Finding It: And Finally Satisfying My Hunger for Life (6 page)

I gave him a hug that nearly broke his ribs and said, “Thank you, Lord.”

“Don’t thank Him,” Tom said. “Wolfie passed because he finally decided to crack the book.”

“I heard that,” Wolfie said.

“And?” I asked.

“Well, I guess it’s true,” he shrugged.

With the written test behind him, Tom took Wolfie back to the DMV to get his actual driver’s license. Even though all of us agreed the hard part was over, Wolfie asked me to stay home, explaining that I made him nervous. I was mildly hurt, but at the same time I was a little relieved. I waved goodbye, wished them luck, and made Tom promise to call as soon as there was news.

More than an hour went by without a call from either one of them. I tried calling them, but neither picked up. Wolfie’d had an appointment. They should have already been done. Not knowing drove me crazy. I was standing outside by the front door when they finally drove up. Wolfie was in the driver’s seat with a smile on his face as wide as the windshield, so I knew he had passed.

I looked up at the sky and saw a string of puffy white clouds lined up like chariots. It was a beautiful day.

After my first book,
Losing It
, was published, I was asked intensely personal questions about my marriage, past romances, and drug use. I was mostly questioned about my diet and how I’d achieved my recent weight loss, though people seemed to be equally fascinated with the fact that I
had
gotten fat, as in, How could you have let yourself get that big?

I knew what I was getting into when I wrote the book, so I had no problem with the questions, whether they were about dating Steven Spielberg, life with my ex-husband, or experimenting with drugs. Even though I was best known for playing other people, I was unexpectedly comfortable in this new role as myself. I didn’t really care who knew what about me.

What was there to hide? I’d already told the world I was fat. Now my life was literally an open book. Oprah homed in on the last and only real intimate secret I had left when she asked about
my memoir’s revelation that I had once kissed another woman. It was no big deal. As I learned while doing book signings, for most people, my life’s more prurient moments aren’t as interesting as my history as a reformed fatty. They mostly wanted to hear about my trek through the Valley of the Shadow of Overweightness.

Although happy to comply, I was surprised and unprepared for the pressure of being held up as an inspiration for change. It was one thing for Obama to stand in front of a banner that said “Change You Can Believe In.” It was another for me to do the same. Yes, I had lost weight. I looked different, and better. But was the change real? Would it be long-lasting? Would it be permanent?

Privately, I had trouble believing it was real, even though I’d vowed to keep this new me. I worried I might be a big fat fraud hiding in a thin-person’s suit. I worried that I might let down anyone and everyone who saw me as an inspiration. After all, I hadn’t cured cancer. I had just lost 40 pounds and was living my life. I didn’t understand that these feelings of doubt were normal, part of having good and bad days, part of embracing the idea that, with hard work, good things do happen, and they are real, and they can actually last!

Basically, I had to grow into me as I kept growing—or shrinking—if that makes sense. It did to me, anyhow.

One of my sillier but actually serious goals was: I wanted to be able to walk around the house naked. It wasn’t because I wanted to flash Tom. In fact, it wasn’t even about clothes. It was about getting naked with myself, about being honest and comfortable with who I was at that moment.

Tom thought I was being too hard on myself for having doubts and worries. But then that’s me. I have my issues. One morning we were at the kitchen table, and I told him that, a few years ago, I
had refused to audition for the wonderfully funny sitcom,
Malcolm in the Middle
, because the opening scene had the mom (played brilliantly by Jane Kaczmarek) vacuuming the living room while topless. It didn’t matter that they showed her from the back. I couldn’t do it.

I was still horrified whenever I thought about the time Wolfie had seen way too much of me. It had happened a year or so before I lost weight. I was blow-drying my hair in my bathroom. The door, though slightly ajar due to the position of the sink, was for all practical purposes closed, and other than the sound of the blow dryer in my ear I couldn’t hear anything, including a knock on the door.

Wolfie later said he had knocked, and maybe he had. Either way, he didn’t wait for me to respond. He pushed the door open and barged right into the bathroom, where he came face to face with me as I normally am when I blow-dry my hair: in front of the mirror, with a white terry cloth towel around my waist but nothing on top. Like a wannabe
Venus de Milo
, with arms.

Don’t get me wrong. I didn’t mind being thought of in the same vein as Aphrodite, the Greek goddess of love and beauty. I just didn’t want my boobage admired in person, especially by my son, who gasped, “Oh, my God! I’m sorry, Mom!”

I saw him through a layer of hair. I immediately shut off the blow-dryer, set it on the counter, and pulled up my towel. In my haste, I did more rearranging of my towel than actual covering up of my private parts. I’m pretty sure I managed to expose even more skin.

Wolfie froze. The last time he’d seen my boobs, he was an infant. It was a very different experience for him as a teenager. He swiftly backed out of the bathroom, mumbling another “I’m sorry.”

I never found out what he wanted. By the time I finished my hair and got dressed, he had gone to a friend’s house. I found Tom and told him that I had just caused my son irreparable harm.

