Drinking and Tweeting (13 page)

Through her posts and photos, I was able to watch their adulterous love story unfold. Before long, she brought out the big guns: my kids. I could actually see these family photos of the woman who stole my husband sharing Christmas Eve dinner with my children, while I was home alone for my first Christmas without them.

I had this perverse window into their seemingly perfect little world: beach vacations, private jets, and family-photo shoots. These were my children. I gave birth to these two little boys and now have an insanely expensive vagina to
prove it. Why did she get to be their mom, too? How was this fair? She got my husband. She took my kids. She stole my life. And she knew I was watching, and she was fucking ruthless. Everyone told me to stop looking, that I was self-sabotaging, but it became my addiction.

People who say that they don’t check their exes’ Face-book posts, Twitter pages, Instagram feeds, or Foursquare check-ins are completely full of shit. Every time that see-you-next-Tuesday would post some nurturing, cuddling photo with my children, I headed straight to the sauvignon blanc. #WineTherapy. I’m not even sure why I wasted a clean glass, because I knew I was downing that entire bottle. It was like cyber-cutting. I had to see what she was doing. I had to know where my boys were (since I still didn’t have a fucking cell phone number for either of them or a house line). It was my only glimpse into their world. To this day, if I can’t get ahold of my boys, I will check her Twitter, and nine times out of ten, I can figure out exactly where they are. Oh, no wonder my son isn’t answering our FaceTime call, he’s having a great time playing in the ocean . . . in fucking Mexico! I try to step away, but as the saying goes, curiosity killed the cat—or, in my case, the cougar.

There is a huge part of me that wishes I couldn’t check
in on them. It never stops hurting. It gets easier, but it’s still a little painful. I can only imagine the strange sense of relief I would feel if I woke up tomorrow and I couldn’t google my husband’s name or cyber-stalk his wife’s Twitter page. But there’s no use living in Fantasyland. (I did that for thirteen years, and look how it turned out.)

My only regret now is that I didn’t hop on the technology bandwagon sooner. I would have forced my husband to get a smartphone so it would have been easier to keep tabs on his cheating ass. It would have been a little bit more difficult for him to lie about where he was sleeping, if I forced him to make a FaceTime call to me before bed. (But beware, no one looks good on FaceTime. For being so advanced, couldn’t Apple have cooked up a better camera solution?) And maybe if I could have tracked his whereabouts with some fucking iPhone app and known that he wasn’t playing golf, but having dinner with his married girlfriend in Laguna Beach . . . Knowing that I had this intelligence, he would have stayed on his best behavior—and perhaps I’d still be married today. The downside being that I’d still be married to Eddie Cibrian.

N
ot only has technology changed the way we break up, it’s transformed how we date altogether. Social media and the Internet have all but completely eliminated the concept of the blind date. If your friend sets you up with a fiftysomething real estate developer, all you have to do is google his name to find out almost anything about him—where he works, where he lives, what he looks like.

Once you actually start dating someone new, there’s an entirely new set of cyber rules by which to play. Before, you knew you were in a committed relationship after a conversation and a piece of jewelry or, for our parents, a letterman jacket. Today, it’s changing your Facebook status to “in a relationship” and your profile picture to some Instagram-filtered shot of the two of you. If you’re really seeking some attention (which, let’s face it, we all are or else we would delete these stupid accounts), you change your status to “it’s complicated” whenever you’re having a fight—or when you’re separated but still legally married. Nothing perks up someone’s interest more than coming across an “it’s complicated” status. When you break up, as most people do these days, it becomes a story for all of your “friends” to see on the Facebook news feed.

I still pretty much hate all technology and the entire concept of social media (except when I’m loving it); however, I’m pretty sure it’s here to stay. Don’t get me wrong, I’m a total #TwitterWhore and I google just about everything and everyone, but I also recognize how, at times, it has taken over my life. Just ask yourself how many times you have interrupted a wonderful night with friends and family to post on Facebook or Twitter that you’re having a wonderful night. How many times have you stopped midsentence to ask a waiter to take a photo and then spent the next five minutes fucking with filters to post it on Instagram? It’s as if we have this strange obsession with proving to the world that we are, in fact, cool. Look, I’m totally guilty of this, and I’m not sure I ever intend to stop. It’s just the culture we live in now, but it’s important to keep things in perspective.

