You Only Get One Life (20 page)

So, yes, we did find a house in the small fishing village of Morcote and shortly after I became pregnant with another boy – Douglas.

N
ear Morcote was a large villa perfectly situated by the shore of Lugano and it was badly in need of some tender loving care. There were four walls and a roof, but it had been abandoned for years. We would have to renovate the whole thing and getting it perfect would become a real passion. By the time we were ready to move in I was only a few months away from giving birth to Douglas. I was overwhelmed by happiness.

Work on the house had been expensive but now the child who was going to live in it was on his way. This was meant to be. I reaffirmed the solemn promise to myself: no running away this time. No matter what happens, I’m staying with this guy. I was serious – I couldn’t keep packing my bags when things got hard; this was something I could give to my kids. This was, by the way, a very big mistake on my part but that was how I was determined to live.

My dream of family life was reality. In my eyes it was taking on the shape of the ideal relationship that my parents
enjoyed, only in grander surroundings. It was a good time that made me feel unbelievably happy and I couldn’t wait to give Killian and Julian their sibling. I’d got to six and a half months and that was when my waters broke.

It was an afternoon and we were moving the last of our things into the big house. I could never sit still, even when I was pregnant. Ever the busy bee, I was up and down and totally absorbed in what I was doing. Contractions started and I was rushed to the hospital, where my doctor and gynaecologist were standing by. They quickly decided that the only thing for it was to do an emergency caesarean section.

Three months premature, Douglas was tiny and very weak and the medical staff didn’t pretend that he had a great chance of survival. The gynaecologist, who together with his wife ended up becoming friends of mine, later told me it was actually better to have a child that early than in the eighth month. Nearer the time of birth an important hormone in the lungs is off doing other work in the brain, I think, and with the bones.

As it was, Douglas’s tiny lungs were just fine with the help of all the technological firepower they could bring to bear. His healthy cries were at first cause for celebration but we were cut short when he abruptly fell silent. The staff crowded around and pulled him off me for tests as he turned blue. I didn’t understand what was going on. All I knew was that I was lying there without my child or news of him for hours. What the staff didn’t even tell me then was that he had been clinically dead for a full two minutes, but it wasn’t hard to guess from the face of the doctor who eventually came to see me that the outlook was bleak.

‘It’s bad,’ he told me. ‘It’s really bad. We don’t have the equipment here to stimulate the lungs, heart and brain of an infant under one kilo. We have called the emergency helicopter to take him to a hospital at Bern [the Swiss capital].’

The mountain weather was poor and we waited until 6 o’clock the following morning for the team to arrive. We spent the whole night praying and crying. I was still too weak to move and I had to stay in my bed while my helpless little baby was flown away.

As I recovered over the next 10 days I watched the other new mothers in the ward cradle their healthy babies as I had done with my two previous boys, but there was nothing I could do except wait. I could hardly move anyway – during the birth the doctors had given me an injection in my leg so that I didn’t lactate and they had hit a nerve which had left it temporarily paralysed. As time passed slowly I learned Douglas’s chances of survival were much greater but any good news always seemed to be accompanied by a fresh blow. I was told there was an increased risk that he would be brain-damaged. His retinas might be detached and it was not uncommon for such premature babies to be blind.

Raoul drove the 280 or so kilometres between my hospital and the capital, where Douglas was being treated alongside babies weighing as little as 500 grams. Three months went by before he was completely off oxygen and only then could they test him for defects. Time stretched into eternity; every day was a waking nightmare. I had to wait two months before I was able to hold him and care for him.

Finally he was big and strong enough to come home,
though he still needed to be an in-patient on a daily basis. At last I felt like I could be a proper mother. I drove him through the gate of our house and then along the long drive that swept down parallel to the lake and to the house. There, I got out of the car, unbuckled his car seat and reached over into the back seat to pick up his blanket and other things to take him inside. Unknown to me a paparazzi was waiting and snapped Douglas in his car seat while I was rooting around in the back of the car.

