Spelling It Like It Is (15 page)

After Patti left, the Shirelles song “Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow” came into my head. “Tonight you’re mine completely / You give your love so sweetly.” Alone in my hospital room, I sang that song to my unborn child and felt a little bit of peace.

ONE WEEKEND THE whole family stayed across the street at the Sofitel Hotel. When they came to see me on Saturday, Liam and Stella gave me big warm hugs. Liam immediately focused on ravaging the Skittles and Sour Patch Kids that Bill and Scout had brought me. But Stella climbed up on the bed, looked me over closely, and then asked, “Mama, are you ever coming home from the hospital?”

It broke my heart. Wasn’t I asking myself the same question? But I buried my feelings, put on a bright smile, and said, “Of course, mama. The doctors just want me to stay at the hospital for a little while to keep me and the baby safe.” Stella seemed satisfied with that—I wished I were so easily comforted.

We snuck Liam and Stella into my room so they could spend the night and wake up with me the next day. Only one cot fit in the room, so Dean stayed with Hattie and Patsy in the hotel right across the street. The kids slept on the cot next to me. As usual, I woke up several times in the middle of the night to the soft light of the medical monitors and beeps from rooms nearby. It didn’t feel as lonely with my babies lying close to me, the sound of their soft breath filling the room with life. A mother’s job is to create, love, and nurture. I felt helpless, but I was doing all I could for my growing baby. Nurturing it by staying in the hospital. Keeping it safe. In that moment my hospital room felt as close to home as it could get.

The next morning Stella gave me a sunflower she had painted. It went straight up on the wall. Liam had made me a recipe-card holder in school. Clipped to it was a recipe. His teachers had written it out for him. It was his favorite thing to cook: mashed potatoes. In the card he wrote, “I love when you make me breakfast and going shopping with you.”

It was a momentous day because for the first time Dr. J allowed me to be wheeled out to the plaza level to get some fresh air. The air and sun on my face felt good. I sat in my wheelchair smiling and watched Liam and Stella chase each other all around, screaming and laughing. Dean held Hattie, who smiled a big gummy smile and squealed every time they zoomed past her. This was my family, but at the same time as I felt like the center of it, I also felt disconnected. It was strange to be watching from the sidelines. I’m usually in there, playing chase, then panting for twenty minutes and cursing myself for not working out in four years.

I thought about my dad. When I was growing up, he was always the life of the party, holding court, telling stories. But in the last few years of his life, after he had throat cancer, he was different. He was in remission, but he seemed much older. His zest for life was gone. As my brother Randy, our friends, and I laughed and told stories, he just sat quietly in the corner chair or his bed, kind of smiling, kind of zoned out. At the time I was hurt that he seemed distracted or disinterested, but now I got it. When you really can’t participate it’s hard to be present. Your body gets in the way of what your mind and heart want.

After a sunny half hour out in the real world, we came back inside. As we approached the elevator, I saw sign with an arrow pointing left. It said “Gift Shop.” Shopping? I’d take any form of a retail-therapy fix.

When we entered the gift shop I gasped in glee, shouting, “It’s huge!”

Dean said, “It’s not that big.” Buzzkill.

I had Dean wheel me all over that shop, and I was especially taken with a pair of coral Isotoner slippers. Funny how when almost everything is stripped away, the smallest things become more colorful and exciting.

When they announced the gift shop was closing, I settled on a copy of
Redbook
magazine, which featured easy summer entertaining tips that I would most certainly not have a chance to execute, and a pack of hair bands so I could practice my fish-tail braids in my new life of leisure.

We’d all been so happy for me to get outside, and yet I had an unexpected sense of relief when I came back to my room. The truth was that my brightly colored dorm room had become my world. I felt like the fetus inside me was safe there, and being out on the sunny plaza only reminded me that an outside world still existed, and I was missing out on it.

SEVERAL DAYS LATER, Dr. Silverman came by with the 3-D ultrasound machine. It had been two weeks since his last visit, and I was anxious to see if the baby was okay. I was always anxious to know if the baby was okay. Dr. Silverman ran the cold ultrasound wand over my belly and I heard the baby’s quick little heartbeat. He was still there, strong and steady. Looking at the screen, Dr. Silverman gave a big smile. He said the placenta had moved into a slightly better position. I didn’t understand everything he said, but this was very good news.

