I'll Scream Later (No Series) (29 page)

They had to shoot it over and over—they kept shooting with different types of underwear to see which one would cover my butt the best.

Ironically, everything that I had to go through to shoot the scene made the opposite point—I couldn’t have ended up feeling much worse about my body than I did after shooting that day.

I remember asking for body makeup. When I was getting smeared with the makeup, one of the girls who thought I couldn’t read lips kept pointing to different spots saying, “Get that spot there.” Maybe she was trying not to hurt my feelings, but she did. I would rather she had just said something to me.

I’ve always had issues about my body. My kids tease me because they never see me in shorts or bathing suits. I don’t want to tell them it’s because I don’t feel comfortable with my body. That’s not a message I want to send them, particularly not my daughters.

It would take
Dancing with the Stars
to help heal that part of my psyche.

I
N SIFTING THROUGH
all of the boxes that hold bits and pieces of memories and moments in my life, I unearthed an old letter from my mother. She sent it in April 1995. There’s no clue that any particular event triggered the letter, it just feels that she wanted to tell me something that had probably been on her mind for years. Make it official. Here’s part:

“I am sixty-four years old and whatever I am, whatever my personality is, not much is going to change it. If I could change it, I would have to unwind my mind, much like a movie reel and start over again.”

She talked about her role as Jewish mother, adding that it wasn’t all “chicken soup and eating, but working your butt off trying to instill a real sense of values.”

Then she got to the heart of what she wanted to say: “I want my children to accept me as I am and not attempt to change whatever I am today…to sum it up, please don’t try and change me.”

It got me thinking a lot about family—the one I grew up in and the one I am trying to build with Kevin. I never want to write a letter like that to my children—closing the door on the possibility of changing our relationship. It felt like a replay of all the times as I was growing up when the door closed and she retreated to her bedroom if she was having a bad day.

I’m working to cherish my kids but also to really know each of them as they grow and change. I want our relationships to grow and change, too; I never want that evolving to stop.

I learn something every day, and I spend a lot of time thinking about my relationship with my mom as Kevin and I make decisions
about our kids’ lives. I hope that whatever path I choose along the way, whatever choices I make, something positive will come out of it.

I know in my heart that parenting is a lifetime of work, and with four kids it is forever a blend of joy, discovery, and chaos—lots of chaos. Here’s a snapshot of my family and our life.

We are a well-oiled machine. When morning comes, and it comes early, everybody is up and getting ready to go—to school when its in session, to classes during the summer. Breakfast is simple, from cereal and juice to eggs and toast. A nanny helps during the day, but Kevin and I are hands-on parents, from making treats for their classes, driving them to school, guitar lessons, football practice, dancing lessons, making school lunches. No overnight nannies unless I’m out of town.

My favorite time is picking them up from school. I love it when they pile into the car with stories about the day spilling out all around me. I want to scoop up and save all of those moments—knowing who their friends are, how Brandon’s math test went, what picture Isabelle drew in art class, what joke Tyler played on his best friend.

It is amazing to watch these four personalities emerge—each so different, so unique.

Sarah, my oldest, is MIT—Marlee in training. She is a free spirit, extremely friendly, and everybody she meets falls in love with her.

She’ll be thirteen by the time you are reading this, and I’m already starting to feel the pressure of those teenage years. There’s a boy she likes, but thank goodness it is all still innocent. I try not to take the teenage rants personally—I know this pulling away, this clash with me, is the natural order of things.

Maybe because we had Sarah to ourselves for her first four and a half years, she’s both a mommy’s and a daddy’s girl. Both Kevin and I are extremely close to her, but she’s very independent. Always has been. No crying on the first day of school—that was me with the tears!

I just love seeing her bloom, whether it’s watching her swim (she’s an absolute fish in the water with natural ability) or dancing (she loves hip-hop) or singing, playing guitar, and especially writing songs, something that she’s gravitating to more and more as she
grows older. She is also an incredible soccer player and has a wicked sense of humor…like me.

