Mommywood (17 page)

As we described the situation, Dr. Wexler said that our dynamic was pretty common but that she usually heard it in reverse. The wife usually complained about the husband‘s not doing enough, and the husband usually said that she didn‘t give him a chance. The husband would say that when he did try to step in, the wife told him he wasn‘t doing the job right. Instead, in our case, Dean was the experienced dad, and it was all new to me. I needed some freedom to make mistakes and learn from them.

Instead of helping out with the everyday work of parenting, I overcompensated in the ways I knew how to show my love.

Liam always started to cry whenever Dean and I had to go to a meeting. (And let‘s face it, he was probably crying because
Daddy
was leaving.) Dean always made a quick exit. He said,

―Bye, buddy, see you later, and he was out. But I always took much longer, rubbing Liam‘s head and explaining to him, ―It‘s okay, Monkey. We‘ll be back. We always come back. Dean always got annoyed with me for taking too long. He said you needed to treat leaving like ripping off a Band-Aid. Just say you‘ll be back and quickly walk away. No matter how many times he told me this, I couldn‘t bring myself to make a quick departure. It drove Dean nuts. Dr. Wexler told Dean that in theory he was right, sure, but he couldn‘t control the way I felt.

Because I‘m not the primary caregiving parent in our minds, I felt a need to grow my bond with Liam, so I doted more on him.

Maybe it was more for my benefit than Liam‘s, but that didn‘t mean it was all bad.

Dean and I both work, and we work together, so on paper our parenting is pretty equal. It‘s been that way from the beginning, and I love that. But it surprised me how quickly our own childhoods and Dean‘s experience as a dad came into play in the dynamics we developed. I wanted to make sure the decisions we made as parents were shared and deliberate and as free from our own baggage as possible. Going into couples therapy gave us insight almost immediately.

One inspiring session of therapy later, I decided that the best way to build my independent bonds with my children was to spend time with them alone. I decided to take Stella on her first shopping excursion. Neil Lane, the famous jewelry designer, was having a party to celebrate the opening of his store, and I had to find a dress for the event, then go to Neil Lane to pick out the jewelry I would wear with the dress.

Stella was four months old. I know it sounds crazy, but it was really the first time Stella and I went out alone! Dean and I go everywhere together. But now that Jack was in town, Dean had independent obligations; some days he was picking up Jack from school or taking Jack to karate. It was about time that I started to do more by myself.

We pulled up to Neiman Marcus. Stella was cooing in her infant car seat, an Orbit, which is the celebrity-choice car seat, because it has 360-degree rotation, some new high-tech foam, and a sunshade that the Orbit website actually calls a paparazzi shield! I like to think that they used that phrase after watching
Tori & Dean,
since as far as I could tell, it showed up on their website after I called it that on the show. Anyway, I planned to snap the car seat into its stroller base, but when I opened the trunk, the base wasn‘t there. The base is always there. Dean always puts it back after he uses it. But this time it wasn‘t there, and I hadn‘t thought to check. Because I have no practice taking independent excursions with my child.

Now what was I going to do? The Orbit is awesome, but it weighs—this is a rough estimate—a million pounds. Okay, it weighs almost ten pounds, but when you add that to my fourteen-pound baby, the total comes to almost a million pounds. (Math was never my strong subject.) I‘d seen Dean carry it, but me? Never. Well, I had no choice, I was going to mom up and haul the thing through Neiman Marcus.

When I‘m walking through Neiman Marcus I always feel like I‘m being judged. As if the other shoppers are all so upscale that they‘re looking at me like I‘m Julia Roberts in
Pretty
Woman
—out of place and unwelcome. It seems to me that in a place like that you have to have a certain air of confidence that has never come easily to me. When I walked in with Stella, I didn‘t want anyone to look at me and think, ―She can barely carry that child. She has no idea how to be a mother. So I was lugging her in her infant car seat up the escalator, dragging her from designer to designer, trying to act like it was effortless. In less than ten minutes my arm was aching, I was breaking a sweat, and my heart was pounding. Not cool, Tori, not cool. So I told myself I was doing an acting exercise. I concentrated on making my expression say to the other shoppers, ―I‘m a hands-on mom. This is no big deal. I‘m just effortlessly shopping at Neiman Marcus. I do this all the time. I could run a marathon carrying this baby. And yours. Care to try me?

