Being Kendra (7 page)

Around when baby Hank was born, I realized I needed to settle my losses and get set up for my future. I had so much clean-up to do that I ended up hiring a business manager to handle our money properly. Being a parent makes you mature whether you like it or not. It was one thing to screw up my life, but it was another to screw up my child’s. It was one of the most mature things we ever did: realize that with all of the financial trouble I was in and the various outlets we had money coming in from and going out to, we needed someone to keep track of it all. “Kendra” is a business. I couldn’t let a stripper be the CFO of Kendra Inc. I just wasn’t cut out for it.

Now our business manager has the passwords to our bank, he does our taxes, he pays our bills, and does it all on time and correctly. I know not everyone has that luxury, but for me it’s not a luxury, it’s a necessity. I’d probably be in jail if not for this. I haven’t seen a bill in more than a year, my paychecks go straight to him, and all past credit issues are directly handled. I have clarity and security now.

T
hrowing plates against the wall, screaming four-letter words at the top of my lungs, and trying to pull my hair out of my head may have been the climax of my problems, but it certainly didn’t start there. Everything wrong that happened during the first few months of Hank Jr.’s life can be traced to one small body part: my brain. I had an imbalance, wires were fried, things weren’t communicating properly. Physically, mentally, and emotionally I felt like a giant jigsaw puzzle with all the pieces mixed up. With the meltdown in Minnesota, my weight gain, and marital problems with Hank, my depression was dominating every moment of
Kendra
. But at the time I didn’t realize all of my problems were classic postpartum symptoms.

When you are knee-deep in it, you just don’t get why everything is aggravating you. I blamed my anger on the fact that we had no place to call home, I blamed my anxiety on the fact that we were cooped up in tiny little living spaces, and I blamed my lack of sleep on the baby. Those were probably all true and certainly played a role in my meltdowns, but really it was all just my brain not being able to adjust to my new life: motherhood. If I was just a wife and all I had to do was travel the country with Hank, from hotel to hotel, city to city, I probably would have embraced it. How fun! But throw a baby into that mix and it was just a recipe for disaster.

I’m not sure if I can accurately say I had “postpartum depression.” I was never diagnosed officially, but I’m going to go ahead and self-diagnose myself: I had it. I think once you’ve had the dark days—and I had them bad—you realize that depression is only one minor part of everything going on in your brain. Yes, there is a lot of depression involved, but I also experienced bouts of anxiety, anger, insomnia, and hatred—really a little cocktail of every bad symptom I’d never want on its own, let alone all of them mixed together.

When baby Hank was born, we were living in Indianapolis in a nice gated community and it was beautiful. It all began during the first few weeks after the baby was born. While it was always snowing and freezing cold outside, for the first three weeks there was a sense of calmness and beauty. The skies were gray, the ground was snowy white, and there was silence everywhere. That’s where the beauty ended though, and the weather and being trapped in the house began to take its toll. I am not a cold-weather person; I wear sweatshirts during the summer. We were fighting winter in every way because the house wasn’t made with weatherproof windows or doors, so in addition to the constant whistling of the cold wind, we always had portable heaters going. We had about fifteen of them set up throughout the house and we even kept one going in the bathroom 24/7.

The house was made in the sixties (we were temporarily renting it for the show) and furnished and designed with really ugly stuff. It wasn’t the least bit comfortable, but then again I was kind of used to that type of lifestyle at this point in my life. We were sleeping on someone else’s bed and showering in someone else’s shower—a foreshadowing of things to come for the next several years of my life. With cameras, TVs, wires, lights, and a production crew set up in the basement, our house became a mini production studio, which meant we always had the camera in our faces.

It was beautiful outside with the snow, but you never wanted to go out because it was just too severe of a winter. Trapped inside the house, I developed bad eating habits and stopped caring about basics, like personal hygiene. It was hard for me to quit eating poorly because I couldn’t exercise, I couldn’t get outside much or go anywhere, and I didn’t have the time to cook anything healthy. I ate nothing but junk food. I was in survival mode. Dinner was sometimes carrying around a bag of popcorn while I did laundry or arranged the baby’s toys, clothes, and essentials.

With studio show lights in every corner and every hallway and on every ceiling, no matter where I was the spotlight was on me. Even when I closed my eyes on the couch just to get peace, there were lights. Comfort was hard to find under about two feet of snow and in the glare of the TV lights.