“You’re no longer a ticking time bomb,” he said.

“Well, what am I now?” I joked.

“I’ve upgraded you to a firecracker,” he said. I loved that Dr. Silverman.

I was twenty-four weeks along. The baby was considered viable. He told me that he had considered giving me steroid injections at this point in the pregnancy to develop the baby’s lungs in case there was an emergency and they had to deliver the baby. But I’d gone several weeks without a bleed. Now he was no longer as worried and wanted to hold off on the steroids. If things kept improving, at some point the danger would pass and I could go home. He wanted me to know about the possibility, but he didn’t want to get my hopes up too far.

In that moment I grasped how serious my situation had been, and at the same time I felt optimism on the horizon. Before he’d come in to look at the ultrasound, I had told myself that no matter what he saw, I would remain positive. I would get myself and my baby through this. When Dr. Silverman left, I looked up and thanked God and my angels. I sat holding my belly and bawled my eyes out. I cried and cried, blissfully happy, but also scared to be too happy yet.

I was still crying when I called Dean to report on the doctor’s visit. I knew he would be worried when he heard my shaky voice, so through my tears I blurted out, “I got good news!” As Patti had recommended, I had done all I could do. I had had faith. Faith in me, faith in my baby, faith in my family, and faith in the life I would continue to build with them. Now I was hearing words of encouragement. It felt like my positivity had paid off. Today was a milestone.

Reality Check

T
he next time Patti came for our weekly session, Dr. J and Amy were keeping me company when she arrived. As they left the room, Dr. J said to Patti, “Move that placenta!” He’s a medical doctor, so he was a bit cynical about Patti’s spiritual mumbo jumbo, but Patti was truly helping me take charge of my emotional state.

I told her the good news from Dr. Silverman but quickly added that I was scared to get too excited. Patti always sees things from an angle I can’t anticipate. She said, “Don’t think about wanting an outcome or not getting the outcome you want. Just be hopeful in the moment. Stay present and have hope.” It was so simple, so clear and direct. By the time our session was over, I was brimming with hope.

Then I checked my e-mail. Sitting in my inbox was a message from my agent Ruthanne. It said, “I tried to call you but couldn’t reach you. I hate to tell you by e-mail, but I want you to hear it from me: Oxygen called. They said the network is moving in a different direction and the show is canceled. I’m so sorry. Let’s talk as soon as you’re ready.” I couldn’t believe it.
Tori & Dean
was over? The show had been our life—literally—for six years.

I flashed back to another time when bad news had come to me electronically. I was in Toronto with Dean when I got the news that my sitcom,
So noTORIous
, had been unceremoniously canceled. This was the same sinking feeling. A feeling of loss and powerlessness. All that work with so many people I loved uniting to create a show I was proud of. Then some executives made a decision and it was over, just like that.

Adding insult to injury, after all these years working together, sharing my life and family with them on-screen, nobody from the network had even bothered to contact me personally.

For six years
Tori & Dean
had followed our lives. It was a reality show. Having it rejected felt like our lives—or the story of us—was being rejected. Before I called Ruthanne, or Dean, or anyone else to process this news, I put my phone down and rested my head back against the pillow, crying silently, thinking about the journey Dean and I had taken in the course of making the show.

AS MOST PEOPLE know, the lines of reality in reality TV get blurred. Our lives might be interesting enough for TV, but there is still no such thing as straight documentary, ever, in film or TV. They can’t just turn on a camera, run it nonstop for hours on end, and then air the tape from start to finish. Everything has to be edited to have a structure. Everything needs to be given a narrative shape.

The very first season of the show had a really straightforward hook. Dean and I were going to open a bed-and-breakfast together, and I was pregnant with our first child. All of that was real, but it also meant we all knew in advance where the show was going. I was a fish out of water, a Beverly Hills girl trying to start a small business in the middle of nowhere.

