Drinking and Tweeting (14 page)

If you’re going through a split without children, you have reason to be grateful for that, too. While my boys
were a huge blessing when I was struggling with my divorce, and continue to be the light of my world, I have to deal with their father for the rest of my life. Breakups and divorces are much easier to move on from without children. You can wash your hands of your former partner, you’ll never have to deal with that person again, and you definitely won’t be ambushed by yet another paparazzi set-up at your kid’s soccer game by his or her new partner. #JustSayin.

Look, when it comes to raising children after divorce, I don’t have all the answers. I barely have any answers for raising children in general—especially in Los Angeles. When I was going through the thick of my divorce, friends recommended a thousand books and websites about how to tactfully explain to the boys what was going on and how to make the transition as easy as possible. However, mine was a unique situation. The shelves weren’t necessarily brimming with books titled
What to Do When Your Husband Has an Affair with a Semi-Famous Country Singer
. It breaks my heart to think that my children will one day be able to relive every painful moment of this ugly ordeal, because it is forever cataloged on the Internet.

I decided not to tell the boys about Eddie’s and my
separation—not immediately, anyway. How could I? I could barely accept it myself. At the time, part of me was still hoping that he would one day come home. I know ultimately it was my decision to end things. He kept telling me his affair was over, but I kept catching him in lies. He wouldn’t shake this woman, and I simply could not trust him anymore. Despite all of that, I stalled in telling the boys the truth and instead kept telling them that Daddy was working. Daddy was always “working,” so it wasn’t anything new to them. I realized it was also a lie I often told myself when my husband would be on a trip for days on end and not call. I think taking your time in telling your kids is okay. You need to heal first before figuring out the right time and the right words. And Eddie’s schedule was the perfect excuse.

Throughout both of my sons’ lives, Eddie was always traveling for work—Romania, Morocco, Canada, New York, Washington, DC. It wouldn’t seem out of the ordinary for him to be out of the house for lengthy periods. I decided early on that I would never say anything bad to the boys about their father. Every child deserves a father he or she can look up to and respect, even if it is Eddie Cibrian.

Mason finally figured out that Daddy wasn’t coming
home when he moved out of the Oakwood apartments and into a rental home in the gated community of Mont Calabasas (only about a mile away from the home we’d shared). There, Eddie introduced the boys to his new friend, “Le,” despite promising via his lawyers that he would refrain from bringing her around the boys until after the holidays and not until January 2010. Like most promises Eddie made, he wasn’t prepared to keep this one, either. LeAnn had recently moved out of the Brent-wood home she’d shared with her then husband, Dean, and into a rental in Hidden Hills. A soon-to-be-divorced, childless woman was consciously deciding to move from Brentwood to Calabasas? #SoPathetic.

“We met Le again,” Mason told me one day over a bowl of cereal.

“Okay,” I said. I had no other words and focused my attention back on unloading the dishwasher. I have always been extremely domestic, but since my divorce, I could no longer afford the help I was once accustomed to, so I was learning to do things on my own again.

“She sings songs that they play on the radio. Do you listen to her music?” Mason was testing me, studying my reaction, and I knew what was coming next.

“No, Mason, I don’t.” I didn’t want to lie to him, but I didn’t want to bash her, either. With Eddie’s track record, I wasn’t exactly sure how long she would be around; but for now, it appeared that she was going to be in the boys’ lives for the foreseeable future, and they seemed to like her. Even though they were little, they are their own people, and I wanted them to develop their own opinion of her. Eventually, they will know the full story, and they can process that information however they like.

“Daddy kissed her,” Mason said, looking directly at me. #GutPunch. He wanted to see if I would get sad. It wasn’t manipulative; he was six years old at the time, and he was just trying to understand a confusing situation. I tried to muster some calm response, but I couldn’t help the tears from welling up.

“Okay,” I quickly managed, and darted out of the kitchen. I locked myself in the master bathroom for the next five minutes and allowed myself to sob. Of course Eddie and LeAnn kissed. I saw the video with my own eyes months earlier, and I know that kissing was just the tip of their sexual iceberg, regardless of how unattractive he always said he found her.

