Now I needed to stop throwing up. I had morning sickness, but for me, it was also afternoon and night sickness. The day would slowly edge into misery. I wondered if it was karma for all the interviews I’d done talking about how blissful pregnancy was. Maybe because it was a boy, my hormones responded completely differently this time around. Isn’t that the old wives’ tale?
In a move that will go down in history as not one of our better ones, we booked a three-week trip to Hawaii for the end of December and beginning of January. We announced the pregnancy on my social media, this time with a Christmas photo of Maxwell on the beach with “Big Sis” written in a heart in the sand in front of her. I also had to announce that I was stopping the Weight Watchers diet but would return to it as soon as I could.
We had three waves of family and friends coming to visit the house in Hawaii. It was rainy, and I spent most of the trip in the theater room of the house we rented, Eric joking that as people came to visit, I became more and more like Howard Hughes. The hermit tycoon hiding in the dark room, only rubbing her belly.
Right before we left for the trip, we fell in love with Ozzy Osbourne’s house, which was for sale in Hidden Hills, so we spent much of the trip sealing up the details with our realtor. I had always liked Hidden Hills when I’d lived nearby in Calabasas. Ozzy also had his own studio in the house, and I thought it was just perfect for our family—once I redecorated, of course.
That spring was about transitioning to the new house, with Willie Nelson and Neil Young albums as the soundtrack to our lives. I even had a tapestry embroidered to hang over Ace’s crib with a verse from “Harvest Moon,” one of my favorite Neil Young songs.
When June 30, the day of his C-section arrived, they asked me in the OR what kind of music I’d like to have playing. Oh, I should play Neil Young, I thought. Ace would recognize that music from hearing it so much at home. But I wasn’t thinking clearly.
“Neil Diamond,” I said.
The nurse paused. “Like ‘Sweet Caroline?’ ”
“Oh gosh, no no no no,” I said. “Neil Young. ‘Harvest Moon.’
He was seven pounds, four ounces, a little guy in comparison to his big sister. We took him home to our new house, and again Eric rose to the occasion. Maxwell, who was about fourteen months, started pretending to diaper her dolls to be like mommy and daddy.
When you have a second child, you wonder if your heart will divide to accommodate another child, but it just expands and gets bigger. Each time I put them to bed, there was a feeling of gratitude. I couldn’t believe they were all mine, and I had made these perfect beings with my best friend.
I held on to that gratitude, sometimes gripped it tightly to withstand a sudden, unexpected wave of anxiety. I’d been pregnant back-to-back for two years, and now I was no longer able to turn inward in a positive way. I felt overwhelmed by the return of my old demons. I am wired to stay awake until everything is complete, and when you have two kids under two, there is always something to worry over. I have more sympathy for myself now than I did then, which I know is the story of a lot of women’s lives. We are kind in hindsight.
I had these two babies, and I was trying to catch all these firsts and savor every second. I wanted to still be intimate with my husband as my system tried to reset itself—and once the hormones stopped fluctuating, I had no idea what that would even look like. Even with the children outside my body, we were still so strongly connected that their emotions and needs crowded out mine. Was I anxious because of something I was feeling, or was I picking up on Maxwell’s distress about not having a need met in that one second because I was trying to breastfeed her brother? Where did I end and begin? Did it even matter?
I was able to talk about these feelings with Eric on our walks, getting in my steps as I rejoined the Weight Watchers program, working my way back to a healthy weight. The investors in the Collection gave me a grace period before I got back to the business of being famous and out there. My mother had poured all her heartbreak and creative energy into building the brand. She was phenomenal, but the brand needed its face back.
“We need you to be relevant,” someone told me. Oh, that word. Relevant. I turned that one over in my mind. How was I irrelevant? Being relevant to them was about my going places and being photographed, whether it was appearances for the collection or being some aspirational version of Jessica Simpson. I also put pressure on myself because I was fully aware that I needed to be fully connected to my brand. It was my face that sold it. But this—being a mom—was the person I aspired to be. But “relevant” dug into an insecurity I had: Other than planning a wedding, I really didn’t know what was next.
Eric and I didn’t need a big wedding to prove our love. We had each had our dream weddings already. And then my publicist and best friend Lauren told me a magazine wanted to buy the exclusive and said what they were willing to pay. The offer would cover a huge celebration, not so much for us, but for all our loved ones.
“Hunh,” I said. “I guess I’m having a big wedding then.”
We were already in the habit of hosting huge parties at our house. Two- to three-day extravaganzas where all our friends gathered to share one another’s company. Any excuse would do, and we always had a blast. We had it to share, and this wedding would be like one of those parties on steroids.
There was one last thing I wanted to do. When I next visited my beloved Nana and Papaw, it was for the Thanksgiving after Ace, Papaw’s namesake, was born. At that point, Papaw was suffering from dementia and was unable to retain information. I watched my strong grandmother, my prayer warrior, being so protective of her husband of sixty years. We sat in the living room, and she held my hand. I shared my memories of Papaw, and him taking the snakes from the grass for us. I looked up at her wall, which still had pictures of me and Nick.
“Nana, I love you so much,” I said. “But you have to let me help you take those pictures down. I have babies with another man. Eric is going to be my husband. He already is in my heart.”
She nodded. She would do that for me.
My grandfather, Acy “Ace” Drew, passed away on December 4. The Waco Tribune-Herald ran a big obituary. One of the lines read, “Coach Drew’s grandchildren were the apple of his eye.” It was so meaningful to me that he was alive when my dream of a family came true and that he and his namesake shared the same earth, if only for a short time.
25
Ever After
July 2014
Just be in the moment, I told myself the morning of the ceremony. Be here. Be present.
I woke in our cottage at San Ysidro Ranch and looked out at a garden of roses. I had chosen this place to start our marriage because it felt like our first home: everywhere you looked there were flowers or ivy climbing a wall. As if a good witch had spun around, raising a collection of enchanted cottages from the earth. For a while I had been blocked on what I wanted my wedding to be. I didn’t want it to be opposite of my first wedding, but it had to reflect who I was. I found myself going back to the book I loved, Great Expectations, and its 1998 film adaptation. The movie captured what I loved about the book, a delicate beauty that’s been worn and softened with the passing of time.
Eric, always moving if he was not perfectly still in meditation, was already outside welcoming the day. Carol was looking after our kids in her cottage. They adored her and called her Cici. This was the slight calm before the storm of the day, probably the last minutes I would have alone. I had spent six months planning every detail for this wedding weekend for 275 guests. I let myself get too stressed about it. It was the wrapping-paper thing I do—where I overthink how I package a gift for someone when they’re only going to tear through it to get to what matters. I overworked myself on every detail, but Eric and I did really want this wedding to be for our friends. It was a thank-you and a love letter in one, a hug back for the support they’d given us in love and in parenting. This was as much about them as it was about us.