With any new advancement comes its pitfalls. For every positive, there must be a negative. Good doesn’t exist without evil. You know, like yin and yang and all that Zen crap?

To me, one of the biggest downfalls of this new age of technology is the emergence of cyber-bullying. Let me say first and foremost that cyber-bullying does exist. Take the twelve-year-old girl in Chicago, Illinois, whose classmates created a Facebook page dedicated solely
to making nasty comments about her weight and was forced to face her victimizers every day. Or the gay college student whose roommate posted an explicit personal video of him on YouTube and who decided to take his own life rather than tell his family and friends that he was a homosexual. Those are real, serious, and tragic accounts of cyber-bullying.

However, I do think this culture is way too liberal with its definition of cyber-bullying. If, hypothetically, you’re a country-music singer and public figure who decides to engage with one of the millions of “haters” online—whom you never have to actually see—that is not cyber-bullying. If you can close your computer or turn off an app without the repercussions of actually having to deal with these people in your real life and not your cyber life, it’s not fucking bullying. If you decided, hypothetically, to contact a mutual Twitter follower to get this hater’s phone number and call him or her, that person is not cyber-bullying you. I’ve experienced my fair share of actual bullying in my life, but I have not been cyber-bullied. Sure, I’ve had people who, let’s say, work for a certain blond former Nashville resident send nasty, mean, and cruel messages to me on Facebook and Twitter. I’ve had people call me ugly names
and make horrible accusations about my life, but that is not bullying. I don’t have to go to work every day and be harassed by these people. I’m not forced to interact with them on the playground. At any time, I can close the fucking window and walk away.

When you choose to open up your life via social media and allow random people to interact with you, you can’t get upset if someone in Middle America wants to call you fat, ugly, or, perhaps, a homewrecker.

I’ve learned firsthand that when you’re a public figure (even someone as minor as a reality personality), everybody has an opinion. It’s easy to spit insults from an anonymous account while sitting in your basement in Anywhere, USA, so I never take what people say to heart. Miserable people love to make other people miserable. I don’t hate those people, I just feel sorry for them.

My philosophy is that if you have the balls to post a negative comment online, you better be prepared to say it to that person’s face—and if you’re a big enough pussy to create a fake account to publicly criticize someone, you really should find a hobby. I’ve never been one to mince words, so if I decide to post something negative online, I would have no problem saying it to that person’s face. If
I post that someone was being a bitch today, odds are I’ve already told that person that she was being a fucking bitch today. Occasionally, I have been known to have a few too many glasses of wine and start reacting to the more negative tweets. It’s like today’s equivalent of drunk dialing. Sometimes the wine starts flowing, and you just can’t help telling the shitheads to go fuck themselves. I know, it’s not a good idea, but you know what? #SueMe.

So, if you do choose to be an active member of the cyberworld, here are my rules for being a responsible social-media citizen:

1. Do not allow yourself to be victimized by shitty people. No one else should have control over how you feel about yourself.

2. I think Kenny Rogers said it best: you got to know when to fold ’em. If you are on the receiving end of offensive tweets, posts, or messages, turn off the computer and walk away.

3. Don’t be a fucking hypocrite. People are all too eager to post negative comments about other people online but want to cry “cyber-bullying” when they are on the receiving end of nasty comments. Boo-fucking-hoo. If you’re going to dish it, you better be prepared to take it.

4. Don’t ever make a fake account. That’s just completely spineless and seriously lame.

5. If you decide to post a shitty comment online about someone, you should have the backbone to say it to his or her face.

6. Everybody has seen a sunset. Nobody wants to see a picture of the sunset you saw. And if you’re lame enough to want to see someone else’s photo of a sunset, guess what, go outside around 6:00 p.m. and watch the sun motherfucking set.

