you want to do something but letting your fear of what others will think if you don’t do it perfectly stand in your way.
The party wasn’t a total bust. If I wasn’t going to sing, at least I’d take a stab at dancing. Miss Gorgeous is an amazing dancer, and I’m pretty good too. (Remember that Solid Gold Dancer thing from high school?) The hard part is getting my guts up to dance in public. When we first got out there I wasn’t dancing freely. Dancing openly releases so many feelings: passion, laughter, sensuality, and the purest level of good clean fun. You’d think that pleasure combo would be enough to get me to dance. But, just like with the singing, I worry too much about what people are going to think. What am I afraid of? Why do I even care? But worry often dominates, and throughout the evening I had to conquer it. Being with Miss Gorgeous definitely helped.
Ultimately I let myself relax, danced for hours, and had a great time. It must’ve been obvious, because the next day Miss Gorgeous emailed me to say, “It was good to see you loosen up.” I’d half succeeded. I’d danced the night away. But I would have liked to sing. I knew that the only thing in my way had been me.
Months later I mentioned the party to Miss Gorgeous, and before I said anything about it, he said, “I wish I’d sung something.” It shocked me. Miss Gorgeous is so not that guy. Not the least bit shy and self-conscious – maybe you’d guessed that by the nickname I’ve given him. And so I started to wonder: How many of us at that party were too shy to sing? How many people at that party, and other parties, and in churches and at birthday parties and in our own private showers across the world are silencing ourselves, getting in our own way, missing out on fun that’s practically handed to us on an hors d’oeuvre tray? And what would the world be like if those voices emerged, in a great cacophony of devil-may-care joy? Can’t we teach the world to sing in perfect harmony? Okay, I’m getting a little age-of-Aquarius. But seriously, can’t we do something to support each other? Can’t we make the world a softer, more welcoming place?
I think about this a lot. How we should be gentle to each other, even when we’re strangers. While I was working on Lois & Clark, I lived in Sunland, a horse community in the northeastern valley of LA that gave me the down-home rooted feeling I was looking for to counteract the glamour and stress of Hollywood. I lived there for eight years. I was living alone, sometimes working seventeen hours a day, and that’s no exaggeration. I’d come home in the pitch-dark of night, collapse on my bed, and leave early in the morning. And so it came to be that sometimes I’d leave my trash cans out. Yes, I confess. I was one of those intolerable, disrespectful, thoughtless neighbors – the trash can leaver-outer. No! Not that!
At the end of one long, exhausting day, I arrived home to receive a nasty letter from a neighbor, ranting about how she had to look at my trash cans all day long, and how I had no courtesy and how could I be so rude? I guess I got her point, but I couldn’t help wanting to write her back to say, “Maybe you should find a better way to spend your time than smoking cigarettes and staring out your window at my trash cans all day long.” I know, I know, it brings down the neighborhood. But how about this – the next time you have a neighbor who leaves their trash cans out too long for your taste, what if you just assume that they are spent, busy, depressed, and in need of help, and take your lazy ass over there and move them back. Yeah, I’m a little defensive about the trash cans. I try hard to move peacefully through the world, and I’m sensitive to that kind of judgment from a stranger. If we could all spend a little time thinking people might need a little help, instead of assuming they’re selfish slobs, we might live in a nicer world.
Your world is what you make of it. It’s a collection of steps, one in front of the next, that form a path from your childhood to your present. Sometimes you’re led against your will. Sometimes you want to stop but have to keep going. Along the way you may think you know who you are and what you want. Some elements of that may stay the same forever, and others may change every year. Regardless, you have to take ownership of your destiny and be honest about what you want, even if it’s hard to admit. Even if the people around you don’t think you’re making the right decision.
I didn’t go to my dream college – my top choices were Juilliard, a music school, or Carnegie-Mellon, an engineering school – because my father told me he’d only pay if I studied electrical engineering. (If Juilliard has an electrical engineering program, I doubt it’s very good.) My dad grew up during the Depression. All he knew was the security of work. Being an artist wouldn’t guarantee me anything. My mom, who also came from a poor Depression background, had the same fears. That’s why she always felt like she had to have a job. They wanted our family to feel safe. This is a mentality they were taught, and it didn’t always reflect our actual circumstances. Because the truth is that there are no guarantees in life. You don’t know where happiness is going to come from. I think my dad kind of gets this now. He offered to pay for me to take singing lessons – now! – as a late and sweet endorsement of the choices I’ve made. If only I’d taken him up on it maybe I wouldn’t have been too shy to sing karaoke.
I stuck with acting in spite of the pressures from my family. But then, when Lois & Clark finished up, it was time for me to make another decision that was all my own. Since I was sixteen, I’d wanted to be a mother more than anything else. Psychiatrists would probably say that teenagers who want kids are trying to fix something in their lives – to have someone who loves you unconditionally and who you can control. Fine, maybe there was something true in that for me at that time. (Luckily, I didn’t drop out of high school to have kids.) But one thought that had stayed with me ever since my teen years was that I didn’t want to be a working mother. My mother had worked throughout my childhood. Once when she dropped me off at school, she told me that if she didn’t get going she was going to be fired. My face got very serious and I let her go right away. It wasn’t until days later that she realized I didn’t know what it meant to be fired. I thought that if she were late to work the people at her office would set her on fire. Her work was that evil and horrifying to me. Right or wrong, having a working mom didn’t work for me. I didn’t like it. I was lonely. I constantly begged for siblings. And I vowed that I would give my kids a different childhood.
The working mom vs. stay-at-home mom decision. I’m cautious when I talk about this because I love and appreciate women, and I don’t ever want to sit in judgment. There is no right answer in this debate. It’s a struggle for all of us, and we have to make our own decisions. So much is asked of us – to work, to parent, to look a certain way, to act a certain way. I never judge a woman’s choices because I actually don’t think there is any easy, right way to be a woman in our society. You’re not building either a career or a family. You’re building a life. How it adds up, what feels right, is something only you can decide.
Becoming a mother changed my life. Previously my acting career and my marriage had been the tent poles of my life. But when Emerson Rose was born she became, at once and forever, the center of my world. I was responsible for this small, perfect being. It was up to me to protect her from danger, to introduce her to joy, and to give her the tools to build a life that will make her happy.
People in Hollywood probably thought I was making a mistake by letting my career stall in order to raise my daughter. They either thought I was finished – I was out of the game – or that it was, at most, a quick year off. (Which, of course, it wasn’t.) I could have succumbed to the pressures around me, telling me I was risking my career. I still wouldn’t have changed how I spent my time, but I certainly could have let myself feel torn between what people said and what I knew was right for me. But I made a choice. I ignored my agent. I didn’t pay attention to the decreasing number of party lists I was on, how quickly the phone stopped ringing with job opportunities, or how the free stuff that celebrities always get stopped arriving in the mail. I didn’t want to go back to that insecure hell of being an actress. Especially not now that I was a mom. I had to do what felt right to me.
Suddenly the influences of outside people fell away. I looked deeper than the opinions and reactions of my friends, family, and colleagues. A relative didn’t like the name we’d chosen. Other people told me I should cut my daughter’s hair. She liked to eat pats of butter, plain. People said I shouldn’t, but I let her do it. I had a strong sense of how I wanted to parent, and I wasn’t about