Baby Steps (26 page)

He was a source of compassion on the set, when nobody else knew what had happened. I didn't want them to know. I wasn't ready to talk about it. I didn't want anyone to ask me if I was okay (because I was
not
okay) and I didn't want to see pity in their faces. Why tell everybody? But knowing that Jack knew gave me some peace. When he looked at me, it wasn't with pity. It was with a look that said, “You're going to be okay because I'm here and I'm standing and I'm okay.” Eventually, I was able to tell others, as I got used to saying the words: “My mother has died.”

This was in the fourth season of
Heroes,
and we were filming the final three episodes. There were rumors that the show wouldn't be renewed, so the cast was connected and intensely focused on making the final three episodes as amazing and effective as we could, hoping it would keep the show afloat.
Heroes
was a show about the meaning of life, and the people on the outskirts looking in. It was about the
conflicts between right and wrong and love any loyalty. Lauren and Noah were out to take down and destroy something they didn't understand, and Noah was conflicted because his own daughter (played by Hayden Panettiere) was part of what he didn't understand. My character was also trying to do her job; like Serena Southerlyn, she was bound by law, and yet, the passionate part of her wanted to break the rules in the name of love. In the end, on the show, love becomes more important than what is right.

I believe that to be true in my own life, too—in my relationships with my mother, my daughter, the man I love, even with my friends. Love is more important than what is right. I think about this when I think about my mother because she didn't always do what was “right.” Should she have sent me away to boarding school at fourteen? Should she have sold our childhood house to pursue her strange and unique dreams? Should she have torn up that Social Security card? Should she have walked around the house naked? Should she have told me all about her money problems, her spiritual conflicts, her every emotional bump in the road? Should she have given up everything for me, and should she then have taken it all back to go find herself?

Yes. Yes, yes, yes, because it was all for love—love for me, for herself, love for God, and a great passionate love for life.

My little family recently moved out of the house we'd lived in since my daughter was born, and that event was just one of thousands that made me realize that nobody but a mother wants to hear the blow-by-blow details of your everyday existence. Of course I could talk to my friends, but honestly, nobody but your mother cares if you are moving. Nobody really wants to hear about it. Nobody wants to help. If my mother had been there, she would have wanted to hear every detail.
How's the light? How's the water pressure? Describe the kitchen.
Did you check for mildew? Send Easton to my house while you move. I'll take care of everything.

I long for those days when she would call me at 6:00
A.M.
to hear everything about my life. I can't forget that conversation when I told her we should table our early-morning chats for a while, because I wanted to focus on myself. I think about every word, every sentence I didn't get to hear from her or say to her. All lost. She understood the need for solitude better than anyone, but I still regret my withdrawal from her. I would give almost anything to hear that phone ring. I would answer it with joy and gratitude and I would talk to her up until the last second when I absolutely had to hang up and get to work. I would tell her every single detail, no matter how trivial: what I had for lunch, every syllable my daughter speaks, what the dog did, how the weather is, all about my latest acting project, why the new house really was better than the old house, what I would miss about the old house, and how bittersweet it is to move on from the things you love. I'm greedy for every lost moment. I want them all back.

Instead, I have these conversations with myself, unmoored as I am now from the grounding force and anchor that was her. She wanted me to love something beyond this world, and oh how I do. Mom, where are you now? What's it like? How's the light? Are you finally free? Can you feel how much love I'm sending out into the ether? Does it find you?

Because she was still alive when I last saw her, sometimes I feel like she's still out there somewhere, living out the rest of her life, the decades she should have remaining. She cannot answer me, not yet, but I'll never stop asking. She wanted me to keep seeking, and I do—I seek God, I seek love, I seek
her.
Because my mother is gone from this world.

Her gifts were not lost on me and that is my one consolation. I see how she created me in her own image, and how she also created me in the image of myself, so that I could become someone who had never existed before and will never exist again. She made me see my own beauty and uniqueness. She taught me that what I need matters more than what society thinks I should want. It was her legacy. My mother didn't do everything right, but she got the big things right. The soul-oriented, character-creating things were what mattered to her, and I can only hope I can be half the mother she was.

My mother was strong and passionate and she walked this earth with a power all her own, and she bestowed it on me. To be a mother is, in some sense, to be supernatural. To be full of magic. To be eternal. To understand at the level of soul that love is more important than what is right, and to act on that—to love through fear and pain and even through death.