7. Girls and gays, be nice. If you post a photo where you look amazing and your friends look like shit, you’re just a fucking dick—and a terrible friend.

8. If you’re going to tweet it or post it, you better believe it. If it’s not something you will be comfortable with existing online forever, don’t fucking put it up. And don’t ever delete it, because by doing so, you’re admitting you did or said something wrong.

9. Know your social-media boundaries. If you’re currently in a relationship, it’s not okay to be tweeting or facebooking with anyone who has sucked your face or your privates.

10. And, above all, don’t drink and tweet. #Hypocrite.

brandi’s babble

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. #TwitterWhore.

CHAPTER EIGHT

My Favorite Threesome

“M
om, do cheaters go to hell?”

I always assumed that my nine-year-old, Mason, had a pretty good idea of what had happened between his daddy and me, but not until he got a little older did he start to ask questions. I saw the fear in my little boy’s eyes that his daddy was damned for eternity for being unfaithful to his family. Okay, to be fair, I may have shouted at Eddie to “go to hell” more than a dozen times before it was all said and done, but never in front of the children. Despite everything Eddie had put me through, I always wanted to shield the boys from the mess that was whirling around us.

“Why would you ask that?” I responded.

Mason shrugged and looked back out the window of the car. “I just want to know if cheaters are bad.”

“Cheater!” Jake shouted. I looked back in the rear-view mirror and saw the smile spread across his dimpled face. I was grateful that at least for today, he was still too young to understand what was going on.

The parent rumor-mill talk must have trickled down to the children in Mason’s class, and my heart sank thinking that my son was now subject to all the whispers I’d been battling for months. I know that when he is older, he will read about the entire ordeal on the Internet and see the now-infamous video, and perhaps when he’s thirty years old, I’ll actually let him read this book. But I wasn’t yet prepared for the “Daddy cheated on Mommy” conversation.

On most mornings the boys spend with me, we hop in the car at 7:30 a.m. and head to the Valley for school. I knew Mason was already aware of what a cheater is, since we would always listen to KIIS FM on our drive. During the station’s morning show (the most kid-friendly one in Los Angeles, I might add!), a segment titled “Ryan’s Roses” is intended to catch people who are unfaithful in their relationship. In the bit, someone
pretends to be a florist and calls the presumed cheater to ask him or her where he or she would like a free batch of a roses sent, while the person’s partner (who assumes the person is cheating) is quietly on the line. Some kind of on-air confrontation occurs, but if you’re already unsure whether your partner would send his or her free dozen roses to you, it can’t be that big of a surprise.

Mason looked at me expectantly, waiting for an answer.

“No, honey, they don’t go to hell. They’re not bad people, they’re just not great husbands or wives.”

I’m not sure if that was the right answer, but I didn’t know what else to tell him. While I would never want my sons to grow up with resentment toward their father or to think he’s a bad person, I also don’t want them to grow up believing that infidelity is acceptable in any relationship. It was a fine line, and I was walking it the best I could. That being said, the idea of Mason’s or Jake’s ever dating someone special is such a foreign concept to me right now. Right now, they are
my
boys, and I will keep them that way as long as I can. I don’t like to share.

I am lucky. I had two good reasons to get over my
divorce and move on with my life: Mason and Jake. While children aren’t the only reason for living—many people suffer breakups with no kids involved—my children saved my life. If it weren’t for those two little men, I would either be rocking a straitjacket in a padded room or be at the Betty Ford Center. I checked out of my life for a good while, and if it weren’t for them, I don’t think I would have had a reason to check back in. For a long time, Mason and Jake were the only reasons I would get out of bed in the morning, wash my face, and put one foot in front of the other. On plenty of days, I would rather have sat in bed all day watching sad movies and crying, but I was a mom and they needed me. So fighting the urge to crawl back under the covers and into my hole of self-pity, I would get up and go about my day. Many couples never have children, which makes a split that much cleaner—at least one would hope. I have come to enjoy the time I get to focus on my self-betterment when the boys are with their father, but during the transition, they were my two best reasons to move forward, and I’ll always be grateful to them for that.