Finding It: And Finally Satisfying My Hunger for Life (15 page)

Three days after the Van Halen show in Chicago, Tom and I were walking along Michigan Avenue when a woman stopped us and thanked me for inspiring her to lose weight. From the sunny nature of our brief exchange, which included taking a photo with her, it was impossible to tell that I was having a bad day. But inside my head, a voice said, “Me, an inspiration? Clearly, you have the wrong person.”

Some days I didn’t feel that I was either a size inspiration or a size perfect, and this was one of those days. The night before, I had learned there wasn’t any room for me on the private jet taking Wolfie, Ed, Dave, and Al, as well as their significant others, to Grand Rapids, the last gig of the tour. Seeing the final shows, including the very last one, was the reason I had come out in the first place. I took the news personally—and probably too emotionally.

I shouldn’t have been as upset as I was. I can’t even count how
many Van Halen shows I have seen since I first met Ed at a show in 1980. I have followed the band for twenty-eight years, and not always because I wanted to. It was like they say in
The Godfather
: “just when you think you’re out, they pull you back in.” Now I was back in, but my son didn’t always want me around as much as I wanted to be around…. I don’t know. I was conflicted and confused.

Anyway, I was pissed. I took the lack of a seat as a personal slight, and it wasn’t. There just wasn’t a seat.

Then at the last minute, I received word of an extra seat on the plane. By then, I was in too foul a mood and said no thanks.

Was I over-reacting? Yes. I couldn’t help it. Family is my top priority, and I felt like I was being denied access to an important event in my son’s life. All sorts of emotions boiled to the surface. The outburst was unlike me. I warned Tom to keep his distance. Normally I am fairly even-tempered and maybe guilty of not caring enough about certain things, but I was tired and cranky from too much travel and the pressure of having to be “on” and upbeat way more than normal.

At lunch, I shoveled food in me until Tom asked if I thought I might be eating my anger. If he had just made a comment, I probably would have snapped at him. But since he had asked a question, I had no choice but to stop and consider whether I had lapsed back into that dark place I thought I had left way behind. The answer was clear: yes, I had—and it shocked my eyes wide open.

I put down my fork and asked the waiter to clear my plate and the evil basket of bread in front of me. I regrouped with Tom by talking out my frustrations. I was aware of what had happened. My feelings had sailed out of control. I had gone from being upset about being denied a seat on a plane, to asking whether Wolfie appreciated
my efforts to be with him, to wondering whether or not I was a good mother. In reality, I was simply hurt and had handled it poorly.

I was most disturbed by how easily feelings of inadequacy and self-doubt got back in my head, and also how quickly I had returned to bad habits. It was the definition of my old bugaboos, unconscious behavior, and emotional eating. It was also a wake-up that progress—in my case, maintenance—happens in fits and starts. I wasn’t going to be perfect every day.

“It’s not fair,” I groused to Tom. “If I don’t want to regain the weight I’ve lost, but if I want to keep trying to be the best me, I have to be vigilant every day for the rest of my life.”

“Yup,” he said.

“Who wants to be vigilant every frickin’ day forever?”

I calmed down and began to think in terms of a more manageable time frame than forever. Ah-ha! So that’s what was meant by living in the moment. I could handle a moment; forever was too much. With twenty-four hours to kill, Tom and I worked out and saw the city. In the afternoon, Wolfie called from the venue to say they had finished the sound check and he felt good about that night’s show. That night, he called again to say the show had gone well and they were back on the plane, heading back to Chicago.

“Love you,” he said before hanging up.

“Love you, too.”

Wolfie and I flew home the next day while Tom and his son went to Ohio. I was still out of sorts, and feeling pressured. I had two days to settle Wolfie back home after he’d been three-quarters of a year on the road; then I planned to fly to Ohio for a weekend of long-planned parties for Tom’s family, including his parents’
sixtieth wedding anniversary. It was too much to do in too little time.

I felt stretched too thin. It was the first time I had felt anything in my life was too thin.

Wolfie was bugging me, too. He rattled off all the things he wanted to do now that he was going to be home for a long stretch. They included taking advantage of his driver’s license, hanging out with his friend Zack, and indulging in his love of gadgetry at the Apple store. In my state, I was sensitive to what I felt was a glaring omission on his list—spending time with me.

I had imagined that we would spend a day together getting resettled and talking about this amazing experience he’d had touring with Van Halen, seeing the country, being away from home, and in many ways growing up. But I realized that was my fantasy and perhaps I needed to process the past year more than he did. As it turned out, we spent the first full day back home together, anyway. I took him to meet his new business manager, and on the way back home we ran a few errands.

For a few moments, including the one when we walked across the grocery store parking lot, we were back to our old selves, Wolfie and his mom, two inseparable compadres spending all their time together. Back home, the illusion ended. Word had spread among Wolfie’s friends that he was back and the phone rang nonstop, as did his cell phone. And on the few occasions I saw him pass through a room, he was texting.

Several times, I called out, “Hey, what’s up?” In return, I got a “Love you, Mom.” One time, he actually paused and asked me for advice. He wanted to know where he should go to get Liv a necklace. Meanwhile, Tom’s son, Tony, was preparing for his senior prom. He needed help renting a tux, picking a corsage,
and organizing a group of friends who would share expenses on a limo.

Those two days were hectic. By the time I got on the plane to Ohio, I felt that I hadn’t accomplished one thing. I sat there thinking that even though I had done the “lighten” part of enlightenment, I didn’t know how to pull it all together. For much of the flight, I pressed my nose out the window and scanned the clouds for signs of God. I would have settled for a UFO. But Cleveland came up before either one.