That is why she was, and is, and always will be my hero.

The world is so rich,
simply throbbing with rich treasure.

—Henry Miller

 

T
he first time I felt the miracle of pregnancy wasn't when I heard
my baby's heartbeat or saw her on the ultrasound monitor. It was the moment when I first felt her move inside me.

Ron and I were visiting Turks and Caicos along with some other celebrities for the opening of a beautiful new hotel. The hotel was promoting itself and invited us, and I was looking forward to a relaxing weekend in the Caribbean. The hotel was beautiful—bright yellow with white hurricane shutters, decorated in pastels and infused with the aroma of patchouli and gardenias. In the airport, I recognized Giuliana Rancic and her husband, and although we didn't really know each other, we waved. (I wish I had known then what I know now—she could have ordered up a stiff drink and I could have ordered a virgin piña colada and we could have swapped infertility stories!)

I was about six and a half months pregnant at the time. After we checked into the hotel, I looked out at the vast turquoise ocean and told Ron I was going to go swimming. I put on my maternity bathing suit and went down to the beach. I waded into the warm water and lay back to float. I wanted to get some exercise, so I paddled around gently on my back. Suddenly, I felt the baby roll over!

Oh my God! I looked down at my swollen belly and I saw her foot or her hand pressing out toward me, reaching out to me. I touched it, and I felt like we held on to each other for the first time. I waded back out and went back up to the room to show Ron. She was still moving. He put his hand on my belly and she kicked and turned for him, too. He looked at me in wonderment. It was a miracle. I was growing a life inside me. For the first time, it felt real.

Life is full of little miracles like this. When I look back over my life, I can think of a lot of examples of people showing up and reminding
me who I am or where I am or what I really want to be doing, just at the moment when I could have gone in the wrong direction or forgotten what was important. It might be a random taxi driver in New York saying something out of the blue that helps me keep my head on straight. It might be a server in a diner or my agent or manager or lawyer, or it might be my Aunt Laurie or Ron or even my daughter. I think God speaks through people sometimes, in order to tell you what you need to hear. Words that seem to come from the beyond have often helped me to find my way again. I think that anyone with eyes wide open is likely to run smack into all kinds of miracles in this life. You just have to pay attention.

Having a baby was my greatest miracle, but after my mother died, my miracles began to come hard and fast. When she was alive, calling me every day from Amsterdam, she would sometimes say, “I'm so frustrated that I can't help you. I can't help you with finances because I don't have any money. I can't help you with child care because I'm not in the best of health. I can't help you by being there because I'm an ocean away.” One day, she said, “I would be more help to you if I was in heaven!”

After she died, I was practically laid out by grief, and after
Heroes
ended, I was feeling a lot of career and financial pressure. Then, out of nowhere, I was cast in a movie I'd been interested in a year before, but that I thought was never going to be made. The best thing about the movie was that it would be filming in New Jersey, so I was able to go back home to New York and stay at Nancy's house in Scarsdale. I could bring Easton, and I would have the family support and help I needed. It was a dream come true at that moment in my life.

Shortly after filming the movie, I was called back to New York again to make a two-hour personal appearance at an event for animals. The honorarium seemed disproportionately large. All I had to do was go to a party and give a speech in a ballroom full of pets and
pet lovers about my love for animals. It was amazing. It was something I was more than happy to do, and I felt like the money had fallen from the heavens.

I just know she choreographed all of it. She was sending me the help I needed. The child care help, the career boost, the financial boost, and the family support I craved. After that, I got another starring role in a studio film called
Transit,
opposite Jim Caviezel, an actor with a strong sense of spirituality. Of course, my mother, from her heavenly vantage point, would put me into a film with someone like that. Then, other miracles: I began to write a blog at
People.com
, and then through a series of coincidences, I met the writer who could help me with this book. And now I'm writing it! It all seems so unlikely, so beautiful, and so perfectly orchestrated. I cannot believe it was all coincidence.

Then, last December, I was praying to God that I didn't want to travel so much anymore because I wanted to be home more often with my daughter, so she could have more stability and be able to count on my being there every day. I prayed, “God, please keep me at home unless travel really enhances our lives. I want to work in LA.” Very soon after that, I began to notice a couple at my daughter's school. I'm not sure why I noticed them, but when I saw them in Whole Foods one afternoon, I went up to them and said, “For some reason, I feel like I'm supposed to know you.”