At this point I was showering about once a week, a far cry from the twice daily I used to do. You can always tell how depressed I am by the number of times I shower and brush my teeth. The better I feel, the cleaner I am. If I’m down, I’m going to be dirty. So during my depression teeth brushing went to a minimum, and even when I did it, I did it in the dark, because I was so ashamed and in denial about the way I looked. I had gained fifty-seven pounds during my pregnancy and in the first few weeks after Hank’s birth, I still looked and felt bloated. I didn’t look in the mirror, nor did I ever look up. Deodorant and personal hygiene became last year’s problem. I was sweaty, with milk leaking out of my boobs.

Nights were even lonelier. I would be down in the living room—it was a two-story house and we let the baby sleep anywhere (we never gave him a specific place to sleep really)—at four
A.M
. breast pumping. So I’d creak down the stairs, open the fridge, get the breast suctions and bottles, and pump my boobs in the dark, all the while trying to keep my eyes open. Hearing the breast pump and the drip of the milk was like Chinese water torture every night; I was the only one awake, all alone, repeating the same mundane steps over and over again every night. I was watching the baby sleep peacefully while Hank was upstairs sleeping; it was like I was the only one in the world awake, and all the while the pump was going
chug
chug,
chug
chug
and the milk was going
drip
drip
into the bottle. The wind was banging up against the thin windows; it was about 40 degrees in our house unless you were standing next to one of our fifteen portable heaters, and the sun was about to start rising in around 180 minutes, and I’d yet to get two consecutive hours of sleep.

There would be nights too where I would purposely wake up Hank because I was so jealous he got to sleep. I felt really alone. I was so tired and miserable and without help I’d just give a little cough and he’d pop his head up to see what I was up to. That was my evil side taking over.

I had no sleep for a full month. I didn’t initially hire help or a night nurse because I said to myself, “I don’t need help, I don’t need a nanny. I’m doing this myself.” I brought that baby home and I took on the role of being a new mom the day after I had a C-section all by myself. Hank was working hard playing for the Indianapolis Colts and I was working hard being a stay-at-home mom. I wanted to be put to the test. I wanted to show people that I was going to do this on my own without help. It was a matter of pride, and I felt like I had a lot to prove.

But that schedule of waking Hank Jr. and feeding him every three hours hit me hard, and during a twenty-four-hour period, I would average about two and half hours of sleep. As soon as I’d finally fade to sleep, I’d have to wake back up again. This went on for about a month. I have ADD, so once I was up I would wander around the house or look outside or just kill time. Sleeping became something of the past, a sort of fuzzy memory, something only “Hanks” got to do.

A month went by and I was fried. It became harder and harder to string a sentence together and remember what I was doing when I entered a room. I knew that I needed help. I was not only taking care of the baby but shooting a show on top of it. Here I was taking care of baby Hank with a sense of obligation. It had nothing to do with love or a desire to care for him. I was changing that kid’s diaper because he couldn’t do it himself. I was feeding him a bottle or my boob because I was taught to take care of those in need. I was running off of obligation but I wasn’t loving him or anyone. I was angry at the world and my love for everybody was starting to fade away and diminish. Imagine that when your baby is crying you just shove a pacifier in his mouth to quiet him instead of giving him a hug. That is when I got help.

I finally gave in and hired a night nurse, Genie. She was from Indianapolis and recommended by my ob-gyn Dr. Webber. I didn’t love the word “nanny,” but I loved the word “nurse”! Even better, a night nurse! A nanny felt too much like I was having someone take care of my kid. A nurse felt like I just had someone around to help because I had never done it before. Genie was older and had kids of her own. I could tell immediately having her around was a good thing.

Hank Jr. liked her and that made me happy. She would come from ten
P.M.
to six
A.M.
, so that meant I technically should have loved her too. But I felt a little threatened and jealous of all the things she could do that I hadn’t mastered yet.

I would still take care of baby Hank during the day, but I was mature and responsible enough to know that I wasn’t doing anyone any good trying to do this all on my own. So the nurse woke up with him during the night. I felt guilty, but sleep was what I needed more than anything in the world and staying up at all hours of the night for me was dangerous. Too much of anything is really dangerous, especially for me. Not only for me but also for the baby and my husband and our relationship. I was at the point where the yang was taking over. I needed more balance in my life. For me, sleeplessness turns into paranoia and I started to hallucinate and see traces in the light, walking around like a zombie. I never laughed and I never smiled. I was not Kendra Wilkinson.