Tom and his parents picked me up at the airport. On the way to the hotel, they gave us the low-down on the relatives who had come into town for the three celebrations: Tom’s sister Angela’s son’s high school graduation, his cousin Pat’s fiftieth birthday, and their own sixtieth anniversary. Mention of each party included a description of the food. It sounded more like a three-day Italian food festival.

Suddenly I felt the urge to exercise. If my calculations were right, I would have to walk back to Los Angeles to burn off all the calories I would likely consume. It might have been the after-effects of my breakdown in Chicago, but I was seriously worried about being able to resist what seemed to me the perfect storm of temptation. Mortadella, lasagna, and biscotti—I had to remind myself that these were not my friends. I also had to remind myself, in a voice that sounded a little like Forrest Gump’s mother, that “Jenny Craig always said there’d be days like these.”

As I feared, the test began that night with a casual dinner— several pepperoni-and-cheese pizzas. I smelled them coming through the front door as they arrived from the local pizzeria.

“I suspect that’s what Heaven smells like,” I said to Tom.

“Or Hell,” he said.

I shrugged.

“Whichever one it is, I’m going there if it smells that good.”

To my credit, I managed not to over-eat. My secret? I talked nonstop. Between Tom’s mother, sister, aunts, and cousins, I found myself amid a compassionate and sympathetic sisterhood who sensed I was off, drew me out of my shell, listened to my complaints, and assured me that I wasn’t a loser. All of them said they had been through the same thing with their children that I was going through with Wolfie.

Tom’s sister reminded me of the old adage that, if you want to make God laugh, make plans. Then she added, “If you want to feel unappreciated and taken for granted, try to do something nice for your kids.”

“That’s me,” I said, raising my hand in acknowledgment.

“We don’t notice it as much when they’re little,” she said. “They’re too cute. We forgive them too quickly.”

“Yeah.”

“But then they become teenagers….”

I was fully aware of the possibility that I, like many other mothers I knew, might be needier than I realized. My expectations for hugs and thank you’s might have been based on memories from when my child wanted to hang on my leg and look up at me as if I were the Statue of Liberty. As I was learning in other areas of my life, I had to recognize changes around me, adapt to them, and change myself and my own reactions. Like when I called home the next morning to check in on Wolfie and hear how Tony’s prom had gone.

Wolfie answered, and I could tell that I had woken him up. After extracting a few key details—Wolfie was fine, Tony had gotten
back late, a few people had forgotten to pay him for the limo and he was still asleep—I let Wolfie go back to sleep. He promised to call me later. Before hanging up, he said, “Love you.”

That night, Angela threw a party for her son’s high school graduation. We arrived en masse: Tom; his two daughters, who had flown in from Arizona; his younger son; and me. We hugged and kissed everyone hello and then walked straight into a spread of impossibly delicious food. It started with a platter of assorted olives, cheeses, and breads and ended with iced Italian twist cookies that Tom’s Aunt Syl had baked earlier in the day. I only got as far as the warm potato salad, made with bacon and cheese, by the way, before groaning that I half expected to hear someone shout, “Dead man walking.”

I didn’t want to harp on the food, but, my God, there was so much of it—and this was just the start of the celebrations. Nonetheless, I managed to pace myself and exercise incredible self-control.

Later that night, I did some soul-searching about what I could reasonably expect from myself in such situations. Though I didn’t want to fall off my diet, I also wanted to be able to enjoy myself and not miss out on life’s special occasions. I didn’t want to walk into every party or event full of worry and leave full of guilt.

I realize that the keys to maintenance are balance and moderation, but I also know that people have struggled with those concepts since the dawn of time—no doubt since the first meal where dessert was served and someone asked for a second helping. Why would I find it any easier?

I didn’t, and the next morning I struggled to get ready for Mr. and Mrs. Vitale’s sixtieth wedding anniversary. I had packed five outfits for three days, tried on every one of them, and didn’t feel comfortable in anything. Then I tried to mix and match. Nothing
was right. Standing stark naked, I turned to Tom and announced that I couldn’t find a thing to wear.

“Nothing feels right,” I said.

He looked at me with eyes as wide as two-lane tunnels.

“Come here and let me feel,” he said.

“Shut up,” I snapped. “You don’t understand. Nothing’s working.”

“You don’t understand,” he replied. “I’m looking at you and everything’s working for me.”

I appreciated his support even though it got him nowhere. Finally, I gave up on feeling comfortable and put on nice jeans and a top I had tried on forty-five minutes earlier, the outfit I had originally planned to wear. We drove to Thistledown Race Track, where Tom’s family had reserved a private room for an afternoon of eating and betting on the horses. From the looks of the buffet table, I thought the smart money should be put on the chicken marsala and the lasagna.

Unfortunately, I just wasn’t in the mood for visiting and found a perch off in the corner and watched the room fill up with Tom’s family and friends. I listened to the rounds of toasts and congratulations, wondering why I couldn’t shake my crappy mood during such a relaxed, joyous, loving, and festive event.

Tom was patient. He gave me time and space and then finally came over and dragged me out of the corner. It was as if he sensed I needed to be pulled away from myself. He was right. Soon I was immersed in a conversation with Angela about her parents’ marriage. I was curious what she thought they had done right that enabled them to stay married for more than a half century.

“Tenacity,” she said.

“It has to be more than that,” I said.

“Not only did my parents’ generation stay together, I don’t think they expected everything to be perfect or problem-free,” said Angela, who described her parents’ values as old-fashioned and out of step with those today. “They thought about family first and measured success in ways that were much different than nowadays.”

I knew what she meant. They weren’t consumed with partying and playing like they were in their twenties when they were in their fifties. They didn’t think about staying young forever. They didn’t spend every day focused on their own selves. They didn’t worry about keeping up with the latest fashions because the things they valued never went out of fashion.