Finding It: And Finally Satisfying My Hunger for Life (10 page)

“I wish I’d done this sooner,” she said.

“I’m glad you’re doing it now,” I said.

I remember when she called to let me know that she had lost another five pounds. She was bursting with pride. I knew the feeling. I smiled.

“You go, Mom!” I said.

“I don’t care if you’re nineteen or ninety,” she said. “You have to want to do it—and I do. I’m not ready to go yet.”

“Glad to hear that,” I said.

We kept trading information and encouragement. I liked the way we were talking to each other. It might have sounded superficial, a mother and daughter discussing their diets, but as I came to realize, we were relating to each other differently and more positively. For the first time, we were able to open up and talk.

I finally saw my mom as a woman with her own full and complex life, and in her own way, she felt similarly about me. It was no coincidence that each of us felt better about ourselves.

She called one day after seeing me on TV to let me know she was pleased to see me “out of my cocoon,” as she put it, “And no longer hiding out at home and making excuses that you had to take care of Wolfie.”

“I did?” I asked.

“It’s like you rejoined the world.”

“You, too,” I said.

In January, I was at my parents’ house and noticed several brochures for cruises on the coffee table. I picked one up as a distraction from the heated political debate we were having. My dad and I were like fire and gasoline when we talked politics. He was a Bill
O’Reilly—loving conservative who backed McCain-Palin for president and didn’t care that I was vacillating between Hillary and Obama because he thought both were the wrong choice.

“I refuse to get involved,” my mom said. “I just know your dad and I feel everybody in California is way too liberal.”

“That’s getting involved,” I said.

“No, I’m not taking sides,” she said. “But we have to get this country back on track.”

“We aren’t going to solve it here,” my dad said.

“All I want to say is that Bush is probably better off on his ranch,” my mom added.

“Amen,” I said.

Although presidential politics turned us into a bunch of bickering talk radio rejects, we were in total agreement about the progress my mom was making on her diet. Since going on Jenny Craig, she had dropped 19 pounds. Added to the 16 she had already lost, she had shed a total of 35 pounds. She rode her stationary bike daily for an hour while watching a DVD player she perched on a nearby stool. She had gone down a couple of dress sizes. She joked about taking off another five pounds, which would bring her total to 40 pounds, like mine.

“Maybe I’ll keep going,” she said, shaking her head confidently.

“Me, too,” I said, with a wink.

In all seriousness, I let her know that she looked great.

“When you’re young, dieting is about looks,” she said. “At my age, it’s about making it to the next age.”

“I’m with you, Mom,” I said. “It should always be about health and feeling good.”

In February, mom’s weight loss caught the eye of a Jenny Craig executive and at the end of the month they put her in a commercial
with me. We shot the ad on a soundstage in front a fruit-and-vegetable stand designed to make it look like we were shopping. I explained that my mom and I, after losing weight, were now “a size energetic.”

Then she tugged on my arm and said, “Come on, Val, keep up.” She was adorable.

Afterward, we went out to dinner. Despite the dangers of talking politics, we ended up back on the subject of who we should elect as president. This time, I decided to take advantage of my parents’ new openness. I knew they had supported Kennedy in 1960 when we lived in Claymont, Delaware. I asked when they had switched from Democrats to Republicans.

I was surprised to find out that my mom had done a lot more than support JFK. She had been the secretary of the Claymont Democratic Club. After Kennedy’s win over Richard Nixon, she attended a special celebration for volunteers at the White House, where the new president thanked each of them personally.

“Did you meet him?” I asked.

“He spoke to the group,” she said. “A few people might have met him individually. I didn’t.”

“But you were right there with him,” I said.

“He was very good-looking,” she smiled. “I wish that I would have tried harder to shake his hand.”

As for Lyndon Johnson, my mom said she thought he was second rate (“not good enough,” she said) and then, after glancing at my dad, she laughingly said that Nixon was even worse. He agreed. They had voted for Bill Clinton the first time, something my dad admitted so grudgingly I found it funny.

“But after Monica Lewinsky, no, we couldn’t continue to support him,” my mom said.

I looked at my dad.

“No comment,” he said.

“Valerie, this may surprise you,” my mom said.

“What?”

“If Hillary wins the nomination, I may support her.”

“You’re kidding!” I said.

“I want to hear more,” my mom said. “I’m definitely intrigued.”

“Are you kidding?” I asked.

“Never say never,” she shrugged. “You have to keep an open mind.”

I stared at her in disbelief. Was this really my mom? She brightened the table with a satisfied grin. I marveled at her and thought, as I had done so often lately, you go girl.

In mid March, I went with Tom and Wolfie to Hawaii to shoot another new Jenny Craig commercial. This one celebrated the fact I had reached my weight loss goal by showing me catching a wave on a surfboard. I loved the symbolism of being 40 pounds lighter and able to finally lift myself up. I really wanted to convey the joy I felt.

