Mommywood by Tori Spelling Read Free Book Online Page A

for breakfast! Of course! Whoever said one bowl a day was the limit? It never would have occurred to me, but here was the man I loved, suggesting it as if it were a perfectly reasonable way to start the day. Who could say no to that?
    Minutes later there I was, happily spooning ice cream into my mouth. I looked over at Dean. He was enjoying the same breakfast. Out of solidarity. Before long Dean was offering me rocky road ice cream for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. My thoughtful husband. Then suddenly it dawned on me. Dean always fixed two bowls of ice cream. He ate it every time I did.
    This wasn‘t a sacrifice out of solidarity. Dean was the one who wanted rocky road back in our lives. Dean was the one who wanted ice cream for breakfast! This was all his fault! And yet I knew I’d get blamed for it after the baby was born. Both Dean and Mehran complain about the weight they gained during my pregnancies. Dean says, ―I‘m still trying to lose the twenty-five pounds of baby weight. Mehran likes to observe, ―I gained more with the second. And here I thought the pregnancy was one thing I could call my own.
     

The Family Curse
    N ow remember, Dean and I were sure I was pregnant with another baby boy. Dean had already fathered two boys. But also during season two of Tori & Dean, before I was pregnant, I‘d brought Dean to visit Mama Lola, the voodoo high priestess who once cleansed me from a curse. Mama Lola said, ―You‘re going to have more babies. Liam was only four months old. I said, ―How many do you see? She said, ―Three. Dean and I smiled at each other. That was what we had been thinking. Then I said, ―I‘d love to have a girl. Mama Lola looked down at the cards and studied them for a moment. When she looked up she said, ―Well, you want a girl but what if you have all boys? That seemed to settle it. Baby number two would be a boy.
    As far back as I can remember, I‘ve always wanted to have a baby girl, but my relationship with my mother—have I mentioned my mother yet?—was so fraught that I couldn‘t help feeling nervous about how I would do with a daughter. To some extent all parents act and react according to how they were reared. Some people might model their parenting on what their parents did. I wanted to model my parenting on something more abstract—what my parents didn’t do. But maybe having a girl was too close to home. What if I brought all my confusion and trouble with my mother to the relationship? I‘d rather not have a girl at all than be a bad mother to a daughter. So when I found out Liam was going to be a boy, I thought, Okay, maybe that’s what’s meant to be. Maybe I’m meant to have all boys . I got comfortable with that idea, and I started to like it.
    At one of my regular checkups, Dr. J said it was too soon to officially call it, but he thought I was having a girl. Dean and I were shocked. What? Impossible. We said, ―No, no, no. It‘s a boy.
    Dr. J said, ―I would go on record saying I‘m ninety percent sure it‘s a girl. After that there was a seed of hope, but neither Dean nor I really believed that it could be a girl. Later, at twenty weeks, we went to a different doctor for the quadruple screen sonogram. This time we knew we were going to find out the gender. As the nurse was doing the preliminary exam, Dean said, ―Do you see what I see? I did. We both saw a penis between the legs. When the doctor came in, he said, ―What do you guys think you‘re having? (He must do this to torture all his patients. What fun. For him.)
    I said, ―We think it‘s a boy.
    The doctor said, ―Really? Why do you think it‘s a boy?
    Dean pointed at the ultrasound and said, ―That‘s a penis right there! The doctor explained to us that we were looking at the labia of our baby girl, but we still didn‘t believe him. He practically had to pull his degrees down off the wall to convince us. Even when we had a detailed ultrasound again later in the pregnancy, we asked, ―Are