“He’s never going to look at boobs the same way again,” I said. “I can hear him in twenty years telling his shrink, ‘Oh yeah, I remember when I saw my mom naked and my life was never the same.’ ”

Tom was not sympathetic.

“Hey, V,” he said.

“What?”

“My life hasn’t been the same since I saw you naked.”

“Ha,” I said, rolling my eyes.

The truth was, Tom hadn’t gotten to see me naked that soon after we started seeing each other. He jokes that, after I’d fall asleep, he’d turn on the light and look. But early in our relationship, I had been extremely self-conscious about taking my clothes off in front of Tom. We had known each other a while before we got intimate. At that point in my life, I wasn’t a slow starter as much as I was careful. Ditto Tom, who had four children from a previous marriage and was reluctant to add another person to that complex situation.

My hesitancy, though, was different from his. It was all mind-body related. As much as I liked him and wanted to be with him romantically, I wondered how he could fall in love with me when I didn’t love myself. I laughed the first time I saw him naked. He had a fine body, but I was nervous, and I have always dealt with stress by cracking jokes. If he had laughed at me, I would have been devastated.

But he didn’t get a chance to see me when I finally stripped to my birthday suit. I made sure the bedroom was dark, the drapes
were pulled, and the lights were off. If I hadn’t been wrapped around him, he would have needed a seeing-eye dog to find me. Tom was allowed to bump into me, but he couldn’t look. It was ridiculous, but it was a process that I needed to go through, and fortunately he was patient enough to put up with me until I quit paying attention to whether the drapes were up or down.

Eventually, I realized the lights had never mattered. It was all about how I saw myself when I shut my eyes and looked at myself from the inside out.

While promoting
Losing It
in different cities, I kept wondering how truly comfortable I was inside my new 132-pound body. It was stupid. I really did like myself better and I was happy with the improvements I had made. I spent all day telling people that, Yeah, I did it and I was proud of myself. And that was true. Yet alone at night in the hotel room, I looked through fashion magazines and battled feelings of inadequacy and fears that I was a fake. I wondered, What the eff was going on?

How could I feel both good about myself and on the verge of a freak out? But hey, as I had to realize, life was full of contradictions and self-doubt, thrills, and victories. I had to get used to the fact that it wasn’t always a perfect picture. A diet is a process of gradual change, and even though it had taken ten months to get where I was, this new lighter me was still too new for me to completely accept or trust.

Never mind the fashion magazines. I also had a hard time with the room service menu. Everything I ever fantasized about doing in a hotel room was listed on the left side and the right side of that tall, slender menu. I closed my eyes and imagined ordering up the most illicit threesome: a starter, an entrée,
and
dessert!

Talk about temptation. But that’s when I would ask myself which version of myself I liked, the new or the old, the fit or the fat, the size 6 or the size 14; then, drawing on every ounce of willpower and self-discipline, I would order up salmon with NO butter and a side of vegetables, and “please, no bread.”

Tom was always helpful on the phone when I was traveling without him, and he offered even more strength when he was with me. I also made sure to stay at hotels with gyms. I had lost weight, but I was still fighting the battle.

Getting naked, as I came to define it, was all about being honest with myself. By the time Wolfie walked in on me in the bathroom, he knew flaws of mine that were worse than any insecurity I had about my body. He had seen me lose my temper, cry from frustration and loneliness, and sit on the couch and stuff my face as if I could never get full. In other words, he had seen way more than my boobs.

We all show more of ourselves than we realize. One time, I pulled off the freeway near my house and stopped at the bottom of the off-ramp. A disheveled man stood off to the side. As soon as we made eye contact, he opened his coat and flashed me. He was completely naked underneath. Shocked, I sped off before waiting for the light to change.

In the aftermath, though, I remembered the pain and desperation in his eyes rather than anything else I saw. He had exposed much more than his body.

When I was on the series
Touched by an Angel
, I wore so many layers of clothing to hide my embarrassing girth that I may as well have been peeling an artichoke at the end of the day when I undressed. But the one thing I could never conceal was the unhappiness in my eyes. To this day, when I’m flipping through channels
and come across one of those episodes, I only see my pain. I want to grab that version of me and tell her it’s going to get better.

While flying home after one trip, I watched a movie starring Kate Winslet, one of my favorite actresses. Though she kept her clothes on in this particular movie, she frequently got naked onscreen and seemed comfortable showing her body. Clothed or not, she conveys enviable self-confidence. I applaud the way she has spoken out about the importance of looking real, as opposed to emaciated, so that her daughters and others of their generation don’t grow up thinking you have to look thin to be beautiful.

Women of my age need that, too. As I had discovered at age 48, feeling healthy and normal has as much to do with being honest with myself as it does with eating right and exercising. When I thought about wanting to walk around the house naked, what I really meant was that I wanted to feel the comfortable confidence that I saw in Kate Winslet’s eyes, whether I was dressed or buck naked. To get there would require more than adhering to a diet over the long haul. I would have to be forthright with my emotions, my relationships, and my dealings with other people. I would have to recognize when I felt less than I was, figure out why, and push myself to be better.