Authors: Elisabeth Rohm
It was easy for me to imagine giving up acting entirely and being a stay-at-home mom for the next eighteen years. I loved that baby so much, I didn't ever want to have her out of my sight. I stared at her for hours, cuddling her, stroking her, kissing her cheeks, smoothing the fuzz where someday her hair would be, stroking the tiny ears, running my finger down the mini swoop of her nose, which was no bigger than a button.
Nothing in life is ever what you dream it will be . . . until it is exactly what you dream it will be. For me, having Easton became the embodiment of every miracle I'd ever hoped for. I had no idea how emotional breastfeeding would be, how I would cry out of joy when she gazed at my face, how perfect she was. I was awash in love and gratitude that my mother came to stay with me for a whole month to help. I had everything I could ever want: my mother, my daughter, and Ron.
People began to respond to me completely differently. My life was suddenly overflowing. I gushed love like a geyser. People constantly
stopped by to see the baby, presents came every day for the baby, children loved the baby, dogs loved the baby. Our golden retriever, Homer, slept outside the baby's room, guarding the door from imagined marauders. A few weeks after Easton was born, a producer called my agent and wanted me to audition for a project, and I couldn't even imagine going back to work.
“You have to get out there and audition for this!” my agent said.
“No,” I said. “My boobs are leaking. I can't do that.”
“Oh yes you can,” interjected my mother.
“I'll call you back,” I said to my agent.
I hung up the phone and looked at my mom.
“I didn't have a career when I raised you,” she said. “But you have a career. A
great
career. You can do it all. I couldn't, but you can. I know you can. I've seen your stamina and your strength. You can be a working mom.”
“I don't know if I can,” I said, looking doubtfully down at the two wet spots on my T-shirt, and longingly at my infant daughter.
“I'll go with you in the car,” she said. “You can breastfeed Easton right before you go into the audition, then I'll wait with her in the car, and then you can breastfeed as soon as you come out. You have to do this!” she said.
I finally agreed.
It was a great audition. The casting director practically interrupted me to exclaim, “God, I
love
auditioning actresses who are breastfeeding! They're so
open!”
Everything my acting coach had once predicted about the effect of having a baby on my acting career felt true. My heart was wide open. After the audition, the director sent an email to my manager that said he'd always liked me as an actor, but never loved me, until now. “I will want her to audition for everything I'm casting,” he said.
At seven months, my milk dried up and I was heartbroken to give up breastfeeding. For two years, I was profoundly exhausted. But in the best possible way, I had
changed.
I suddenly had a real purpose, and a love bigger than any I'd ever experienced. I think I must have become more interesting to everyone around me. I also felt like I was healing from every childhood injury I'd ever experienced.
I began to see how desperately I had always tried to deal with the shadows of my past, to repair my own pathology, and then suddenly, this thing that happened to me, this becoming a mother with a baby, it lifted me effortlessly out of my obsession with my own life.
I began to feel happy.
I had always been so focused on how to be happy despite my past. I had always blamed my parents. But when I held my baby in my arms, late at night, rocking slowly back and forth in the nursery while gazing through the blinds at the moonlight and listening to the sounds of the night, I realized that happiness doesn't come from looking at yourself. It comes from looking toward others.
I'd always wanted to be a good person, to be kind, to give to others, and I'd always wanted to feel better about myself, but when I had Easton, all I wanted was to be strong, to be powerful, to be an artist, and to fight for everything I've earned because
she
deserved a mother who knows who she is and knows how to make home a happy place.
“You deserve to be happy,” my mother would tell me in those early weeks, when she got up with the baby sometimes, so I could get some rare and wonderful sleep. My mother told me I was a natural. She told me I was a good mom, and it was the greatest compliment anyone could have ever given me. “Now you know how to love,” she said. “I know you've struggled through your life. I know you've been angry about your childhood, about your dad leaving, about having to go to that school, about a lot of things. Maybe now you don't have
to be angry anymore. Maybe now you understand love in a different way.”
I don't mean to make it sound like everything in my life was fixed. It wasn't. Nobody tells you that love is hard, that you're going to get your heart broken, that the things you want the most might not come to you as easily as you hope. Nobody tells you how difficult it is to be a parent. And nobody tells you that a baby doesn't solve all your problems, especially if you struggle with infertility. You probably wouldn't believe them if they did. But I'll tell you. A baby is a miracle, a wondrous gift, but a baby is not a panacea. It doesn't make you into somebody you never were. It doesn't make you a different person. You're still the same person, with all the same faults, but a baby can help you to become okay with your faults. A child doesn't cure you, but it can heal you.
Here's the truth. When you have a baby, when you finally get the thing you've wanted more than anything else, you might still feel depressed sometimes, or anxious, or unhappy. Sometimes you're going to wish for your freedom. Sometimes you're going to want to run away. Sometimes you're going to put your head into your hands and sob because it all seems like too much to bear and all you really want is a couple of hours of sleep.
I realize all this now, but nevertheless, having a baby was the best thing I ever did. Yes, sometimes I still want to run away. I want to shut myself in the bathroom with a bottle of chardonnay and pretend nobody is ever going to ask me to do anything for them ever again. I love Easton with all my heart, but that doesn't mean she's not going to throw a tantrum or demand something she can't have or tell me that she doesn't like me, even if, two minutes later, she climbs into my lap and nestles against my chest like a little kitten.
The other day, she told me I was a bad mommy because I was ignoring her. I was reading a script at home in the afternoon.
“But Easton,” I said. “I'm here all day with you. I just have to do a little work.”