I don‘t know what my face looked like, but at least my acting efforts distracted me from the pain. Soon enough I was happily ensconced in a dressing room, with Stella watching me try on dresses. As the salespeople brought me options, I explained the designers to Stella. ―Look! A Christian Dior dress.

Now, Stella, this is gorgeous but way out of our price range.

But, here! Look at this—an Alice and Olivia. One dress is thousands of dollars, the other is three hundred dollars.

Accessories are everything. If I pair the Alice and Olivia with this belt… Stella loved it. The lights, the mirrors, the colors and patterns, and if I‘m not mistaken she expressed great respect for the enduring style of the Diane von Furstenberg wrap dress.

Stella doesn‘t have a baby book. Before she was born I heard people talk about the second child syndrome—how number two doesn‘t get the same attention. I couldn‘t imagine that. Each baby was sure to be as precious as the last. But then, when Stella was born, I finally understood. The first four months of her life flew by, and suddenly I realized we had very little to show for it. No baby book, a few photos that were taken on my BlackBerry, and no record of her growth. By the time Liam was four months old I could have made twenty albums, one exclusively devoted to shots of him sleeping. I recorded every measurement the doctor took—height, weight, and head circumference. For Stella I only wrote down two measurements, her stats at birth and at her first doctor‘s visit.

Stella might grow up with no memories of her childhood, but I knew that we had a special bond from the very start. When day-old Stella stared up at me with her beautiful eyes, I couldn‘t help thinking,
This one’s going to be mine!

When you have a cesarean you stay in the hospital a few days. I slept a lot, held Stella, swaddled her, fed her. One afternoon Dean had gone to run some errands and Stella and I were alone. I was in the hospital bed holding her. She gazed right up at me. I know babies are basically blind for the first few days, but when she looked at me like that, I felt a deep connection to her. All of a sudden I had an epiphany. It was going to be okay. Everything was going to be fine. She was looking right into my soul to say, ―I‘m connecting with you, Mommy. We‘re going to love each other. We‘re going to have a great relationship. You‘re going to get me a car for my sixteenth birthday. I love you. I still feel that way when she looks at me.

I feel the connection. Maybe I‘m making it up because I want it so badly, but who cares? That feeling can‘t be a bad thing.

Now, in the dressing room at Neiman Marcus, I couldn‘t help fast-forwarding to years from now, to a day when I would watch Stella try on dresses, spinning around in front of the three-sided mirror. And that‘s when it hit me. Wow. I actually have a
girl
. And based on her response to the fashion show I‘d just put on for her, she was going to be a shopper just like me.

Stella had remarkable shopping endurance. She was really good until the end. When she started to fuss, I knew it was time to book it out of there. I was still trying to decide between two dresses, so I bought them both with the plan to return the one I didn‘t wear.

Carrying Stella in her car seat into the store was hard enough. Now I was hustling to get out of there before she had a full-on meltdown, and I was carrying my purse, the diaper bag, the lead-weighted carrier,
and
the Neiman Marcus garment bag.

As I trekked to the escalator, missing Sherpa Dean, a saleswoman looked at me, gasped, and said, ―Oh my God, you must need help! Let me take something. I instantly got super defensive. I said, ―No, why? [gasp, gasp] Do I look like I need help? [gasp, gasp] I‘m fine. I turned away, but she knew I was just being stubborn. She said, ―I‘m a mom. It‘s okay to ask for help. I knew that if Dean were alone with Stella, he‘d never need an extra hand. I wanted to prove the same independence.

But my arm muscles were already quivering under the weight, and I was pretty sure this kind of exercise wasn‘t going to do much for my postpartum love handles. So I reluctantly let her carry the garment bag to the escalator. It was a moment of defeat. A relieving, lifesaving, wonderful moment of defeat.

I fed Stella in the car, she perked up, and we hit Neil Lane.

Inside the brand-new store the counters were full of gleaming jewelry. Stella‘s eyes opened wide. What was this place? She had found her Shangri-la. As she gaped at the magnificent jewelry, I flashed back to my mother, who had such a fondness for diamonds the size of race cars. As a teen I had begged her to wear silver, crystal, plastic, cardboard—anything less showy.

