Baby Steps (28 page)

Here is what I've decided about love: it begins in infancy, when you gaze at your parents and they are the whole universe. My parents were my first great loves. My mom was the very source of all from the moment I was born, or maybe even before. Her body was my body, her energy was my energy. Like all babies, I must not have fully understood we were separate beings for at least a year.

My dad was the first man I ever loved. After the divorce, and even before because of his work schedule, I didn't see him nearly as much
as I saw my mother, but I always ached to see him more. He was my reflection of the outside world, and his opinion of me, spoken and unspoken, defined me in my own mind. When he told me I was a great singer, a great writer, that I could run fast or that I was strong or beautiful, I believed him. When I looked at myself through my father's eyes, I felt like a better version of me.

Although my parents ultimately failed at loving each other, they each had their own evolution of love, and they both found happiness and true romantic love with other people. That knowledge has often sustained me through my own heartaches.

Sometimes I think back on how my mother must have felt, going through a heartbreaking divorce while still having to care for a young daughter. As difficult as it was for me, to experience the loss of our family as I knew it and to watch my father fly off to start another family with another woman and have other children he seemed to prefer, my mother had no one else but me to sustain her. Me, and God.

When my mother sold our family home and went off to pursue her own dream and the life she really wanted, it was a great act of self love. As much as she had sacrificed for me, this wasn't about me, and I'm so grateful I got to see her do that. But at the time, I thought that her rejection of society was also a rejection of romantic love, in favor of her spiritual quest and her need to love herself.

I think that was very brave. It takes a lot of courage to love after heartbreak, after you've been disappointed, and I remember my mom saying she was never going to end up with anybody after my father. She said she was done with it, and I believed her.

But when she was fifty-one, my mother attended her best friend Nancy's wedding to Olaf, and Olaf's brother, Peter, flew in from Amsterdam to attend the wedding, too. He was older than my mother, and he had become bitter about love, but when they met, they had an instant connection. Something happened between them
that neither of them expected, and they weren't willing to give it up. Because he lived in Holland, they stayed in touch by phone after he went home.

This was all a little baffling to me. I was so used to my mother being a single woman. It was part of her identity, or so I thought. She was living in Woodstock, New York, at the time, and every Friday, after the long week of filming
Law & Order
was over, I drove from New York City on the Westside Highway, all the way up to Palisades and along the Hudson River to upstate New York. After I passed Kingston, I took the exit to Woodstock and followed the winding roads up to the house where she lived. After an exhausting week, I loved this dark, quiet drive.

But the first time I opened the door to that house in Woodstock after Peter had gone home after the wedding, I was surprised and startled to hear giggling. It sounded like bubbles flowing out of a champagne bottle after the cork is popped. I remember going to my mother's bedroom and quietly knocking on the door.

“Mom?”

I opened the door and there she was, snuggled under the covers of her bed, talking on the phone with Peter. She grinned at me, and her smile was incandescent. It was the sweetest thing in the world. I realized something had changed. Love had returned to her life in a whole new way.

Every Friday for months, I came to visit and encountered these same ripples of joyous laughter. The two of them spent the whole summer on the phone, crazy with puppy love. Then Peter came to visit for two weeks at the end of the summer. The day they came sheepishly to my apartment, holding hands like two teenagers getting ready to tell their parents about their grown-up plans, I remember thinking,
Oh shit. She's going to move there.

I felt a wave of anger and abandonment roll over me and then roll away. I felt like our time together in the house in Woodstock was just beginning. I'd finally gotten her back, after all those years apart, and now he was going to take her away from me?

Sure enough, my mother said, “Lis, we have something to tell you . . .” It was official. They were in love. She was leaving the country, moving to Holland to be with him.

My father also found true love. When I was ten years old, I saw my father and my soon-to-be stepmother, Jess, fall madly in love. The first time I met her, he brought her with him to pick me up at summer camp. I remember thinking,
Oh great. Who's this? Not my new mother.
Their courtship was quick and intense. I remember sitting with them at the pizza parlor while they made out at the table. I was mortified. They were that couple who sips wine and slow dances in the kitchen and makes their children want to throw up.

It was complicated for me, to see him act this way with another woman when I never saw him act that way with my mother, but it was real love, and it did make an impression. I remember the awkwardness the day he handed me the invitation to his wedding. At first I was cynical about their relationship, but thirty years later, just this past weekend when I was talking to Jess, she mentioned something about how hot my father is. This was a little too much information for me, but I also recognize how lucky she and my father both are to have found and sustained a love like that. That's rare.

If I learned anything from my parents, it's that it ain't over till it's over. If it's possible to find that crazy puppy love you think is reserved for sixteen-year-olds, the kind that makes you want to kiss your beloved a million times a day, even after you've been heartbroken, even when you are forty or fifty or sixty and so on, then that says something for the power of love. That says love is always available.
You may have to wait for it, it may not find you on your timetable, but it can find you anytime, anywhere. My parents both found the loves of their lives, each in their own time, and maybe that happened exactly the way it was meant to happen for each of them.

I believe love is the one thing in us that doesn't die. It is the thing hope grows out of. It is the soil that sprouts everything good. It is the one thing that can never be destroyed. Even if your parents were divorced and you come from a broken home and feel like it was a disaster for you, there is a silver lining when you get to see them find happiness with other people. I think there is a lot to be said for actively seeking love. Seeing love in action always gives me hope that love is winning over darkness.

