Baby Steps (13 page)

And yet, there were gifts—great, brilliant gifts. Suddenly, my time was my own. I could go to an audition, or not. I could get enough
sleep. I could go outside in the middle of the day and look at the sky. I could spend time with my friends. I could actually nurture a
relationship.
I'd just met Ron, and although I was excited about us, I didn't feel the pressure to make something work, to make it perfect, or even to find the perfect person to marry. I was just excited to be able to spend time with him and get to know him. We had time on our side . . . or so we thought.

I was attracted to him and he was attracted to me and that was all that mattered. We could break up or get back together or whatever we wanted. It felt like true freedom, for the first time in as long as I could remember. It was independence, and it was intoxicating. I felt happy in a way I hadn't felt for years. I wasn't on the treadmill anymore, spinning and spinning, and I realized that it was fine to want a family, someday, but maybe for now, I would just have some fun.

I had time for all of it. I had time for a life. My financial situation wasn't so great, but as I adjusted to the absence of a strict and regimented schedule, I began to feel my feelings, rather than plowing through the days like a workhorse. I began to think about the other parts of my life I'd ignored for so long. I also began to get to know the new post–
Law & Order
Lis. Like Serena Southerlyn, the role I played for so long, I began to realize I had philanthropic goals.

This is something my mother had always nurtured in me. She liked to email me calls-to-action for causes she thought were worthy. Sometimes I would tell her, “Look, Mom, I don't know if I can save the world today.” She wanted me to use my platform to help others, and now I actually had time to think about doing this. Maybe I could do more than just attend the occasional charity ball. Maybe I could get personally involved. I loved this idea. It seemed real and important.

Back when I was in college, my mother's little house in the country in Missouri, the one she'd left everything for, when she tore up her
Social Security card and left society, caught on fire. The Red Cross had come to her aid back then and replaced her roof. She talked about the Red Cross a lot, telling me that our family owed them a debt of gratitude and that if they ever reached out to me, I should use my platform to help them.

One day, they did.

The New York chapter of the Red Cross was producing a campaign called Give 100 to educate people about volunteerism. The Red Cross is run almost solely by volunteers, so the idea was to ask people to give a hundred of something: one hundred hours of time, one hundred dollars, one hundred thousand dollars for those who could afford it, or just one hundred pennies for kids. After
Law & Order,
people associated me with New York, and the Red Cross wanted me to represent them in my capacity as a New York actress. I did a poster for them, and I called a few of my actor friends to do similar posters, and after working with the Red Cross, I was so impressed that I told them I didn't want to just do a poster. I wanted to do more. I wanted to be trained as an emergency volunteer.

I underwent training and responded to domestic fire calls in New York City. The Red Cross is about crisis control, and Red Cross volunteers are often the first ones on the scene to help people, whether it's to get them a hotel room or a toothbrush or a vacuum cleaner to vacuum up the ashes in their apartment after a disaster, or just to get water to the scene.

The more involved I got, the more people I met. I got to know the people in Washington, DC, and then I helped them develop a campaign called Hometown Heroes, which paired celebrity Red Cross volunteers with noncelebrity volunteers from particular cities, photographed together. The first order of business was to secure the brilliant Timothy Greenfield Sanders to shoot the portraits, which he agreed to do. Then we were able to get other celebrities to participate,
like Jamie Lee Curtis and Julianne Moore. These beautiful portraits, of volunteers you recognize and volunteers you don't recognize, became popular Red Cross posters. My photo was taken with a local New York journalist, author, and Red Cross volunteer named Susan Carswell. I was hugging her from behind. All the posters have some element of touch: someone's hand on another's shoulder or face, to express how we take care of each other and how the Red Cross touches so many lives.

Working on this campaign took months of my time, and I loved every moment of it. When it was over, I told them I wanted to help the wounded warriors, so I visited Walter Reed Hospital right in the middle of the controversy about whether the veterans there were being given proper care. Volunteering for the Red Cross became such a passion that I began to turn down acting opportunities that didn't interest me, rather than taking any acting job I could get.

Working for the Red Cross was a relief when acting became frustrating. My manager at the time had been thrusting me into auditions for TV pilots I didn't want and movie auditions that I didn't get. I did one movie and a few spots on TV as well as a miniseries, but it was far from my Merchant Ivory dream.

I talked to my mother almost every day, and she could tell how much pressure and stress I was under, and how disappointed I was that leaving
Law & Order
hadn't launched my movie career. On particularly dark days, she would encourage me to stop moping. “Go outside and take a dip in the ocean,” she would say. “You need fresh air. You need sunshine.” She was a shot of sunshine into my veins. She was always living in joy and she hadn't raised me to be someone who wallowed, so I tried to get past it, but I had a lot of “poor me” moments.

My work with the Red Cross gave me purpose and fulfillment, so I gave them more and more of my time. One day, my manager left me a
nasty voice mail that said, “Why don't you just go join the Red Cross? Just go save the world, that's what you'd rather do anyway. You don't really care about acting. Your career is over.”

Obviously, I fired him. He was wrong that I didn't care about acting, but he was right about one thing: I wanted to save the world. I loved acting as much as ever, especially because I had learned to fight for it, but I also wanted to discover other aspects of myself. I wanted to do something different. Finally, my life had opened up beyond acting. My life could be bigger than just a career, and I was interested in knowing the world beyond the studio. I would find a new manager. I would still achieve my acting dream, but in the meantime, I traveled, I learned, and I met people I never would have met in Hollywood. I got my dual citizenship so I could have the option of working in Europe. Maybe my movie career could start there. But I wasn't worried. I wasn't in a hurry.