After we’d proven ourselves in the first season and shown that we could draw an audience, they still wanted us to give them a sense of what might happen at the beginning of each season. This exercise always frustrated me. It was our lives! How could I predict what was going to happen by episode ten? The most I could do was give them general guidelines, like where I was with new businesses, how I was juggling family and career, the ups and downs in my relationship with Dean, and what milestones the kids were hitting. As far as I was concerned, it didn’t matter what we plotted out on paper. Those plans were never what made the show work. It was the unexpected that happened along the way. Crazy things just seemed to happen to us.

Once, at a farmers’ market, a fan approached me and started talking about
90210
as if it had actually happened. She asked how David (my on-screen boyfriend) was and whether Kelly (my fictional best friend) was still my roommate at our beach apartment. I loved it because it was a real, quirky encounter. Networks try so hard to put together “softly scripted” shows, but you couldn’t script that kind of comedy if you tried. With our show it seemed to all fall into place. We encountered wonderfully eccentric characters, like Giselle, who worked on an ostrich farm. I loved her. Who could predict that Scout would fly off a bucking bronco at a dude ranch? Or that my dear and perfect toddler Liam would spontaneously curse (actually, that’s shamefully more predictable than it should be—we left it in once but most of the time we edited it out). Anyway, I worried that if we planned too much, we’d strip the show of the spontaneity and raw truth that drew people to reality TV in the first place.

Once a season got going, there were all sorts of edits we had to make along the way in order to tell a cohesive story. There were also some great moments that we had to edit out of
Tori & Dean
. One time Dean and I were in the kitchen having a heated parenting debate. Just as we asked Patsy which of us she thought was right, her phone started ringing. Patsy’s ringtone was some disco groove. Everyone in the room—Dean, me, the cameramen, the producers—we all stopped what we were doing and danced to the ringing phone. Then it stopped and we immediately picked up the conversation where we’d left off.

Another day we were filming and suddenly we heard dogs barking and looked out our kitchen window to see the production assistant run past the window, arms flailing, screaming in real fear. Chasing him were all four of our dogs, on the attack. He hurled himself over a fence. He wasn’t badly injured, but the dogs had ripped holes in his jeans in a not-fashionable way. It was a very scary, dramatic, and very
real
moment, but we couldn’t include it as part of our story because he was part of the production crew, and even though we’d become friendly with him, he wasn’t a “character” on the show.

We’d become close with all of our crew, especially Mario, the director of photography and lead camera guy. Mario knew when and how to be discreet. Once, in the first season, we had a barbecue at the inn. It was a family-friendly affair, with a bouncy house, a Slip ’n Slide, and a petting zoo. My friends Suzanne and Scout were in character costumes to entertain the kids. I’d just given birth to Liam, so I was wearing a maxi dress with Spanx underneath. They happened to be the kind of Spanx that have a pee hole. (I never found the pee hole practical. There’s a reason girls’ pants don’t have flies.) Anyway, the bouncy house we rented had a built-in slide. Suzanne and I decided to go down it while Mario was at the base, filming. I threw myself onto the slide. As I went down, my dress flew up. My legs were spread, and, as Dean would put it, I blew a lip.

Poor Mario. He had to see that through his lens. As I stood up and pulled myself together, I said, “Mo, did you see that?”

He said, “Yeah, I’ll rewind and delete.” It was thanks to Mario that Oxygen never saw the dailies with me flashing my pussy. Maybe we should have left the snatch shot in. After all, their show
Bad Girls Club
is still on the air.

We also reenacted some moments, like when I took the pregnancy test with Mehran. Redoing scenes didn’t bother me at all. It was the real drama of my real life; we just tweaked it a little so it made sense for the story line and was entertaining for the viewers.

It’s hard for me to watch reality shows without the setup scenes jumping out at me. In
Keeping Up with the Kardashians
, there’ll be a scene, early in an episode, that seems casual and incidental, like the one where Khloé and Kourtney are riding in an elevator, Khloé thinks something smells bad, and they blame it on a food delivery guy who is in the elevator with them. Later, Khloé tells Kourtney’s boyfriend Scott that it was actually Kourtney’s body odor that she smelled in the elevator. When I saw the elevator scene, I didn’t know that the plot was going to revolve around Kourtney’s BO, but I knew that scene was a setup. I could smell it a mile away—much farther than the reach of Kourtney’s alleged BO. There are no random scenes in reality television.