I went out to look for it as soon as I moved out of my mother's home, and I've always been open and communicative about my loves and losses. When I was on
Law & Order,
I used to tell Sam Waterston and Fred Thompson all about each new relationship, and I was effervescent with hope that this, finally, was
the one.
Sam must have felt like he experienced all my relationships right along with me, considering how much I told him. Moving in with “that last one” had been a mistake, as evidenced by a handful of broken plates and more than one call to law enforcement. Maybe “this new one” will be nicer, but don't rush into anything, Lis.

“Well then?” Sharon, my makeup stylist, would want to know how every evening out went, the results, wonderful or terrible, of every first date. “Don't leave us in suspense. Who is it this time?”

Most of the time, the results were disappointing. I remember going back to the dressing room on the first day of filming after a summer when I really did believe I would get married and settle down for good. Sam Waterston came into my dressing room looking tanned and ten pounds heavier and deeply peaceful. I remember thinking,
So that's what it looks like, to be well loved.

“Well?” he said. “Are you married? Did it all work out?”

Sadly, I held up my empty hand and wiggled my ring finger.

“Ah well,” he said. “Perhaps it's all for the best. Don't be in such a hurry. You still have a lot to do.”

I've dated some pretty amazing human beings, and I'm lucky enough to still call some of them my friends. They all might have made good partners if the timing had been right, and there wasn't anything wrong with any of them. Even when I thought I wanted commitment and family, I wasn't really ready for any of those things. Maybe people never really are. But sometimes, life puts you just where you need to be in the moment you need to be there, while you're busy weighing and measuring and still fooling yourself that you have control over it all.

When I met Ron, I was getting cynical. Experience had taught me (or I had misinterpreted the lesson) that if I loved too much, I would be abandoned. I was perpetually disappointed when a relationship didn't equal the fairy tale I'd concocted in my head. I was in love with love, and I wanted to be swept off my feet by a man on a white horse who could take anything I could dish out and love me all the more for it, who wanted everything I wanted, who would be the perfect husband, the perfect lover, and the perfect father. I wanted perfection, and a guarantee.

But there was something about Ron's quiet passion and enduring patience that began to seduce me into a quieter, more realistic idea of love. When I realized that Ron could be the father, the lover, and the one who wouldn't abandon me, I began to rethink my history of loving and leaving. I was finally experienced enough to recognize a good soul when I saw one. I realized that maybe he was perfect enough, and maybe I was, too.

Ron has been my great learning experience, my understated love story, the father of my child, and the one man I know will never leave
me, no matter how I test him, no matter how faultily I love him back. Ron has taught me more about love than any of the others. I think about that Bible verse from 1 Corinthians:
Love is patient and kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. Love never fails.
That's Ron.

We still haven't tied the knot. Ask me why three days in a row, and you'll get three different answers, but these are some of the things I know about Ron:

First, I think if Ron and I got married now, we would stay together forever, but if we don't get married, we will probably stay together forever anyway. Sometimes I wonder if it was a mistake not to get married when we first started IVF, as we had planned, but this is the way things worked out. It's now been eight years of deciding to stay together, and if one of us thinks the other one isn't quite what he or she wanted, well . . . why have we stuck around for so long already?

Second, Ron didn't sweep me off my feet, but he drew me in and held me tight. He hasn't given me the TV movie version of love that I thought I aspired to, but he has given me the real version of love, which is unconditional and based in truth—the lasting, growing kind. He's never betrayed me, never cheated on me, and when it comes to what we need to do to create and maintain our family, he has always done it. He always shows up. He's in it for the long haul. Some of our friends call Ron and me “Ricky and Lucy,” because that's been our love affair all along. It's not perfect. Sometimes it's hilarious. But it's real and enduring.

Third, Ron and I make a great parenting team. We deliberately chose to be parents, and we are devoted to our daughter. The other day, a friend told me that her parents were completely in love with
each other, but they weren't good parents. Sometimes I think Ron and I are excellent parents, but we don't always connect on a day-today basis. I'm sure most people can relate to that. Our relationship has become so much about our miracle baby, even though she's now four years old, that it's rarely about the two of us anymore. I think that's pretty common when children are young, but we have a similar moral compass and passion for family, the family we fought so hard to create. And that's worth a stable of white horses.

Finally, I've always had this image in my mind that someday, I would have a wedding with a white dress and a white cake, and both my parents would come and they would say nice things to each other. They would say things like “We were in love! Why were we so angry? Why did we have to torture each other and torture Lis? Ha-ha-ha, let's tip one back and forget it all ever happened because it's all okay now!”

In my wedding fantasy, everybody would laugh and hug and I would know I was doing exactly the right thing to get married, and it would be beautiful and romantic and perfect. It would be a fairy-tale wedding.

But when my mother died, I realized that fantasy could never come true. If she couldn't be there, the fairy tale would be incomplete, so it was too late. If she couldn't be there, why bother to get married at all? My mother's absence would just confirm that all the problems and imperfections in my life will never get magically and romantically resolved in one gorgeous, lacey, silk-draped, white-rose-festooned, fondant-wrapped afternoon.

Then again, sometimes I think my reluctance has to do with how vast and incomprehensible I believe marriage to be. It's a fantastic impossible contract I couldn't possibly read and understand, let alone sign. How could I live up to the expectations I have for such an agreement? Maybe I think it is an invitation to disaster—the ultimate fate
tempt. “Look at me! I'm happy now! I've proven it!” That's when they pull the rug out from under you, isn't it? That's when the other shoe falls. Forever is a long time.