Finding It: And Finally Satisfying My Hunger for Life (18 page)

I didn’t want to be twenty-eight again, but neither did I feel
like I was forty-eight. When my friends asked me how old I felt, I thought about asking if they meant my head, my knees, or my heart; I needed more specifics. Finally I said that I simply felt “older.” And smarter. “But only sometimes.” Which got a laugh.

Looking around the table, I saw that the common denominator among all of us was experience. We weren’t old or older as much as we were experienced. Our different professions aside, we knew about giving birth, raising children, making doctor’s appointments, nursing kids through various ailments, helping with homework. We knew how to feed a family every day, buy a car, and arrange financing for a home. We also knew about love, divorce, and survival. We knew about life.

We knew more than we gave ourselves credit for. All of a sudden, that seemed worth a round of toasts.

“When did age become more important than experience?” someone asked.

“Screw age,” someone else said.

“Here’s to experience!”

“And to wisdom.”

“And to Advil!”

After dinner, we saw
Love
, the Cirque du Soleil show celebrating the music of the Beatles, and then we gambled. I played blackjack. I warned the girls I wasn’t much of a gambler, but I realized that wasn’t true about me—or any one of us making her way through life. With each decision, whether it is taking a job, starting a relationship, raising a child, or something as mundane as getting on an airplane, we all gamble to one degree or another that things will work out the way we want.

We do our best to stack the odds in our favor. We work out,
read books, eat healthy foods, see therapists, arrange for tutors, don’t drink and drive, and fly on good airlines. The biggest bet of all is whether God is real and whether at some point we will have to answer for our thoughts and actions. Who knows?

Where better than a casino, and while holding a glass of white wine, to ponder whether you’ll eventually meet your Maker and answer for your sins?

Back home, I focused on Wolfie’s reapplication to private school. He had attended the school since kindergarten, but after he took off a year to go on tour, I was informed that he would have to reap-ply for his senior year. I had assumed it was a formality. The school knew us, and who would separate a kid from his friends for his last year in high school without good cause? But I didn’t know for sure.

Then there was the X factor—me. For months, I had ignored a To-Do note on my computer. I clicked it away every time it popped up on the screen, reminding me to fill out the application, which was just a couple of short essay questions. I frequently
thought
about filling it out. Several times I got as far as clicking the URL, opening up the file, and reading the questions. But then I would go back to ignoring it.

Finally I figured out the reason for my block, one that I’m sure has driven many mothers to the brink of craziness: I had made it more about me than Wolfie.

I had to come clean with myself. My problem was a bout of raging insecurity. I was, like, Welcome back, old friend. Who let you in? In all seriousness, where had the confident forty-eight-year-old who was toasting experience in Vegas gone? All of a sudden I had turned into Sally Field before she won the Oscar for
Norma Rae
. I was in the kitchen, hoping to get an envelope that would allow me to say, “You like me! You really like me!” After seventeen years of mothering Wolfie, I wanted that re-admittance letter as validation that I had done a good job as his mom.

I still wasn’t sure that I had made the right decision by taking him out of school for eleventh grade so he could go on tour. I felt that I should turn the application into a confession. Forget the questions on the form. I would simply write the truth:

Dear Admissions Office:

Before I screw up my son’s education the same way I did my own, please accept him back in school for twelfth grade. I want him to get his diploma, something I never managed to accomplish, and it bugs me to this day. Also, in addition to re-admitting him, I’d like you to reassure me that I didn’t make a mistake last year by taking him out of school and that I’m not a bad mother.

Sincerely,

Valerie Bertinelli, Wolfie’s mom

When I finally sat down at my desk, I stared at the blank screen, searching for a way to start. I had no idea how to write about my child. One problem was what to say. Another was where to start. The things that came immediately to mind were the things that made me want to wring his neck, and the stories I thought were most endearing and worth sharing had happened between the ages of four and eight. Neither would’ve been appropriate. The school knew him well. In fact, he had probably spent more time there since kindergarten than he had at home.

Tom came in and saw me staring at the photos I have of Wolfie taped to my desk, including an adorable snapshot of him in his
yellow-and-blue soccer uniform. My eyes drifted over the table to the left of my desk where I had a framed black-and-white photo of me in a blousy shirt and black underwear when I was eight-and-a-half months pregnant. It might be the sexiest picture I’ve ever taken.

“Just start,” said Tom, who stood behind me and rubbed my shoulders for a few moments. Then he left and inspiration hit. “Of course,” I said.

On the application, I explained why Wolfie had left the school. I also described his strengths and challenges as a student. With the basics then out of the way, I opened up my heart and addressed the thing that had frightened me in the first place: how this related to me. It was undeniable. If someone asked me how I most identified myself, it would be as not as an actress or spokesperson but as Wolfie’s mom. Most people at that school knew me that way, too. I could not fathom that part of my life ending yet.