I knew that I was at an all-time low, without love for everything in life, including myself. During the first couple of nights Genie was there, I became even more depressed. That’s when I finally found the time to look in the mirror and see what I had actually done to myself. The first two weeks were tiring but the third and fourth week were downhill even more. It was like torture, and the longer you are tortured the less likely it is that you’ll be able to withstand it. I thought about self-mutilation and was mentally attacking myself. I wanted to pull my hair out and I wanted to cut myself. I didn’t do it because I had been down that road before earlier in my life with drugs. I knew that the second I started to do that again I wouldn’t be able to stop and we’d all be in real bad shape, to the point where if I did do it I’d probably need to go away and get help for a while. It was purely out of experience and what I had learned in my past that I was able to keep my head above water in that department.

I hated life. I hated myself. And I hated Hank because he was getting more sleep than I was. I was so upset. And I still couldn’t sleep at night. I began to hallucinate and I saw myself as a pig when I looked in the mirror. Literally, I imagined myself looking like a hog. I would stand in front of the mirror (or sometimes just think of it in my head) and imagine I was a dirty hog with a snout, that I was unclean and fat and just gorging on food and scrounging around in filth.

I started just to be mad at anyone who got in my way; I was an assassin. Feed the baby, scream at people, change the baby’s diaper, be angry, put the baby to sleep, ignore others, wake the baby up, do laundry, lash out at someone—that was my life. I started saying angry, hurtful things that I’ve never said before to loved ones like Hank, like “I fucking hate you.” On numerous occasions I told my husband that I hated him, and I meant it. The lack of sleep physically started to show on me: My eyes were drooping and my skin was completely pale like a ghost.

The word “hate” was the word I was using more than anything else, and I was hours away from the boiling point where I’m not sure what would have happened. The pig was out of her pen and on the loose.

When the nanny came I had the time to sleep, but that sleep just let my paranoia get the best of me. I was still beating myself up for letting someone else take over the child care situation.
Why
couldn’t
I
do
it
on
my
own?
My mind started playing tricks on me again. I was afraid of what Genie could be doing at three
A.M.
when I wasn’t around. She wasn’t even family. I felt like a failure for hiring this night nurse. I couldn’t let go. I was feeling selfish for taking off a few nights!

As soon as the sun came up I would fly downstairs and be like, “Okay, Genie, I can take it from here.” I knew that I had to prove to people that I could do it. I didn’t even know who I was talking about, but I wanted to prove to “people” that I could take care of this baby by myself. Who were these people I was trying to prove wrong? It was my family. My husband, my son, my mom, my brother, my grandma, my in-laws, my fans, and America. I needed everybody to know that I needed to do this right and on my own. Part of me psyched myself up out of pride—the needing and wanting to do it—and part of me did it out of insecurity, the old “What will everyone think of me if I don’t do it?”

The problem with me during that time was that I wasn’t thinking straight or rationally. If and when I actually got sleep I just dwelled on the fact that I was not there for my baby. I was angry when I got sleep and I was tired and angry when I didn’t. Either way it ended up the same, and I stupidly convinced myself that Hank Jr. was going to remember all of this, he was going to know I wasn’t there for him. Looking back, he didn’t know the difference. When a baby is thirty days old he really doesn’t remember if a nurse took care of him for two or three nights a week. In fact, hell, compared to me taking care of him at that point, if he could remember, he’d probably have preferred the nurse. But my depression led me into thinking he was going to see the night nanny as his mom. I was so delusional that though he couldn’t even really see, I thought he was going to start recognizing her. The worst was when she got him to stop crying. I felt jealousy, anger, and insecurity all at once. She was comforting my baby when I couldn’t! So I would wake up at five thirty
A.M
. or six
A.M
. just to rush downstairs and give Genie the “Okay, you’re gone. Here’s your money. Bye.”

Yes, even Kendra Wilkinson got jealous of the nanny. Was she this young girl Hank was going to cheat on me with? No. But I was still jealous of her. Because when I first had baby Hank I was very insecure in my role as a mother. I was a hormonal wreck and beyond protective, a real mama bear. I was protecting him from everything, even family. And I just assumed everybody thinks I’m stupid and I had no idea what I was doing. Even family members didn’t trust me. They thought I was going to have a blond moment when it came to baby Hank.