Finding It: And Finally Satisfying My Hunger for Life (11 page)

“Oh Jesus, I said to myself. “I was turning in my mom.”

I didn’t say it as a criticism of her. It was a revelation. My mom, who was undergoing her own transformation, didn’t even want to be that version of herself.

Finally, I packed all those clothes and their memories in boxes, took them to the donation box, and wished them luck. I no longer needed them or wanted the emotional crap I associated with them. Goodbye, good riddance, good luck. The museum of misery, once also known as my closet, was now closed.

Afterward, I grabbed Tom’s arm and led him through the
house, looking for more things to pack up and donate. I wanted to maintain the high. I gushed about feeling that I had a clean slate, a fresh start.

“Did you get rid of everything?” he asked.

“Not everything,” I said. “I kept all the clothes I’ve worn in the past Jenny commercials.”

“And?”

I shrugged.

“I don’t know that I’ll ever be completely done.”

In fact, with that statement, I had a feeling that I was finally starting to figure out the idea of maintenance. I wish I had gotten it earlier, like when I was helping Wolfie practice his driving, and arguing with Tom about warning lights. And maybe I had gotten it then, too; maybe that was all part of the process of getting to this new point of more clarity.

Unlike a diet, with its simple formula of eating fewer calories and getting more exercise, maintenance isn’t as easily defined. Most people, including me, understand it to mean not regaining the weight that we had lost, but maybe not everyone knows that it also means that we have to keep working with change.

I decided that maintenance also has to do with cleaning closets. A diet is only the first step. We have to keep cleaning to remain successful, just as we need to keep ourselves open to the process of change that helped us lose that weight, which will help us keep it off.

For me, this came as a revelation. I had gradually come to understand that maintenance is influenced a little bit by everything I had been going through, from trying to figure out how to deal with my rapidly maturing son, to rethinking the way I related to my mom, to the drumbeat of change coming from Barak Obama’s presidential campaign.

It may have required taking a pile of clothes to Goodwill for me to bring this vision into focus, but one thing became clearer. I liked this new version of me. Even better than being thinner, I liked feeling healthier, and that hadn’t happened simply because I had lost weight. It happened because I had changed the way I live. And now I didn’t want to stop making changes.

Nor could I. If I wasn’t going to use food to deal with issues of insecurity, anger, and anxiety, I had to deal with those issues in some other way.

But where was I supposed to start?

Since I was in Spring Cleaning mode, I decided to focus on forgiveness, the emotional version of cleaning. Why forgiveness? Because I suck at it and needed the practice. Also, I saw it as giving myself and other people permission to not be perfect. It took some of the pressure off. Half jokingly, I told Tom that I was going to start with President Bush and Vice President Cheney.

Then I moved on to forgiving myself for getting fat and punishing myself for things that weren’t necessarily my fault, as well as for things that were my fault but that I should have dealt with differently. I forgave myself for having wasted time in a marriage that had fewer good years than the twenty it lasted. I also forgave myself for the time I had wasted feeling sorry, alone, scared, and ashamed. And that was just the start.

I got into the nitty gritty, like my lack of willpower when I smelled butter and garlic. I did more forgiving than a priest working a double shift in a confessional. Then Tom suggested forgiving the grudges I held against other people. I gave him a look that asked, Why would I want to do something that sensible? He quoted Mark 11:25: “And when you stand praying, if you hold anything
against anyone, forgive him, so that your Father in heaven may forgive you your sins.”

“That’s a lot to throw at me,” I said.

“It was your idea,” he replied.

He had a point—and I had plenty of my own sins that others would need to forgive me for sooner or later. After thinking about it, I did feel better—not entirely, but a little—when I forgave my dad for his support of Bush and Cheney. As for my mom, I had more or less come to terms with her. I had already worked through the things she never talked to me about when I was growing up, like my period or sex, and the way she’d handled it when she learned I was having sex (not well—she’d read about it in my diary and then screamed at me though my locked bathroom door). I also regretted the years I had spent being angry with her for having gained weight. Look what had happened: I’d done the same thing.

It was time to let go and understand that all of us were creatures of habits handed down from our parents and their parents. The people who had taught my parents how to love had also taught them that most of life’s problems could be solved with a loaf of garlic bread. My parents then handed the same tendencies down to me.

It’s what we knew—until we knew better. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to think as simply when I thought about my oldest brother, Drew.

Drew and I have been estranged for nearly seven years. As I recall it, the rift started when I asked him to move out of my house at the beach, where he’d been living in the guesthouse. My parents, who’d moved to Las Vegas, had also lived there. At the time, I was figuring out my divorce from Ed and thought I might have to sell the place in order to survive on my own. As much as Drew may have understood, he still resented me for that decision.

At the end of that December, I had invited my family to spend the holiday with me in Park City, where I worked on
Touched by an Angel
. Everyone came except for Drew. He called on Christmas and the phone was passed around. But when I got on, he was ice cold. It took me by surprise, so I asked, “Whoa, dude, what’s up?” He said, “I’ll tell you what’s up” and then he tore into me, calling me a fake, a lousy sister, a bad daughter, and a self-centered bitch who pretended to love our parents.