During this time, Ron and I had moved in together, and one evening, we were in bed reading and I had my glasses on. I wasn't wearing any makeup, my hair was messy, I was in my pajamas, and I couldn't have looked more like a crusty old woman. Ron got out of bed and left the room for a minute, and then came back and got on his knee next to the bed and said that he wanted this life we were living to go on forever, and would I marry him?

No white horse, no roses, no romance. I wasn't wearing a flowing white dress. Actually, I was a mess. I thought,
Are you kidding me? Can I at least take off my reading glasses?
I slipped them off and tried to smooth my hair. I sat up in bed. He looked into my eyes and I knew he meant it. It was simple and sweet and true. Part of me wondered if I could do it. I'd been engaged before, and I'd left all the other ones, but there was something calm and steady and quiet about Ron. Maybe this was the one I could stay with. Maybe this was the one who would never leave me. I said yes.

Happily engaged, I now added wedding planning to my diverse to-do list that was having less and less to do with acting. When I told the Red Cross that I wanted to do more work internationally, they sent me to Vietnam and Cambodia, where I met the man who suggested I check my fertility.

This was like the part in a movie where the music has been playing merrily along, and then someone drags the needle across the record and everything comes to a screeching halt.

Career, marriage, baby. That had been the plan. But now what? There we were, Ron and I, sitting in that gilded marble waiting room, waiting to hear the verdict on my fertility. In the midst of planning a wedding, we'd suddenly been pushed ahead to something that we hadn't thought would even be an issue. I wasn't sure I was ready for this, but my trip to Asia had startled me and I needed to know: Was it even possible? Why hadn't we gotten pregnant already?

I reassured myself silently. I was a normal healthy thirty-four-year-old. Of course it was possible. Everything was in order. I'd been successful, and now I was expanding my life, and I'd met a man who actually liked the idea of having a family, and we were getting married, and we were just checking to make sure that we would be able to take the next logical step when it was time.

We sat there, nerve-wracked, for forty minutes. How long could it take for them to get us into a room? I was annoyed and scared. Finally, they put us in a room and the doctor came in to see us.

I disliked him immediately. He was suave and good looking and slick, and he kept mentioning all the other celebrity patients he had, as if that would impress me. Then he told me the news: my FSH (follicle-stimulating hormone) levels were off the charts.

“Basically, you're in early menopause,” he said. “If you ever want to have children, you're going to have to take fertility drugs, and
you'd better do it now. Good thing you came in when you did!” He grinned. He said it all with a little too much pleasure.

My first thought was,
Not with you, buddy.
I bristled. What a racket this guy had going on, with his fancy office and his perfectly coiffed staff and his marble countertops and fancy furniture and celebrity clients and his huge mansion and his sports car collection. Tell the anxious women in their early thirties they need fertility drugs, then make thousands of dollars off treating them, when they are probably just fine. All I could see in that doctor was a superficially friendly, inauthentic, totally insensitive man who had just dropped a bomb on me and acted like it was nothing.
You're not a real woman, but just take these drugs and we can pretend you are.

Fuck that.

I think Ron could tell how alarmed I was. I felt like a boulder had just rolled over me without any debris to warn me it was coming. I blamed that slick handsome doctor and I didn't trust him. He was perfectly nice to us, but after we thanked him and practically sprinted out of the office, we sat in the car and I vehemently, feverishly told Ron that I hated that doctor and he agreed that there was something about him he didn't like, either.

“We're not having a baby with him,” I said.

Ron nodded. “We'll find someone else.”

I let the information sink in for a few days, during which time I just got angrier at the sudden knowledge that I might actually be infertile. My gynecologist, Dr. Nancy, had recommended that Hollywood doctor, so I called her back.

“Give me someone else. Give me someone nicer,” I said. “Give me someone better.”

“He's good,” she said.

“I don't care. Give me someone better. Give me someone whose sports car collection I won't be financing.”

“How do you know he has a sports car collection?” she said.

“I don't, but I would bet money,” I said.

“All right,” she said. “Then I think you're really going to love Vicken Sahakian.”

Okay. I needed a second opinion, and if what the first doctor said was true, I needed to find somebody I could work with. We would try doctor number two. We set out again, and I hoped against hope for a different answer, or at least a different kind of experience.

It took three weeks. Three weeks of soul searching. I had long conversations with my mother, who hadn't even met Ron yet, because by now she lived in Amsterdam with her new husband. I explained Ron to her. I explained that I knew it was right. I defended my decision. I wanted her to understand that I would still have a wedding and a happy ending, and that choosing to do IVF was part of a happy
beginning
to a family. I could hear my mother smiling by the tone of her voice. “Of course, Lis. One, two, three . . . ten, honey. That's how you do things.”

Ron didn't seem to mind that we weren't doing everything the traditional way, either. “Sometimes you just do what you have to do in a crisis situation,” he said. “You have to trust that this is happening and that we need to do something about it. We don't want to miss the boat. We're a loving couple, and we want a child. Sometimes you have to make big decisions. It's going to be okay.”

Ron told me that from the moment he met me, he wanted us to be married, and within three months, he knew he wanted us to have a family. If this was the way to do it, then this is how we would do it. I spent a lot of time coaching myself:
You can do this, Lis. You need to explain to everyone what you're doing. There is no time to lose. Yes, it's unconventional. Yes, you'll raise some eyebrows, but the people who love you will understand. You can do this.

I called some of my other past boyfriends and made amends, fact-checking
my way through my mistakes so I could be sure I wouldn't repeat any of them. Why did these relationships fail? How could I avoid this kind of failure in my future, with the father of my future child? Everything had to be in order, to feel secure, so I could trust myself in making this grand decision. I wanted to be ready, with no psychological barriers standing in the way of baby success. It was almost like I was in Alcoholics Anonymous, going back and apologizing to everyone for everything I'd ever done wrong so I could know for sure that I was doing the right thing.