She’s very much a cross between a tomboy and a girlie girl. She has the most beautiful lips—Angelina Jolie lips—that most people would kill for: but she is a teenager, so of course she hates them. She is a social butterfly, adores clothes and loves shoes as much as Carrie Bradshaw. I think about two hundred pairs are in her closet!

Brandon is Kevin in miniature—all he needs is a mustache. He’s calm and steady, centered, which is remarkable to see in an eight-year-old. Yet he’s sentimental and caring and absolutely such a handsome little boy.

Brandon has the two most beautiful dimples you could want a child to have. When Sarah was born, the first thing I noticed was the dimple on her right cheek and her beautiful hazel eyes. When I saw Brandon, he had these two deep, deep dimples, dark hair, and dark brown eyes.

In Brandon, I got my sports fanatic. I wanted to take the love and devotion for the Chicago Bears in my head and plant them in his—I didn’t have to try too hard. He lives and breathes football. He plays flag football, and you’ll hardly ever find Brandon without a football in his hand. He even takes his football to bed with him at night, and the helmet is always close by. On Sundays during the season, if I’m not right there beside him, he’ll come running in to give me updates on the score. We’ll high-five with each score and moan over every setback.

Brandon is such a sweet boy, reserved, polite, and loves school almost as much as he loves football. He’s a natural at all sports—he plays baseball, soccer, football, and loves basketball, too. He hasn’t tried hockey yet, but I’m guessing that he’ll get around to that, too. I can see him having his heart broken by his first love (grrr!).

Tyler is mischief with a killer smile. We are alike in many ways. If you put one of my baby pictures next to Tyler’s, it’s almost impossible to tell them apart. He’s my total entertainer! He has blond hair, aqua-blue eyes, and is 100 percent Matlin.

When he was younger, he loved to rummage around in the closets and dress up and use his imagination in the most creative ways. Tyler is very much my out-of-the-box thinker.

People love him because he’d so engaging, funny—he calls me Sugar Mama and shimmies his shoulders! He’s definitely a handful! He’s a gymnastic whiz, and though he was a little slower to take to water, now, like Sarah and Brandon, he’s a fish and loves it.

I remember how much I hated being away from him when I was shooting
What the #$*! Do We (K)now!?
When I got back, I was so worried that after those weeks away he wouldn’t remember me.

I flew in, and as soon as I got to the house, I jumped into a shower—I wanted to wash away anything that wouldn’t seem familiar to him.

Then I walked in his room. He was lying there and looked at me and gave me the biggest, toothless grin. I picked him up and held him so close and sat down on the bed and nursed him. It was one of the most special moments, and I knew then we had a bond that nothing—not time, not distance—could break.

All of my kids are close, but Tyler and Isabelle are just about inseparable. They’re just seventeen months apart, so Tyler was still such a baby when Isabelle arrived that they’ve really grown up together.

Where Tyler is so outgoing, Isabelle is my shy one. Nothing, but nothing, gets past Isabelle—she’s very observant. She’ll check everything out before she approaches anyone or anything.

She’s so pretty, she naturally attracts attention. We are forever having people, strangers really, coming up to gush over her. But she’s like a little cat—she wants life on her own terms and sets the boundaries. Get too close and you’ll hear Isabelle’s infamous
Noooooooooo;
it arches like a cat’s back into highs and lows.

But Isabelle trusts Tyler. If it’s a new situation, she’ll get behind him, feel his vibe, and if it’s okay, then she’ll approach. While most of my kids love the camera, Isabelle has never been too keen on it. She doesn’t like the attention. But when school started in the fall, the pictures came home this year with Isabelle’s beautiful smile—like Tyler’s, with two dimples.

When Isabelle was born, we had a crowd at the hospital. I was in the recovery room for a couple of hours, so by the time they rolled me back to my room, everyone had seen the baby. Just as I got there, someone teased, “So who’s Isabelle’s daddy? Where’s the UPS guy?”

Isabelle had a head of jet-black hair, and the UPS guy, whom I had a huge crush on, had black hair, too. Cute, funny, not my baby’s daddy!