I also hoped I could stand up on the board. For several days, I practiced with Mark, my surf instructor. I loved feeling fit and strong in the water. It was a new experience for me. It was fun. As I said in the commercial, I may have weighed less in my twenties, but I didn’t feel as energetic.

I stayed in the water for hours, practicing my surfing skills. I wanted to feel what I could do in my body. I also wanted to get it right. The
Rachel Ray Show
had also sent a crew to get behind-the-scenes footage, and they were getting a lot of scenes of my behind crashing into the water.

“I’m just going to get up and fall down and get up and fall down,” I complained to Tom and Wolfie.

“You’re in Hawaii,” Tom said. “What’s the problem?”

“Mom,” Wolfie said, putting his arm around me. “You’re going to do great. There’s nothing to worry about—except getting eaten by a shark.”

“Thanks a lot.”

“No, seriously,” he said. “Just keep practicing and you’ll do it.”

He was right. After I was given a long and very stable surfboard, I was able to stand up time after time. I was only riding one and two footers, but hey, the point was to surf—and I was doing it!

For me, the best part was hearing Wolfie cheer for me. As I shot the commercial, I could hear his and Tom’s voice carry over the waves. Several times, a few people jokingly suggested I slip into bikini and show off my new size surfer girl body. I recoiled in horror. I was, like, hell no. Why would I want to ruin a perfectly wonderful trip to Hawaii?

And it was a wonderful trip. Tom and I took long romantic walks on the beach, and I had some pretty great conversations with Wolfie about the tour, his girlfriend, and where he was in his life. It was the kind of conversation that I’d never had with my mom at that age. Thirty years later, we were just learning how to talk to each other.

Before dinner on our last night on the island, Wolfie gave me a hug so big that he literally picked me up off the ground. He was congratulating me on being a successful surfer girl.

“You did good, Ma!” he said.

I looked at him and thought maybe he was right, maybe I was doing good.

A few weeks after we got back from Hawaii, I cleaned out my closet. I always clean it out when I need to regroup and reground myself. It’s not an activity I plan or mark on the calendar; it’s more of a spontaneous action after I spend a few days or weeks telling Tom and anyone else within earshot that I need to clean out my closet.

In truth, I never
need
to clean it. My closet is always pretty neat and organized. In fact, I built it myself—thank you, Ikea and Hold Everything! But somehow I’m drawn to the activity with a weird predictability that makes me think I might have a genetic predisposition or may have been a chambermaid in another life. This time, as I was cleaning, purging, and rearranging, I realized that this exercise had little to do with cleaning. It was about forgiveness.

I had actually started this round of cleanup before we went to Hawaii, jumping in under the guise of finding some cute sundresses
and fun outfits to take on the trip. Instead I had spent a couple of days poking around in there, as time permitted, pulling out a few of the size 14s and 12s and 10s that still lingered on hangers. I looked at them with the surprise of seeing an old classmate, like, what are you doing here? Of course, I was only fooling myself. I knew that, despite my weight loss and public declarations of never returning to life as a size fattie, I had kept them
just in case
.

I didn’t like living with that “just in case” excuse—either in the back of my head or the back of my closet. It was an invitation to failure. Six months earlier, I had cleaned most of my closet thinking that I’d never need those larger sizes again. I had told myself, “Leap—and the net will follow.”

How big of a leap was I really making if I had labeled a tiny portion of my closet “Just in case” or “Remember when”? It was like keeping a bag of M&Ms in a jar with a sign that said, “Break Glass in Case of Emergency.” No, thanks.

So I began removing those items that had migrated steadily from the center of the closet to the fringes where the light never shined. Interrupted by the Hawaii trip, I started back on the closet after we had settled back into a routine. And since I’d been thinking a lot about the concept of maintenance and all that it included, my mindset was different this time. I realized that I was doing more than getting rid of old clothes. I was saying goodbye to the memories I associated with each pair of pants, each dress, each blouse.

I still had some of the “fat” clothes I had purchased when I lived in Park City while working on
Touched by an Angel
and eating myself into a sad stupor every night. One look at those clothes and I was reminded how they were all about covering up and hiding. Next to them were several size 14s I had worn over Christmas
2004, the first holiday I had spent with Tom and we had played touch football with all the kids and my knees had ached after fifteen minutes from my being heavy and out of shape.

I also saw an outfit that I remembered wearing years earlier when I’d had a fight with Ed. Down the rack were clothes that provided more memories, including a two-week period when I was apart from thirteen-year-old Wolfie and had to hear about his homework over the phone. If I shut my eyes, I can remember working all day and then running through the Salt Lake airport to catch a plane home.

Then, as I was about to say, enough, a dress seemed to jump out at me. On closer look, I saw it still had a tag. It was a size miserable and it immediately took me back to those dismal times when I had lain in bed at night in front of the TV, lonely, depressed, isolated, and feeling that this was the rest of my life and I wasn’t ever going to be loved or feel love again, and wasn’t worthy of it either.

I took it out of the closet. I wanted to look at it in the light. It was huge. Worse, it reminded me of something my mother might have worn years ago.