This was different. My children were watching their father be affectionate with a woman other than their mother. Not only was it strange for them, it was difficult for me, too.

Mason didn’t say another word about it when I returned to the kitchen—sunglasses on—and we went about our day as normal. Later that night, after all the lights were out, Mason crawled into bed with me to snuggle. I think part of him felt that it was his job to take care of me now. And I let him. Every night he spent at my house for the next two years, Mason would crawl into bed to cuddle with me. Once Mason got a little too old to crawl into bed with Mommy, Jake took over cuddle duty. To this day, Jake still crawls into bed with me during the night, and I like it that way. Their cuddles helped because it showed how much they care about me. I knew they were going to be good men. Despite it all, I was raising good men.

Jake first realized that our life was changing when he waddled into Eddie’s closet and found it completely empty. He was so confused and wondered where all of Daddy’s clothes went. I had two giant walk-in closets in our Calabasas house (each one the size of my entire bedroom
in my Encino rental), so I took half of the clothes I didn’t wear and moved them over to Eddie’s closet, thinking this would distract Jake for a while. The next day, he peeked into Eddie’s closet and screamed, “No! No pink dresses in Daddy’s closet.” He burst into tears, so I scooped him up, held him tight, and started crying, too. I tried my best not to cry in front of the boys. For a few months I commonly wore sunglasses in the house, so they wouldn’t see my puffy eyes. I wanted to be a strong mom that they could be proud of, but every so often my emotions would get the best of me.

Shortly after the kissing conversation, I finally admitted to the boys that Daddy wasn’t coming home. LeAnn was now a frequent figure at his house, and I wasn’t sure what they were learning about our situation over there, since Eddie and I weren’t communicating. I decided that they might as well hear the truth from their mom, before they heard it elsewhere.

Finally, I just sucked it up and blurted out, “Daddy fell in love with someone else, and he’s not going to live with us anymore.” It shattered my heart to tell them that, but it was as close to the truth as I could get. I knew that as they got older, they would hear the story, but I would
protect them as long as I could. Plus, I was pretty certain LeAnn and Eddie weren’t coughing up the truth on their end. By this point, the boys were already used to the split living situation: two bedrooms, two closets, and two families. “The conversation” didn’t seem to faze them too much, but as a parent, I found it a therapeutic discussion for us to have. I felt as if a weight had been lifted off my shoulders, since I had been keeping this massive secret from the two most important people in my life. It was providing a sense of closure to our former family. Many doors were still open, but as they say, one day at a time.

Mason had known what was going on for a while, but Jake seemed to finally understand as well. Now almost six years old, Jakey has zero recollection of the time Mommy and Daddy were married. Not too long ago, he picked up one of the photos I have displayed in my office from my friend Emma and Bruce Willis’s wedding. The group shot of all of us shows Eddie and me smiling in the back row on what would prove to be our final vacation together, and I could see the confusion creep onto Jake’s face. “You and Daddy were together here,” he said, with a squinty nose and pointing his chubby, little finger at the frame.

“Yes,” I told him. “We used to be husband and wife.”

He looked back at the photo and started to giggle. “Weird,” he said, before placing the picture back down. While part of me feels sad that he’ll never remember the days when we were a happy family, the other part of me feels that he’s lucky not to remember. Perhaps that will make it easier for him down the road.

Shortly after the holidays, Eddie moved out of his rental and into a gorgeous Hidden Hills home with his girlfriend, seven months after we separated. Of course, Eddie jumped at the opportunity to move in with her; he always wanted to move to that ultraluxurious gated community. Now that he had a sugar mama to pay the rent, why not upgrade his house? (Today, they’re still living in their high-end rental, but have been spotted shopping for multimillion-dollar properties within the ritzy community. I guess LeAnn doesn’t have any dreams of heading back to Nashville. #TooBad)

When he moved into his new rental with LeAnn, I was certain an engagement was on the horizon. He’d promised me over and over that he would never marry
LeAnn, but that was just one of the countless lies he told me. Soon, LeAnn Rimes would become my sons’ bonus mom.