They splashed the photo all over the Italian media: ‘BRIGITTE NIELSEN ABANDONS NEWBORN BABY’. I broke down. I had never taken anyone to court, but this was too much. How could the press do this to my children? The articles were just horrific and were accompanied by photographs that I thought extremely intrusive.

I took on a lawyer and prepared for the typically drawn-out Italian case, but the verdict came down just two months later: I was defeated. Stunned, but not prepared to give up, I got my team to bring the case again, and once more we lost. To me that wasn’t justice. One day, I resolved, I would show the press coverage to Douglas in case he ever decided to become a lawyer.

Douglas’s birth was a turning point. The dream I had of my new life was now tinged with shadows but it made me all the more determined that nothing would stand in the way of my happiness and my family. I didn’t realise that I was beginning to compromise my sense of what I needed for myself in my rigid determination to maintain the relationship with Raoul at all costs. Had I been watching
for it, I might have noticed he was gradually becoming less thoughtful and caring than he had been when we first met, but I was so confident I even told my mum that I would be just like her and Dad. I was staying put.

The year after Douglas was born Raoul and I were married in a registry office. It wasn’t a big wedding, but my parents, brother and Eva were there on my side and Raoul’s family also came. Even then I wasn’t entirely sure about us. It was just a certainty that I had to make this thing work out. Not long after that I discovered that I was pregnant once more.

I couldn’t bear to go through all that I had with Douglas again. What if this one was also premature? But there was never any doubt that I would have the child. And this time, with Raoulino, everything was perfect. The pregnancy was easy and he arrived just 10 days before the due date, not long after we had been watching the race in which Formula One legend Ayrton Senna was killed. He had become a friend and I admired the work he did for children in his country. I decided it would be fitting to give Raoulino the middle name of Ayrton in his honour.

With two young children and a good lifestyle to support I felt under pressure to get with the programme as soon as possible and not breastfeed Raoulino for long. Raoul had become my business manager, handling contracts and controlling deals, and that was fine with me: I ran around so much that I needed someone to look after me behind the scenes.

I was the main breadwinner in the family. I didn’t get much of a chance to celebrate the joy of motherhood but
Raoul’s driving career cost a fortune and one of the ways we covered some of the costs was for me to be the face of one or other of his sponsors.

At the end of my working day I played with the kids and took care of them. I helped them to put up the tent in the back garden and then I would go to them at three in the morning because they were scared. Reading them goodnight stories and telling them I loved them kept me sane. My own mother used to draw a heart on me with her finger, very quickly, almost like a caress. It was an ‘I love you’ for me and I often did that to the boys. Even when I was worn out I would always make time for them. We had a nanny too but I wanted to be fully involved with their upbringing. Being with them never failed to boost my energy levels.

Raoul’s passion was for his racing and I supported him in doing whatever he wanted. At home we weren’t so much a two-car as a ten-car family and we had amazing vacations. Raoul taught the boys to ski brilliantly – even Killian, who wasn’t his own boy and who I felt was never his favourite. I’d never learned to ski and Raoul had the patience to show the children how to do it properly. He was equally good about getting them to play football and took them to see Inter Milan play in their home stadium. Sport was the aspect of their lives he was most interested in. Now all the boys are excellent skiers and of course they got into go-karting; Ayrton Senna’s kids had go-karts so we did too.

The boys were very happy but in truth they wouldn’t have had any less fun if they’d been on rented skis. It wasn’t good to let them have everything and it was part of what began
to make me terribly miserable. Raoul and I should have made those quiet moments that two people need to have when they’ve got a baby between them. I began to believe that things weren’t working but if I wasn’t going to break my pledge, what could I do?

There was often a lot of ready cash around and Raoul was efficient in getting payment for me. Minutes before I was due to go on one Danish talk show, he warned the producers that if they didn’t get the cash out I wasn’t going to do the show.

