Life Is Not a Reality Show (15 page)

Now I wish I knew more about that aunt with the triple Ds. But it’s too late. And didn’t I hear that my paternal grandmother once ran naked down the street? Why did she do that? Was she mentally ill, or what? Was she just a streaker? Ha-ha! Maybe she was senile or had Alzheimer’s. Tell me what happened! I need more details!

Seriously, find out all you can about your family. Do your family tree. Ask your parents questions and listen to them when they’re going on about something you might think is unimportant now. One day you’ll wish you had paid attention.

Thank God my mother-in-law, Estella, is very good about tracking the family history and keeping the stories alive. I’m glad my kids will have that, because someday they’re going to want it.

Then eventually we would hear Mom’s voice, “Who took my crystal?” and she’d make us put it all back. But we fell for that crystal sale every time!

We also used to play dentist on this particular girl who lived in our neighborhood. I was very little but I remember it well. Kim and I would assist Kathy. We’d have paper towels and clothespins and all sorts of “instruments,” and Kathy would tell the girl to sit down on the toilet and “Sit still!” Then she’d turn to one of us and say, “Nail file!” or “Walnut picker!” And she’d clean the girl’s teeth! Ha!

I was always very close to Kim growing up, even though we were complete opposites. She liked hamburgers; I liked hot dogs. She liked ketchup; I liked mustard. Night and day. We both had a huge thing for sunflower seeds, though. We ate them all the time when we were little, especially when we were on set filming together. To this day when we’re driving out to Palm Desert we’ll get a huge bag and eat to the point that our lips are falling off from the salt!

Kim always wanted me around, and when I was about five, she did a movie called
Escape to Witch Mountain
. (I had a tiny part in it too, playing my sister as a younger girl.) Kim’s character in the movie had special powers, and I thought they were real! Whenever my mom said no to something I wanted, whether it was a bicycle or a stuffed bear—I always wanted a koala bear when I was little—I’d say, “Well, Kimmy’s gonna get it for me!” Ha! The funny thing is that as Kim got older, she did buy stuff for me.

Because she spent so much time acting, Kim didn’t go to other people’s houses a lot. If she was invited to sleepovers, she’d be nervous and want to bring me along. Her friends got so tired of it. “Ugh! Here she comes dragging her little sister again!” Ha-ha. But I cried every time Kim left anyway, so we were a matched pair.
So
close.

Of course we fought at times too and sometimes it even got physical, which I now find kind of unbelievable. What were we thinking? We literally ripped each other’s hair out. She would dig her nails into my arm, so then I would bite and leave teeth marks on
her
arm. My mom or dad would scream, “You girls are gonna give me a heart attack!” Back then we thought it was normal to fight with each other, but not now. My girls never lay a hand on each other!

I used to have a lot of family barbecues at my old house, and everyone would come over—my sisters and their husbands and kids and their boyfriends and girlfriends. Then after my sister Kathy finished renovating her house (after three years!) she started hosting the family get-togethers.

It’s so fun, a house full of people—and animals. My brother-in-law Rick has dogs and cats and birds. He even has a special kind of cat, much larger than a regular domestic cat, that looks like a tiger and walks around on a leash. It’s scarylooking to me, frankly! But that’s where my niece Paris got her love of unusual animals, from her father.

I love it when we all get together, which is pretty much all the time. There are always kids running around and screaming. That’s the way Kim and Kathy and I like it, because we grew up in a house full of people.

My sisters and I are still very close, and I’m close to all of my sisters’ kids too. In fact, Kathy’s girls, Paris and Nicky, and Kim’s oldest daughter, Brooke, are more like little sisters to me than nieces. I was about twelve when Paris was born, so I’m just about in the middle of her and Kathy in terms of age.

It was so exciting when she was born! That’s when I think I truly realized I wanted be a mom.

Kathy and Rick lived in New York in a little apartment, and they had a twin bed in Paris’s room. Mom was there teaching Kathy everything about being a new mother, because Paris was Kathy’s firstborn. Kim and I came along with her, but my mom and Kim stayed at the Waldorf Astoria, so I got to sleep in that twin bed in Paris’s room!

I would lift her up out of her crib (even when I wasn’t supposed to!) and lay her on my chest. I felt such an overwhelming love for that baby that tears would roll down my cheeks. I would think,
Why am I crying? This is so strange
. But I just loved her so much. She was the most beautiful baby, with blond hair and huge lips. I have never seen such full lips on a baby in my life! She was the first baby I was allowed to feed and hold and change her diapers. Like a real-life doll!

I couldn’t stand it when Kim would come around and try to steal Paris from me. We ended up getting in huge fights. She was seventeen, and she would try to act like she was the older, wiser one, like the mom, and I would get so mad! Kathy always said, “Girls, take your turns!”

It’s so funny. There I was changing Paris’s diapers and taking care of her. And then later, much later, after I started doing
Real Housewives
, I started going to Paris regularly for advice.

Just goes to show you we can all learn from each other, no matter what our ages or relationships.

Oh, speaking of ages—I remember after Paris was born my mother went around saying, “Do you realize what a young grandmother I am?” And I thought,
Really? You don’t seem that young to me!
But looking back, it’s true—she was forty-one, almost forty-two. My God, I’m forty-two right now! Mom wasn’t one of those grandmas who didn’t want anyone to know she was a grandma. She was so proud and loved every minute of it. She became just as obsessed with her grandkids as she’d been with us. Her friends probably wanted to kill her!

