As life calmed down, there was time. At first, the feelings would come like a chill, the kind where you quickly rub your arms up and down and shake it off. I’d get up quickly or run my hands through my hair to pull it back tight, physically moving to push the thought away. “Somebody has just walked over my grave,” we used to say about those unexplained shivers of foreboding.
But I knew what was buried. This feeling of being alone and scared in the dark was one I’d had since I was abused as a child. As this new loss brought me closer to the original one, when I lost my trust, I was a girl again, frozen, unable to use her voice to tell someone to stop. Thinking this darkness had sought her out because there was something wrong with her.
First, I numbed the pain with a drink. As soon as I felt it creeping in, I filled one of my closed gold-glitter tumblers with a straw. This wasn’t to hide it—I never did—but maybe to mask from myself how much I was actually drinking. I’d forget, go to pick it up, and the emptiness would surprise me. Like it had just evaporated. But I knew. You’re drinking way too much, I would think as I took the next sip of a new one.
Then I started drinking in advance of those feelings, like taking a seasickness pill before bumpy waters. And do you know what? For a while, it worked. I kept it up, no matter what time it was. I could be absent while in the room with my parents at gatherings, but the second my kids needed something, I would be right there, laser-focused on them. I would be hungover, braiding hair, making lunches, fighting to be present.
We hosted more and more parties, which were still fun. I don’t regret any of them. I just wish Eric and I didn’t drink so much at them. We began to get disconnected. He would pick up on the energy of others, acting like he was Jim Morrison living out this rock-and-roll life, and I would stay in one spot while people around me passed out. I’d put blankets on them to tuck them in. I was jealous that sleep so came easily to them, but also grateful they were there.
I was able to drink so much when others couldn’t because I had a secret. I’d found a doctor, what in L.A. you call a rock doc. “What will help me lose the most weight?” was my very first question.
It’s awful to remember me saying those words, but my vanity had returned, despite all the work I had done to accept myself. Frankly, I liked how people treated me when I was skinny. Any extra pound would add to my vulnerability, and I was feeling fragile enough as it was because the family I’d grown up with as my rock had disintegrated. I thought if I was skinny, I was powerful.
He prescribed a stimulant at a high dosage. The stimulant kept me alert, no matter how much I drank. Alcohol is a depressant, but the two substances didn’t balance each other out in my body. No, they competed in some terrible chemistry experiment on my liver. I should have passed out from all the alcohol, but my body kept going because of the stimulant. Then I would shut the whole system down when I went upstairs. An Ambien brought the runaway train to a screeching halt.
I had no idea what I was doing to my body. And then I found out.
I WAS TURNING THIRTY-FIVE IN JULY, SO I PLANNED TWO GIFTS TO MYSELF: A trip to Saint Bart’s for all my friends and a partial tummy tuck. The surgery wasn’t for weight loss—I weighed 107 pounds when I planned the surgery. I wanted to get rid of the stretch marks and loose skin left sagging from my back-to-back pregnancies. I was so ashamed of my body at this point that I wouldn’t let Eric see me without a white T-shirt on. I had sex with it on and even showered with it on. I couldn’t bear to look at myself. I need to say this: if you have stretch marks from pregnancy, I hope you can be proud that your body created life. I was not strong enough. It touched all my insecurities, and I couldn’t handle it.
I planned the procedure for two weeks after I got back from Saint Bart’s, a trip I wanted to be an adults-only blowout. I hired a private jet to take thirty of us down for a weeklong stay at Le Sereno, which is right alongside a beautiful turquoise lagoon. I invited my mom, who had just gotten engaged to her boyfriend, Jon, so I decided not to invite my dad. Ashlee stayed home because she was pregnant and due at the end of the month. Because the trip was for my friends, I spared no expense, renting his and hers yachts, Jet Skis, the whole nine yards, and then thrown in nine more. I got my girlfriends the same glittercups I drank from, each emblazoned with her name and the number 35. I was not sober for a minute of the trip.
On my birthday, my assistant Stephanie got a call. It was my doctor.
“I have to talk to Jessica right now,” he said.
Stephanie said it would have to wait. “It’s her birthday.”
“I am her doctor,” he said. “Put her on.”
“Okay.” She came and got me.
He was direct. My plastic surgeon may have approved me for the surgery in two weeks, but he would not. “I am looking at your liver levels,” he said. “You could die.”
I had a drink in my hand. I sipped. “What?”
“Jessica, you need to stop everything for three months before you can have this surgery. Everything.”
That seemed somehow more definitive than “you could die.” I was killing myself with all the drinking and pills. “Okay,” I said.
I hung up and told the girlfriends around me what the doctor had said. I sipped again. Stop, a voice said. I ignored it. I would stop when I got home in a couple of days. It was my birthday after all.
I told Eric. We were in a sort of shared spiral, both of us in denial about how much we were drinking. I’m sure we were wasted when we talked about it. I would deal with it later, I decided. Why ruin a trip? I had lived in this state of emergency for so long that it felt comfortable.
We went out that night, all of us boarding a bus to take us to a burlesque bar. It was a fun night, and I was able to further distract myself from what the doctor said. Eric drank too much tequila and got argumentative with one of his friends. He resolved it, but on the bus back to the hotel, he started laying into me about the doctor’s call. It was like he realized what it meant and wanted to shock me into taking it seriously. He accused me of neglect, not so much as being a bad parent, but because a mom shouldn’t be so selfish that she would risk her life. “Don’t leave us,” he said, right there in front of my mother and my friends.
He still says it was not his finest moment.
When I got home, I cut down on everything, like someone cramming for a test. I disregarded what my doctor said and kept the surgery date. The morning of the operation, my mom tried to get me not to go. I had never shown her my stretch marks and skin.
“Mom,” I said, taking off my dress in front of her. I stood there, nekkid before the woman who birthed me.
“Let’s go,” she said.
The surgery went fine, but I wasn’t happy with the results. I still had loose skin that hung over my pants. I had a recurring thought: people had been so cruel to me when I was onstage at 120 pounds. What were they going to say when I raised my arms, caught in some moment where I forgot myself in the music, and they could see my skin sagging over my pants? I could bank all the self-esteem in the world, but I wasn’t ready to face that laugh-and-point cruelty again. So I scheduled a full tummy tuck for two months later.
This surgery was more involved. There was a sense that something was going to go wrong from the get-go, even though I stopped drinking to prepare. The day of the surgery, Eric was puking his guts out because he was so nervous. He had to leave the hospital, and my mother stayed. She did not want me to do the surgery—nobody did. CaCee was of course googling every complication she could find to prep for the worst.