Mommywood by Tori Spelling Read Free Book Online Page B

you sure it‘s a girl? Is that stuff between the legs still girl stuff?
    Okay, so Mama Lola doesn‘t have a perfect track record.
    Voodoo‘s an imperfect science. At the doctor‘s appointment when we found out that I was pregnant with a girl, I was so shocked and overjoyed that I completely forgot to worry about the size of her nose or any other superficial concerns. A daughter! I‘d longed for a daughter for so long, but I never really thought I‘d actually have one. My—our—own little girl.
    In the car on the way home I started to think about the relationship I wanted with her. I would strike the perfect balance between mom and friend. I would never judge her. I would always tell her she was beautiful. I would give her all the emotional strength I could, the confidence and optimism to do whatever she wanted to do. The list I went through was all the things I felt I hadn‘t gotten from—you guessed it—my own mother.
    As the pregnancy went on I started to get scared. Nothing was more important to me than to be a good mom. What if I was even more disastrous than my mom had been with a girl? What if all my hopes and intentions backfired and the past repeated itself tenfold? What if with a girl I became my mother all over again? What if I was cursed? Liam was so daddy-focused. What if the girl was the same way? What if both kids loved their daddy more and there was nothing we could do to change that?
    What if Dean was just a person kids love more than kids love me? Would I feel excluded? Would I pull away to protect myself? Is that what had happened with my mother—I was so attached to my father that she resented it? Then I remembered my first wedding and thought, no, she created our dynamic.
    I don‘t want to go on at length about my relationship with my mom, but I want to explain how intense and destructive our dynamic was. It‘s a formative part of who I am and what I want to avoid as a mother. My pop-psych theory is that my mom couldn‘t stand the idea that I might have more in life than she did. At my first wedding she said, ―I didn‘t have a big wedding.
    My parents couldn‘t afford it. When I told her how happy I was with Dean, that I‘d found my soul mate, she congratulated me, but in the same email she gave me notice that she and my dad were selling the condo that I was renting from them right out from under me. After my father passed away, she said things like ―I never had friends. Your father wouldn‘t let me. It seemed like something was missing from her life and she blamed me.
    The way this dynamic played out was subtle but ongoing.
    Even when I was in my early twenties, instead of bonding we were competing. Beanie Babies—those little stuffed animals filled with ―beans instead of stuffing—were a big fad. They became collectors‘ items, with people trading them on eBay for exorbitant amounts of money, depending on how rare they were (or how rare people thought they might one day become). A few years later everyone suddenly realized at once that they were worthless, and the market crashed. They were like the tech stocks of the mid-nineties, except that everyone knew they were beans and fluff from the start. But during their peak, my mom and I got obsessed and started buying Beanie Babies on eBay.
    I‘d bring my laptop to my dressing room at 90210 and be intently bidding on one animal or another. When my five-minute warning to be on set came, I‘d be furiously clicking to add five dollars to my bid. Then I‘d hurry out to stage cheering, ―I just won the crab! I had books cataloguing the world of Beanie Babies—how many of each were manufactured, what colors they came in, what they were worth. I received the Beanie Babies newsletter once a month and was a member of Beanie Babies of America. Eventually my business manager included my Beanie Babies in my monthly report. Under assets.
    My mother was doing the same thing. She‘d send me an email saying, ―So, I was just wondering