Prologue
February 2019
The kids are asleep, and my husband is reading in the other room. So, it’s just you and me.
Every night after we put our children to bed, I come down here to the study to write. It’s cold here in Los Angeles, so bedtimes have been creeping later. My daughter Maxwell is six now and my son Ace is five, and they have the kind of energy that needs to be burned off outdoors or it will just add up like a bill that needs to be paid at the end of the night. The poor kiddos have to be at school at seven a.m., so getting them down by eight or eight-thirty is tough. Swimming has always helped—my kids are fish—but it’s been too chilly for the pool. Sometimes, as they are racing around the house, I think back to when I was their age in Texas, and I can’t remember having all this energy. But I guess I was busy, at dance class every day and then nights at church.
This afternoon my husband Eric set big drop cloths in the backyard as an activity for them. He’s done this for years, laying out paints and brushes so they can have at it. He says it’s like therapy. A way to get out all your emotions. I panicked the first time I saw them throwing paint.
“It’s washable, babe,” Eric said.
“Don’t do this at anybody else’s house, okay?” I yelled, pulling a face as Ace upended a cup of yellow paint on a canvas. “This is just for here.” I am Southern, so manners matter. Say please and thank you, and don’t throw paint at playdates.
Eric would let them paint the whole house if I’d be okay with it. He’s this amazing blend of athlete and hippie, a pro football player who did yoga on the sidelines at Yale while everyone else ran sprints. I usually join in on painting, but I am so pregnant with our daughter Birdie that today I just sat and watched, hoping that if I just shifted one more time, I would somehow get comfortable. Spoiler: Nope.
Still, I was present. I kept a promise I made to myself a little over a year before to show up in my own life. To feel things, whether they were the result of bad memories, or good ones in the making. Like the gold of the setting sun hitting Maxwell’s face as she knelt on the grass to draw freehand, the quick moves of a girl who is sure of herself. And Ace, stepping back to look at all the paints before committing to action. Just like me, he quietly observes and then has that moment where he tilts his head back and just does, every premeasured stroke of color seeming spontaneous.
We divide and conquer at bedtime. Eric takes Ace, who wants every minute he can get playing with Dad. I take Maxwell, who still lets me sing “Jesus Loves Me” with her every night. I know you might be thinking of the singsongy “Jesus Loves Me,” but I do the version from The Bodyguard. The one where Whitney and her onscreen sister whisper-sing a slowed down, wistful version. Maxwell and I list off all the friends and family we are praying for, and then we sing, “Jesus loves them, oh, yes He does . . .”
Lullabies came hard for me. My first night home from the hospital with Maxwell, I was afraid to sing to her because I didn’t know if I could sing quiet. I’ve never had to sing where I didn’t have to perform. Aim my voice for the back of the arena. I remember thinking, Should I just sing “The Star-Spangled Banner” quietly? If I tried “Amazing Grace,” I knew I would get the Spirit and bust her little eardrum. It was like I was in an SNL sketch about the over-singing pop-star mom. Whitney saved me.
Tonight, in Maxwell’s room, when prayers were done, I got up from sitting on the bed—which takes some strategic planning when you are seven months pregnant—and I was about to slip out. Maxwell is not one of those kids who need you to stay until she’s asleep. I love that she is her own girl and she will let you know it. But tonight, just as I went to turn off the light, I heard her little voice.
“Will you rub my nose?” she asked.
“Yes, baby.”
This is something I did with both my kids when I breastfed them. I sat with them in my rocker, and stroked the bridges of their nose lightly, back and forth. Each stroke, an I love you, I love you, I love you. The times they ask for this are growing further apart, and I know that one of these times will be the last one. There are so many firsts to raising kids, and parents are told to catch them all. But they don’t warn you about the lasts. The last baby onesie. The last time you tie their shoes. The last time they think you have every answer in the world.
As I rubbed her nose, Maxwell settled in to her pillow and sighed. I looked down at her closed eyes. She is growing up so fast, I thought. Just on the edge of the age I was when I began beating myself up when I fell short of perfect. A few months back, we were in the kitchen at lunchtime. I gave her tomato soup and I asked her if she wanted some bread.
“Bella told me bread makes you fat.”
You are six, I thought.
“Maxwell, bread does not make you fat,” I said. “And I don’t understand why you would think about that.”
“Well, Bella’s mom does not eat bread.”
“Well, you’re gonna eat bread.”
“Oh good,” she said, and paused. “Because I really love bread.”
“You listen to what your mommy says,” I said. “Don’t listen to someone else’s mommy.”
I even put extra butter on that bread. As I did so, I thought How does she even know what “fat” is? It was a wake-up call. She already has this world to grow up in, and I want her to feel safe enough to love herself and the body that God gave her. Not waste the time I did being cruel to myself. Standing in front of the mirror at seventeen, pinching a tiny vice grip of stomach fat until I bruised, because the first thing I heard from the record company after I signed was, “You’ve got to lose fifteen pounds.”
Maxi is one of the reasons I am writing this book. It’s also a commitment I’ve made to you, though it’s hard sometimes to look back on some moments in my life that I spent years, okay, decades, trying to forget. For me, sitting down here with a piece of paper and a pen is like, “Hello, self! What are we gonna confront tonight?”
This was supposed to be a very different book. Five years ago, I was approached to write a motivational manual telling you how to live your best life. The Jessica Simpson Collection had become the top-selling celebrity fashion line, the first to earn one billion dollars in annual sales. I delivered the keynote at the Forbes Power Women Summit and Women’s Wear Daily was talking up how smart I was to make clothes that flatter all silhouettes. (Hello, I’ve had every size in my closet, so I’d better be inclusive.) I was a boss, and I was supposed to tell you how to make your dream come true. You too could have a perfect life. Like me.
The deal was set, and it was a lot of money. And I walked away. Nobody understood why.
The truth is that I didn’t want to lie to you. I couldn’t be honest with you if I wasn’t honest with myself first.
To get to this point, to talking to you right here in this moment, I had to really feel. And I hadn’t been doing that. Up until a few years ago, I had been a feelings addict. Love, loss—whichever, whatever, as long as it was epic. I just needed enough noise to distract me from the pain I had been avoiding since childhood. The demons of traumatic abuse that refused to let me sleep at night—Tylenol PM at age twelve, red wine and Ambien as a grown, scared woman. Those same demons who perched on my shoulder, and when they saw a man as dark as them, leaned in to my ear to whisper, “Just give him all your light. See if it saves him. . . .”