and have sex in Santa Barbara?!” I was in shock. Is this how it is all the time? Is this how all the coaches are? Is it going to be this dramatic and intense forever? Was this Dean’s version of “not taking the games seriously”? I didn’t know how to process it. I didn’t know how I was going to handle Little League. I was going to need a lot more wine and a prescription for Xanax.

I had a similar experience with Emilee but much later, after I was already official. She had a soccer tournament in gorgeous Lancaster, California, on the same day Lucas had a baseball game near home, so I offered to drive and attend Emilee’s game so Dean could stay with Lucas, divide and conquer, a term I have become very familiar with. Lancaster is about a two-hour drive into the desert. It’s a wonderful place if you need to hide out or buy some meth. About forty-five minutes into our drive out there, my tire exploded on the freeway. I swore (oops), pulled over, called AAA, and told Emilee to text her friend and teammate Gabby. Knowing that Gabby is always late to everything, I was confident that they hadn’t passed us yet and would be a few minutes behind us. They were. Gabby’s dad pulled over, grabbed Em, and left
Gabby’s mom to wait with me for the AAA man to ensure that I didn’t get raped or bitten by a snake and so the girls could get to their game on time. Everything worked out fine, the AAA guy put my spare on, from Lucas’s baseball game Dean called a tire store in Lancaster and made an appointment for me to buy a new tire after the game, and Em was going to hitch a ride home with a teammate so she didn’t have to spend one more second than necessary in Lancaster. Well, the game turned into a disaster. We were neck and neck but at the last minute lost, and Emilee, who was playing defense, thought the winning goal scored was her fault. She cried and didn’t want to ride home with any of the other players because she felt she had let them down. It was the first time I had ever seen her feel anything but two emotions—unreadable and vaguely content. And now she was crying next to me in the lobby of America’s Tire. I didn’t know what to do or how to make her feel better, so I kept quiet, took her to Subway, and let her pick the music for the ride home. I have since seen her cry one other time, at another soccer game defeat, in a different methy desert town. There is something about the combination of me/Emilee/soccer/desert that is bad luck. Luckily, that time it wasn’t her fault they lost, and she had headphones for the drive home, so we could both avoid an uncomfortable silence or worse, me trying lamely to comfort her while pushing my Prius to accelerate beyond sixty miles an hour.

I really think I could write an entire book about my experiences as a stepmother. I tried to make a TV show about it. Dean Johnsen gave me the thumbs-up when we got engaged to sell the idea to ABC, because it was a pretty wild story. L.A. actress meets the man of her dreams who lives fifty miles outside the city with his two kids, his ex-wife is a sheriff, lives with the sergeant, and Dean’s mom, with the same name as me, lives a few blocks away. I remember when I would pitch my story, people would laugh and
think I was lying, but I wasn’t. I’m not. It’s real. I became a parent to two preteens, and their mom carries a gun and fights crime for a living. Oh, and I mentioned she’s hot, right? Yeah.

I don’t know what my advice would be for people entering into a mixed family. I have no idea what the hell I’m doing most of the time, but it’s fine! Dean told me no one does, and I choose to believe him. Yes, there are challenges, but it’s so specific to the people. My kids are amazing. They are smart, funny, kind, and attractive. My husband’s ex-wife is all of those things too, and we get along so well, she’s just scarier because of the crime fighting, and his mom doesn’t drop by nearly as much as I wish she would, but it’s working out. I didn’t know how to relate to his kids when I started my journey as their new parent. We didn’t listen to the same music, we didn’t watch the same TV shows, we hadn’t seen the same movies, we didn’t like the same restaurants, but one thing we did have in common is that we all loved Dean Johnsen, and I think that’s as good a place to start as any.

Merry KISSmas! Love, Dean, Emilee, Lucas, and Judy

I BELIEVE THAT EVERYONE IN THE WORLD HAS ONE
Oscar-worthy performance in them, and I’m not just saying that because I want to win an Oscar someday. If you’re perfectly cast as yourself, the material is great, and you have great co-stars and a great director, it could happen. What’s hard about acting, besides getting that job with the great script, actors, and director, is the technical stuff. It’s hard to look at a piece of tape instead of the actor you’re talking to in a scene so your eyes are closer to the camera lens, to be soaking wet in a scene for ten hours, to be freezing cold but acting like you’re burning hot, to wear shoes giving you terrible blisters, sometimes just talking and walking can be a challenge when there’s a giant camera pointed at your face and countless silent strangers staring at you. It can be terrifying, like you got shot with a tranquilizer gun after doing seven espresso shots. It’s weird. But saying words and meaning them is kind of easy, I think.

I have a hard time believing people when they say they could never do what I do. Personally, I think that it’s way harder to do almost everything else out there. Yes, you have to be OK with talking in front of strangers, and being scrutinized, and the rejection, but there are occupational hazards in every job, in fact way more dangerous ones, and once you get used to it, and remind yourself that you don’t have to wear a bulletproof vest to work every day (unless the role you’re playing calls for one), it’s not so hard. The real question becomes, can you ever get used to it? I am rejected five times as much as I’m hired, probably more, but I think it (mostly) gets easier. Except when I have PMS, then it’s way worse.