I explained how being part of that school provided both of us with a sense of community and family. While I emphasized the part the school played in Wolfie’s life, I realized it was equally important in mine. In light of my personal evolution and the more recent talks I’d had with my girlfriends at Amy’s birthday party in Las Vegas, I saw how vital it was to feel part of a community and connected to people. Our lives were intertwined. They helped give me my identity as a mother. As a person, they kept me afloat on bad days and made the good days even better.

Clichéd or not, it was true. How could I have ever not known what to write? How could they not let him back in?

Years earlier, my dad had been going through old boxes of family heirlooms that he and my mom had carted around from house to
house. After storing some of that stuff for fifty years, he was finally parceling it out to us kids. Among the things I ended up with that day was my grandmother’s rosary. It’s one of my most treasured possessions, something I always have in my purse. In fact, it’s always the first thing I transfer when I change purses. I keep it in its original pouch with a red crocheted cross she made long ago, and whenever I look inside I feel a special, immediate connection to my grandmother.

I didn’t feel quite the same thing when I thought about Wolfie’s school, but it was similar in that the connections run deep and are very personal and laden with memories. Having made that happy association for myself, I could have clocked Wolfie one day when he asked if he really had to go back for twelfth grade.

Up till then, he had been inquiring if we’d heard any news about his re-admission. Seeing my exasperated face, he said, “Don’t get mad. I was just wondering if it mattered.”

Don’t get mad?

Did it matter?

Wolfie had rendered me temporarily mute, which was rare. As I worked my way through feelings of shock, anger, and downright stupefaction, I considered sanely explaining the importance of an education. I also thought I might remind him of the insecurity I had carried around from not having a high school diploma, not to mention how hard a time I was currently having getting back on track to get my GED. I thought about many things I could have said to him, and then I thought I could have Tom speak to him, too.

But I didn’t want to explain some of these things for the one hundredth time. I wouldn’t let myself. So I said, “Why does it matter? Because it does.”

“But why?” he asked.

“Because I said so.”

“But why?”

Suddenly I understood. Realizing he was playing a game with me, I called his bluff.

“Do you really want to know?” I asked.

“No,” he said. “I believe you.”

Not long after that, I heard from Wolfie’s school. He was readmitted. I thanked God. Tom thought I had worried more than was necessary, and I’m sure he was right, but I couldn’t help it. We celebrated by going out to a nice dinner. Before we went out, I changed purses, and the first thing I transferred was my grandmother’s rosary.

“So, have you thought more about getting into a bikini?” asked Jenny Craig executive Scott Parker.

I pushed back from the table and laughed. I knew the question would come sooner or later. The Jenny Craig marketing execs with whom I worked had dropped hints for months. But I didn’t expect it would be put forth as bluntly as it was at that moment. It was early September, and my managers, Jack and Marc, and I were meeting with the company’s executives about extending my contract. They wanted two years and a guarantee from me that I would pose in a bikini.

I liked the idea of two years. It promised security, as well as monthly weigh-ins. But I didn’t want to guarantee anything in my life, especially that I’d step in front of a camera in a skimpy, two-piece bathing suit.

“I’m thinking about it,” I said. “But I don’t want to commit.”

Truth be told, I had already made up my mind. I knew that I was going to eventually get into a bikini. I didn’t know when. I didn’t like the idea of a timetable that I didn’t set. But I knew that I was going to do it.

It was my secret. I had decided six months earlier when I was in Hawaii with Tom, shooting my surfing commercial. After we finished, Tom and I stayed an extra day to shoot a segment for the
Rachael Ray
show. They had flown out a vivacious young police officer who had lost a significant amount of weight and wanted to wear a bikini for the first time. According to the plan, I was supposed to provide her with the you-go-girl type of encouragement she needed to get into a skimpy two-piece and show off her new body. But she didn’t need any prodding from me. She put on her bikini, slipped off her robe, and paraded in front of everyone without any inhibition. She had worked her ass off to lose weight and was more than ready to let the world see her remarkable before-and-after transformation. I just stood back and watched. She was so ballsy and fun. Her face said everything: “I am here. I am hot. And I like myself.”

Instead of following the script line of my inspiring her, she inspired me. Before we finished the segment, I confided that I secretly wanted to do what she had done. I wanted to get my butt in a bikini, too. But—

She didn’t give me time to finish.

“You can do it,” she said.

Until then, I honestly didn’t know if I could. But seeing her sashay confidently and proudly in her tiny bathing suit planted a seed. One thing about me, I can’t resist a challenge, especially one I pose for myself.

However, I had another question. Did I
want
to get in a bikini?
I didn’t know how much work it would take, but I had spent nearly a year losing 40 pounds and I knew that even that wasn’t enough to be in bikini shape for me. I also knew that no matter what was required, I was going to have to do more than get into the best shape of my life. The challenges would also be mental and emotional, as well as physical.