I would suggest that he might consider taking on more work himself. Maybe he could do something in the motor-racing world. I was quite worried about what we would do if something happened to me. He said everything would be all right, but I had this nagging fear about the kids. They were all at private schools in Switzerland; everything felt such a burden so I grabbed whatever job paid the most. But still I didn’t want to leave.

Talking about where we were going in our relationship didn’t seem to change anything. Things were getting too much to deal with and it is hard to explain what was happening because it wasn’t something that took place in a certain number of weeks or months. An insistent voice in my head told me that this was my last chance to make a family and I owed it to my children, my parents and everyone around me not to give up: I had to keep going. I just made up all these reasons for continuing as things were.
Just get through these hard times
, I thought,
and it will all be perfect
. It
was
perfect already, I told myself: I had a beautiful house, I lived in a wonderful country, I had
healthy kids – what was there to bitch about? I found my own way of dealing with my unhappiness.

We usually had a glass or two of wine over dinner. Wine relaxed me and I enjoyed drinking. And of course, when we were at openings or dinner parties we always had cocktails. However, over those years my intake of alcohol increased in proportion to the pressure of work and the guilt I felt about how I was acting as a mother. I could justify my drinking in terms of the accepted culture in our corner of Europe, but then it’s hard to say at exactly what point you become an alcoholic: you might not even realise you have a problem for years. Over time one glass of wine became two or three; one cocktail became two. It was a gradual process. And alcohol worked for me: I was angry, furious that Raoul and I were even in the same house. A doctor might have suggested better medication for my frustration but this was my way out.

I’ve since heard from other alcoholics and people who have lived with them that it’s not uncommon to take years to graduate from a glass of wine at dinner to a bottle. So if you have a teenager who drinks a couple of bottles on a weekend with their friends, be careful: that’s not okay, watch for those red flags at an early age. I was unusual in developing alcoholism in my mid-30s. Up until then I’d been pretty healthy and watched what I consumed: food as well as drink. But you never know when the devil is waiting around the corner to get you. I told myself that an alcoholic is someone who wakes up with the shakes that don’t go away until they’ve had their first drink of the day and they don’t stop swigging until they pass out in the evening. That wasn’t me.

I could go anything from a week to a month without a drink but when I did, I would make up for lost time. When I started rehab many years later I learned that it’s binging which is really dangerous. The classic alcoholic might be someone who drinks every single day but for a new generation binge-drinking is where it’s at. In Europe alcoholism is still taboo. Everybody drinks, but few would say they are alcoholic.

I evolved my own system of drinking. On some occasions it would even be as long as two months before I got together with a friend and we might, for example, enjoy a post-work glass of wine and we would finish with a bottle. Then another bottle. And then I would feel sick and not have anything for the next few weeks.

At work I was totally professional. I never drank – I wouldn’t have been able to remember my lines if I had, there was no question about it, but the minute I was out of that studio door, I was ready to boogie. For me, as with many alcoholics, there was always something to celebrate or to commemorate. Toasting special occasions is perfectly acceptable and that’s what makes it so deadly for the alcoholic looking for an excuse. I was becoming so sad, and the monkey on my back was the booze: It had the answer to all my worries. It was always there to make me feel better as the relationship with Raoul fractured. I might have gone that way later or perhaps it might never have happened, but I was giving up.

There’s something particularly degrading about a woman – a mother – who finds herself lying on the sofa in the middle
of the afternoon. She’s not drunk as such, but she’s getting there and she doesn’t feel like doing anything. I’d always been that busy bee, full of energy, unstoppable. I don’t know how I did it to myself. Saying I had become a couch potato would be making light of it – I was a slave to my own misery.

I didn’t have the energy to do anything and that made me feel even worse. I was weak and I was embarrassed by my lack of motivation. The sort of tiredness that overwhelmed me defies description. It almost made me frightened, as if I might put so much effort into standing up that I would drop dead.