“I don't care,” she said. “I want a new mommy who will play with me all day.”
Nobody tells you that your baby is going to break your heart, a thousand times a dayâwhen she won't stop crying and won't be comforted by you, when she turns toward someone else with a delighted smile, when she doesn't need you to help her with something anymore. A baby can break your heart just by gazing at you with all the love her soul contains, by reaching for you to pick her up, or by smiling at you for the first time. The first belly laugh, the first surprised expression at the first bite of real food, the first tooth coming in or falling out, the first Halloween costume, the first Easter, the first day of schoolâthey are all heartbreakers.
She will break your heart when she takes her very first steps in the opposite direction, away from you. Because that's where she's headed. Nobody tells you that.
When I was a little girl, my mother often said to me, “You're my greatest teacher.” She always wanted my opinion, even when she started dating again. “Do you like him? You have great intuition. You always know the answer. What do you think?” she would ask me.
This made me feel smart, but as I grew up, I began to suspect that I wasn't her greatest teacher after all. How could I be? She was an adult, and she was
my
greatest teacher. What did I know, a mere child? What could I possibly teach her? She was just trying to build my confidence. She was trying to make me feel important.
Then I had a daughter. Now, I realize that my mother was telling me the truth, as was her way. I know I was her greatest teacher, because my daughter has become
my
greatest teacher. She tests me every day, the way I tested my mother. She loves me unconditionally because it is part of her biology; not because we are related, but
because I am the one who has always hovered over her, fed her, clothed her, rocked her to sleep, soothed her cries, come to her room in the middle of the night, read her stories, and held her hand.
She makes me a better person. She keeps me on my toes. She challenges me to be my best, especially when she's at her worst. She reminds me that she is only at her worst when she needs me the most.
That's what my mother meant.
About eight months before my mother died, we had a sort of impromptu family reunion at Nancy's house in Woodstock. It was the spring of 2009, and it was our birthday month, Easton's and mine. Easton was just about to turn one.
Nancy's home was the perfect place for us to meet. It was a home full of happy memories, about halfway between Los Angeles, where I was coming from, and Amsterdam, where my mother was coming from. It was the place where Nancy married Olaf, and my mother met Peter. It was the place where we had all spent so many happy times over the years. It was a place of rebirthsânew love, rekindled relationships, and family.
The evening everyone arrived, the house was full of laughter and mirth. Everyone was there. Ron and Easton and I, my mother and Peter, who brought his pickled herring from Europe, Nancy and Olaf, Olaf's children, and all the friends who lived nearby. It was a revolving door of loved ones. The red wine was flowing and the house was full of wonderful food, thanks to Nancy. We had all my favorite dishes: olives and cheese, mushroom risotto and arugula salad, and my favorite birthday cake, flourless chocolate.
Everything was perfect. Nancy lives on an acreage with trees and fields and chickens, and the house is rustic and eclectic, with long wooden benches in the dining room, a stone fireplace, glass coffee tables and elegant furniture, and a vast picture window that looks out
onto the fields and the huge sky and the flower garden my mother planted for Nancy every year. Behind the house, trees covered in pink petals fluttered beneath rustling pines, and at night we could hear birds and frogs and the gentle buzz of insects drifting in through the open windows.
The best part about that night was watching my mom with Easton. I wanted so desperately for them to know each other, even though my mother lived so far away. I hungrily watched as my mom delighted in every little thing Easton did: the way she ate her baby food, the cute little almost-talking noises she made, the way she kept trying to take her first steps, grasping onto the edge of the glass coffee table and bouncing up and down on her chubby little legs. My mom sat on the floor with Easton to play with her and read her books, even though I know this was hard for her.
I have a photograph from that night, of my mother sitting in a chair. I'm sitting on the floor in front of her. My mother is massaging my back and I'm cuddling Easton. It's a live snapshot in my mind: three generations, physically intimate, emotionally engaged, spiritually connected.
“I want to see you
ten
times a year,” I complained to my mom that night. “Not just two or three.”
“Let's do that,” she said. “Let's both make sure we do that. We'll go back and forth more often. I'll come here to help you, and you'll bring Easton to Amsterdam.”
“We will!” I said, with such conviction, even though our next visit wasn't planned until Christmas, when my mother would come to California. She wouldn't live long enough to make that trip.
But I didn't see the future. I lived in the beautiful present moments of that week in Woodstock. My mom wanted as much time with Easton as she could get, so she kept shooing me away to go for a run or
get some time to myself. I remember thinking,
This is what family is for. This is how it's supposed to be, all of us raising a child together, supporting each other.
On the last night of our visit, my mother decided she was going to teach Easton to walk, even though she'd recently had two hip replacements and walked with a cane. She seemed frail to me. Her health was failing more than I knew.
Easton had spent the whole week scooting everywhere, holding on to things, trying to pull herself up, crawling up the stairs, really moving. My mom had spent the week following her, shadowing her, being on call while I relaxed. That night, in front of a roaring fire, my mother took Easton's hands. Easton stood up. Everyone in the room fell silent.
We all watched as Grammy and Baby stepped slowly, slowly across the room, one unsteady woman and one unsteady baby making their way together. My mother seemed livelier than she had all week. Suddenly she let go and stepped back and I held my breath. Easton looked startled for a moment, then her eyes fixed on my mother and she became determined. With one little foot, and then the other, haltingly, but bravely, she stepped out on her own and half waddled, half tumbled the four feet into my mother's waiting arms.
Everyone cheered. I felt like the luckiest woman on the planet.