As soon as Eddie introduced her into the boys’ world, she immediately began showering them with over-the-top gifts. She was trying to buy my kids’ love, instead of earning it, and I felt the overwhelming need to compete. When the boys got home from yet another decadent vacation during which “Le” got them this and “Le” got them that, I decided I wanted to be the favorite for a while. I took Mason and Jake to Disneyland and splurged on an exclusive $700 tour guide for what I was calling our “special day.” I’m also terrible at directions, so the guide came in handy. We had such a great day, and for a little while I was the best mom in the boys’ world. I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised when later that same week LeAnn and Eddie took the boys back to Disneyland. Couldn’t they even let me have fucking Disneyland? When I saw the boys a few days later, all they could talk about was how much more fun they had with Daddy and “Le,” because they didn’t have to wait in any lines. I guess when you’ve sung a couple country songs,
they don’t make you wait in line at Disneyland anymore.

Let’s get real: the boys have always been spoiled. Both Eddie and I grew up with virtually nothing. We came from modest upbringings—hell, we lived in ghettos. I lived somewhere between the Bloods and the Crips, who all nicknamed me Barbie. Eddie grew up in a similar neighborhood deep in the Valley. (His parents had come over from Cuba.) When we had the boys, we wanted to give them everything: the fancy house, a big pool, and the extravagant toys. We thought, “We’re going to have these great kids who have everything.” It didn’t take long for us to realize that we were spoiling them rotten. To raise decent children, especially those close to all the bullshit of Hollywood, we needed to teach them the right life lessons. I wanted them to learn the value of a dollar. I may have gone overboard and scarred them a bit, because now everything is about money, and everything is a negotiation. Hey, at least they’ll be solid businessmen.

After the divorce, all of that went out the window for a while. When Daddy and “Le” bought the boys a trampoline, I immediately took them out to get the Xbox
and the Nintendo Wii that I had sworn would never be inside my home. I knew that I would always be their only mother, but I feared that my sons would want to spend more time with their new family because of the fun, new gadgets, so I tried to compete. LeAnn would buy them everything under the sun, and I wanted to go tit-for-tat (or how about tit-for-tit, since she went out and got my exact fucking boob job?). I felt that I was competing with this woman for my children’s love, and it felt even worse than losing Eddie. I know it sounds horrible, but it’s how I felt. LeAnn had once told me in a bitter, anger-fueled text-off that she couldn’t wait to meet my children, and once she did, she would would dote on them, make them lunches, drive them to soccer practice, and do all the other motherly duties that should have been reserved for me. She was simply making an ugly attempt to rattle my cage. But I just didn’t want this new woman touching my babies.

The boys quickly learned to take advantage of the situation, and everything became a game. They were constantly trying to figure out what they could shake me down for. I would take them to the toy store or Target and let them go wild. Their eyes would beam with
excitement as they ran up and down the aisles grabbing everything off the shelves. Once we got to the car, they would rip the boxes open, and for the next fifteen minutes I was the best mom in the whole world. The next day, I would find the toys lying in a corner of the room, where they would stay indefinitely. It was a quick fix. I was just throwing shit at these kids to make myself feel better, rather than doing something positive for my boys.

That’s where Eddie and I both fucked up, because I knew he was doing the same thing. And I knew he felt the same way I did about it. We couldn’t buy our children’s affection. That’s not what this was about, and they were learning to manipulate us against each other into getting what they wanted. We were drowning these children with these lavish, expensive gifts, and I simply couldn’t afford it anymore.

The other shoe finally dropped when I told the boys we were flying up north to see their grandparents and their cousins, and they asked, “Are we flying private?”

“Are you fucking kidding me?” I thought. “You’re little boys and you’re asking me if we’re taking a private jet to Sacramento?”

“No,” I barked. “We’re flying Southwest.”

Instead of randomly showering the boys with presents, I decided to implement a program to make them work for their rewards. I’m aware this is far from a novel idea, but sometimes the simple lessons are the most difficult to learn. I decided to set up a chore-and-reward chart. For every good day, they would get one point, and once they reached ten points—meaning ten “good” days—they could trade that in for one $10 toy.