“How can you say that?” I asked.

“You kicked them out of the beach house,” he said. “You kicked me out of the beach house. You made promises that you didn’t fulfill.”

“What are you talking about?”

“You know what I’m talking about,” he said.

I broke down sobbing, yet continued to listen to Drew’s complaints and criticisms. Finally, my dad grabbed the phone and scolded Drew. My mom then took a turn defending me. By then, it was too late. Everyone was angry, and our lovely family Christmas was ruined.

Afterward, I reminded myself of my version of the truth: that my parents had moved out of the beach house because the cold ocean air bothered my mom’s arthritis and my dad hated California’s high state taxes, which he swore paid for State Assembly Speaker Willie Brown’s expensive suits. As for my brother, yes, I had asked him to move out of the guesthouse in case I had to sell the property, but I was also pissed at him for not taking care of the property the way I thought he should.

In retrospect, maybe I wasn’t completely forthright with him. As I thought more about what he had said back then, I had a horrific revelation that he might have been right about some things
he’d said. Even though my parents and brothers were defending me in the background at the time, I feared he may have described the real me. Maybe I was all that he had said. My marriage was about to end, I had cheated on Ed, felt unworthy of being loved, and felt just generally worthless. I was at such a low point in my life, why not believe him?

The sting lasted a long time, but eventually I recovered. Sadly, my relationship with Drew didn’t. We moved on in separate directions, connected more by anger and hurt feelings than the good times we had shared in the past. At some point, I wondered if maybe we had unintentionally helped each other kick-start the rest of our lives. Maybe pushing him out of the house had forced him to stand on his own. He definitely had forced me to start facing some ugly truths about myself.

About five months before my spring cleaning, Drew’s wife, Laura, had e-mailed Tom from their home in Washington, asking for tickets to the Van Halen show that was coming there. They wanted to see Wolfie and Ed. Before the show, Wolfie called me and said, “Uncle Drew is going to be here. What should I do?” I told him not to worry, that it would be nice to see Uncle Drew and Aunt Laura and their kids, Calvin and Bailey.

“I’m sure Uncle Drew won’t bite,” I said.

A few hours later, he called back and said that my brother had been “really cool.” He also said it had been nice to see Aunt Laura and his cousins again.

After years of little to no contact with Drew, I felt better that Wolfie had seen his uncle and cousins, and who knows, maybe there was a thawing of the hard feelings. A week or so later, Wolfie e-mailed me several photos he had taken of Drew and his family. I
looked at the pictures and wondered if I would ever try to mend the problem with my brother or if he would reach out to me.

I wasn’t ready to do it on my own, but I was open to the idea— and that was a first step. Maybe the next spring one of us would be cleaning out our closet and…

I showed up in the last place anyone would have expected to see me: a Beverly Hills plastic surgeon’s office. I wasn’t getting a surgical procedure; don’t worry. I was reporting a story for
The Doctors
, a daytime talk show, about “oxygen facials,” a new, highly-touted treatment that was supposed to take years off your face. I didn’t see years disappear; but it felt wonderful.

Indeed, for the hour that I reclined in the chair and let the technician cleanse my face at close range with atomized moisturizers sprayed through a stream of pressurized oxygen, it was pretty darn heavenly. The technician told me that Madonna swore by the oxygen facial. Good for her. I loved the luxury of having an hour of quiet all to myself while someone washed my face for me. (Too bad I couldn’t have someone run the treadmill for me, too.)

Afterward, I marveled at the soft, clean texture of my skin and the way my face glowed. I definitely looked and felt fresher—and
that was good. It was April, and as it happens on the twenty-third of that month, I turn a year older. This year would be my forty-eighth. Tom and I planned to celebrate with a nice dinner in New York City since I had to be there for work.

If celebrating a birthday seems antithetical to an actress, or to anyone in these youth-obsessed times, I am happy to start a new trend. I don’t worry about how it affects my career. I am happy to act my age. I’m grateful to have been blessed with the looks of a girl next door rather than a sex symbol. It provides job security that isn’t as dependent on how young or old I look.

Anyway, the simple reality is, I was going to get a year older whether I liked it or not. I decided to like it. I attributed that healthy outlook to having gotten healthier in general. It was also in keeping with a pragmatism I was trying to apply to maintenance. I would accept the things I couldn’t change and work to change the things I felt were unacceptable.

After my oxygen facial, I thought of my grandmother, who lived until she was eighty-eight. I think she spent most of those years standing in the kitchen, kneading dough, and stirring sauces in large pots on the stove. For her, cooking was child-rearing, exercise, and religion all in one. I laughed softly as I walked from the plastic surgeon’s office to my car. My grandma wouldn’t have understood a facial. I could almost hear her, with total bewilderment, ask, “You pay for someone to do what? Wash your face?”