She said, ―One day you‘ll appreciate all these diamonds. Now I was in a different situation, borrowing the jewelry that Mom could buy, with a daughter whose four-month-old eyes lit up at the sight of diamonds. I turned to Neil: ―Do you have anything in the macaroni necklace vein? Still, I was proud. Stella and I had our first independent excursion—borrowing jewelry from
the
Hollywood diamond guy.

Of course, every happy story has a paparazzi ending. As we drove away from the store they started tailing me, and all of a sudden Stella started screaming in the back seat. I was reasonably sure this wasn‘t a late protest of my dress selection.

She wanted another bottle. Like, now. I pulled over in a Petco parking lot, prepared the bottle, and stood there with the back door ajar, trying to feed the baby while hiding from the cameras.

Come on, Stella, we gotta go.
She seemed to finish up, but as soon as we got back on the road, she started screaming again. I was making up silly songs about the designers she‘d seen, trying to find a way to rhyme ―Dolce & Gabbana with ―Bottle‘s coming soon, but nothing was working. We had three paparazzi trailing us now, and if I stopped to take her out and comfort her, they would be all over us. I‘m never hostile to the paparazzi. But I was so frazzled and irate with a screaming infant in the back seat that half a block from my house I lost it. I stopped the car, leaned out the window, and screamed, ―Just fuck off! to the guy behind me. The guy was shocked. He said, ―Sorry, Tori.

As soon as he said that, the road rage disappeared and I immediately felt guilty. That‘s right, guilty. About yelling at a paparazzo. Maybe I should have invited him back for a bottle of milk while I was at it.

Feeling cocky after my ninety percent successful outing with Stella, I was ready to try again. A couple of weeks later there was a sample sale for Splendid kids—an excellent but pricey line of kids‘ clothing. A group of celebrities was invited to go to a showroom in downtown Los Angeles to pick out ten outfits for the spring. It was a really good deal. The sale fell on Patsy‘s birthday and we had a big dinner planned with her gays (my gays were her gays now). So after I finished up my meetings for the day, the two kids and I set off for downtown L.A. to do a little shopping before we met up with Patsy‘s dinner party. That‘s right—me and my two kids. Every mother should be able to handle her own two children, right? It would be double bonus bonding time.

It took us an hour to get downtown. Both kids were fussing.

It was a nightmare. By the time we got downtown it was dark.

We parked in a scary underground garage. (Did I mention that I‘m scared of downtown? I am. It can be a dangerous place, but I‘m probably scared about four hours earlier than everyone else gets scared.) By the time we got upstairs to the sale, I only had fifteen minutes before our dinner reservations. It wasn‘t exactly a leisurely shopping situation.

The showroom was pretty small. I was rushing around with Stella in the double stroller. Liam was running in circles. At some point I looked up from the clothes to check on Liam. I found him surrounded by a group of tall, beautiful, model-type girls. They were feeding him M&M‘s. They apologized, but I said it was okay for him to have a few. Then, as I watched, Liam started feeding the women M&M‘s. They were bending down and Liam, who never, ever shares food, was putting M&M‘s into the mouths of the models—who probably never, ever ate M&M‘s—and loving it. The kid has good instincts.

Finally we left—so late for dinner already!—and I realized that I had no cash to pay for the garage. The security guard told me there was an ATM out on the corner. It was dark. I was scared. But I stood at the ATM, holding Stella, trying to make a withdrawal. Meanwhile Liam wanted to explore. He strayed away from the ATM, first just a step or two, then a bit further. I could see bums halfway down the block. Liam wasn‘t wandering far, but what was safe? It would only take a second for someone to scoop him up and run away. I kept telling Liam to come back to me. He just thought it was a very funny game.

Finally, cash in hand, I loaded the kids into the car. All I needed to do was fold up the double stroller, put it in the back, and hurry to dinner. Now this double stroller—Dean always deals with it. He‘s the stroller unfolder. But now it was up to me and I couldn‘t do it. The two little things—you‘re supposed to unclick them—I knew exactly what to do, but the stupid thing would not unclick. Liam was flushed and hungry. And Stella was screaming bloody murder because if there‘s anything Stella hates it‘s a car that isn‘t moving. I tried calling Dean several times for tips, moral support, anything! But he was on the set of a TV movie. I tried to jam the stroller into the back without folding it, at full mast, but the back door wouldn‘t close.