Then when Nicky came two and a half years later, I was actually there at the hospital for the birth. After that Kim had Brooke. Then I had Farrah. Obviously I was in a rush after falling so in love with my sisters’ kids. After that, Kathy had Barron, and on and on.

I tell you, someone was always having a baby in our family! When Portia came along it had been a while since anyone had had a baby! So you can imagine how much love my little love bug gets from not just me and Mauricio but her sisters and my sisters and their kids.

I love my nieces and nephews very much. Brooke and Whitney, Kim’s second daughter, go with me to Mommy and Me classes, pick Portia up at school, and sit with us at the house. I have a more maternal relationship with Whitney and Kim’s younger kids, but Brooke, Paris, and Nicky are like the little sisters I never had. I have great relationships with them. We laugh like sisters, we go to dinner, we go dancing. And Kathy and Kim will be happy I’m there, keeping an eye on them. Ha-ha!

The cousins are all very close, too, like siblings. They spend a huge amount of time together. Farrah and Brooke are dating identical twins—the sons of our very close friends. I was at the hospital when those twins were born! It’s a small world around here.

My sisters and I each have four kids, so there are already twelve children, and now with their boyfriends and girlfriends it’s a huge crowd at barbecues and Sunday dinners and holidays. It’s so fun to have a big family.

No matter how many people you have in your family, I hope you embrace them and enjoy them and rejoice in them. They are truly a blessing.

I suppose this is a good time to talk about the fight I had with my sister in season 1 that caused such a ruckus.

As upsetting as the incident was to a lot of people—some felt that I attacked her unfairly—it was far more painful to Kim and me. I really want to explain the context of that incident, because the cameras didn’t capture everything that led up to it. How could they? Kim and I have been sisters for forty-two years. That’s a lot of context! If you didn’t see the episode, this is what happened. All the housewives had been at a party and Kim and I had been arguing. Really we’d been at odds during the whole season. So at the end of the night we got into the limo with the other housewives, and she accused me of “stealing” her house, which I’ll explain below. However, there were a lot of things off-camera that viewers didn’t see that just sent me over the edge. I got so mad that I kind of lost it—I got in her face and yelled at her and accused her of being an alcoholic. It’s true that I came off looking like a steamroller, and Kim seemed scared and vulnerable. After that, people called me a bully, which just killed me, because I’ve never been a bully in my life.

Oh my God. I cannot tell you how horrible that was for both of us. It affected our relationship for a long time. Terrible, terrible, terrible. We didn’t talk for months.

We didn’t want Bravo to air the footage at all, and we fought very hard—
very
hard—against it. But we’re not producers of the show and we don’t have editing rights. They were determined to air it, because it is “our reality,” and it was an extremely difficult challenge for us, to say the least. Knowing that the episode was going to be aired was torture, and the producers did feel bad for us, so they brought the episode to my house to let me watch it before it aired. We all shed tears that day. No way could I watch it when it aired.

Just a few pointers about dealing with the sisters in your life!

After the show aired, people said mean things to me on Twitter and Facebook and various websites. It was so hurtful to have people judging me without knowing anything about my life. I thought,
Those people didn’t know us! They think they do because we’re on a show portraying ourselves, but that doesn’t mean they know who we are deep down
.

You can’t properly defend yourself in that situation. It was so difficult. Anybody who knows me knows there’s nothing more important to me than my family.

I take full responsibility for what comes out of my mouth on
Real Housewives.
But when I say things, people who watch the show might not ever see what led up to it. And like I said, in this case, the backstory of that fight between me and my sister took place over many years.

I did have a lot of anger toward Kim. And it turned out that she was harboring huge resentments toward me that I didn’t even know she had. When she said, “You stole my house,” she was referring to properties that our mom had left to us when she passed away. To each sister individually she left one small property, and then she bequeathed one larger home to the three of us all together.

Because Kathy and Kim already owned homes in the desert, they decided to let me buy them out on the house that had been left to all of us. They didn’t need it, and it worked out perfectly for me. So we each ended up with our own home there, and we each owned a smaller property too.

Later on, Kim decided she wanted to buy back in to the home I now owned. And I said no. I didn’t want to mix business with family. I planned to renovate the house, and I didn’t want to have to go to her about every little detail of the process. And she already owned a large home there. People asked me, “What does she mean you stole her house?” I mean, you can’t actually pick up a house and carry it across the street and no one will notice! But try explaining the actual story on Twitter.

“Thank you for my sisters, a gift from you to me. For when I look into their eyes, it’s you that I will see.”

—from a poem I wrote for my mother’s funeral

I just didn’t realize how bitter Kim felt toward me for that, for not allowing her to buy back in. I can see now that she must have been holding on to a great deal of deep-rooted anger, and it just all came to a head that night.

I have an intense relationship with my sister, but I love her very much. And while people who watched season 1 may think I’m the strong personality of the two, the fact is Kim’s a very strong personality too. She has every bit as much fire in her as I do. It didn’t come off on the show that way because I had pulled her in with girls that she didn’t know, and they really weren’t her cup of tea at the time. (Yes, I’m the one who asked Kim to be on the show in the first place, and I’m sure she has wanted to kill me because of it on more than one occasion. Ha!) Kim may have seemed shy and uncomfortable, but I promise you she is an extrovert who is usually never shy or reserved!