I got a visit from my longtime friend Bernard Bragg not long after Isabelle was born. He’s done something special for each of my kids, but let him tell you:

“Here is this story, our favorite. When Marlee had her first child, Sarah, I bought a U.S. savings bond to help open the baby’s first bank account. A few years later when Marlee gave birth to her second child, Brandon, I had to follow suit. Before long, Tyler, the third, came along. I sportingly helped open his account in the bank. For her fourth darling, Isabelle, I mustered up a smile and said to Marlee, ‘Here is yet another bond to open her bank account, and I’ll have to close mine for good.’ To this, Marlee vowed not to have any more so as to save me from a life of poverty.”

Four is definitely a full house. So many days I wish for one or two more hours, there’s so much to do. For a while Sarah was in a pre-school for both hearing and Deaf children to help her learn sign language, but over the years we’ve developed a sort of hybrid language of our own to communicate. So I don’t feel left out of their lives.

Still, one of the hardest things for me as a mother is not being able to hear what’s happening in another room—it makes it almost impossible for me to know who started what, the daily back-and-forth that comes with four kids. Kevin is good at monitoring that sibling back-and-forth, so he plays cop all the time, during the day, then at home, too. Kevin is one of the most involved fathers you could imagine. He is very much a part of their lives every single day. He is my rock; he is theirs, too.

Dinner in our home starts at five thirty because it’s never hurried and then it takes an hour and a half to get them all ready for bed. Unless I’m out of town, we always have dinners together. It’s fun and loud and messy—I love it! Kevin finally got a toy micro
phone so that when it gets too rowdy with everyone talking, we can pass the microphone to one of the kids—he who has the microphone controls the floor!—then after a few minutes the child has to pass it along to someone else.

The china cabinet in the dining room covers most of one wall. It is filled with art the kids have made over the years, and to us everything in it is priceless. We’ve saved everything they’ve ever made for us—from the smallest crayon doodles on a scrap of paper to elaborate collages. We have boxes and boxes already, so I guess we’ll have to expand the storage unit before they’re all grown up.

I try in vain to teach the kids to clean up after themselves—do their chores—and just be themselves.

Nighttime, bedtime, is all about reading—they read to me or Kevin, or we read to them—and talking. Kevin is always there, and we make sure everyone gets tucked in and kissed good-night.

Here I am at the Oscars 1998 wearing an exquisite Escada gown. And on my arm is my leading man for life, my husband and best friend, Kevin Grandalski. (Credit: Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images)

W
E DON’T LIVE
in the Hollywood dream machine—that was a decision Kevin and I made long ago, and we’ve never doubted that it was the right thing to do for our children. Our neighborhood is like any other family suburb you might drive through: nice homes, no mansions. We have a corner house with a big yard where lots of the neighborhood kids congregate to play. Most days you’ll find a couple of Razor scooters on the front walk, and there’s a jungle gym out back.

I try to avoid the image of the Hollywood mom—it never felt natural to me. When treats need to be baked for school, you’ll find me in the kitchen with the kids mixing up oatmeal/chocolate-chip cookies, one of my specialties, or slathering frosting on cupcakes.

When it was my turn to handle the reading circle for Isabelle’s pre-K class, I changed it up a little. When the kids asked why I “talked funny,” I explained to them I was Deaf and that I had another language, but it was one they could learn. So they started throwing out words, and I’d teach them the sign. “Red.” “Spider.” “Monkey.” The kids had such a great time that two other classrooms asked if I could come in and teach them, too.

Saturdays around our house are sports days all day. We spend most of it going from one game to another. I’m like any other parent, standing on the sidelines cheering my kids on. Some of the parents are scared to approach me; others treat me like another parent, and that’s the best because that’s what I am.

I do have to admit, while I love being involved with my kids and their various activities, and I loved almost everything about Sarah’s time in Girl Scouts, I didn’t do so well with the mother-daughter campout. It wasn’t the cooking or the cold showers or the bathroom facilities, it was the claustrophobic attack that came about 1 a.m. when I woke up and felt the tent was going to close around me. I ran outside into a night as black and as claustrophobic as the tent.