It Was Me All Along: A Memoir (25 page)

She sounded immediately tense. I could tell she was struggling. She remained silent for several moments, obviously still digesting the idea. Her reply of “Well, you have to do what you think is right” was quiet, strained, insincere.

My heart sank. Barely giving me a blessing to move forward with my plan, she said we’d talk more later. We hung up, and I instantly felt insecure about the whole thing.

Sitting on my bed, I panicked.
She didn’t say it outright, but she doesn’t think it’s right. She wants me to take the job. To keep going
.

I called her back. No one’s opinion affected me as much as hers. I couldn’t bear the notion of her not agreeing with the direction of my life.

What began with me trying frantically to convince her of the merits of my would-be blog ended in a hysteria of crying and fighting.

“You can’t turn your back on this business, Andrea.” She’d never sounded so stern. “You have to realize how lucky you are to be doing what you’re doing. This job is incredible, and you just can’t see that right now. Listen, doing a blog isn’t for you.” I could tell she still didn’t understand fully what a blog was. The way she spoke of it, I knew she thought little to nothing of a living made online. Certainly it paled in comparison with the Hollywood world. “You’re not the type who can sit at a computer all day long. It’s too reclusive for you. You’re much too active for desk work like that.” She did have a point.

Our conversation made me feel guilty. How dare I turn my back on a good thing? Choking on tears, I accepted her doubts about my choice. Eventually I relented.
She’s right. I hate her at the moment, but she’s probably right
.

My heart shriveled in defeat. We finally said good-bye, both of us angry at the other, and I walked into the living room. I admitted to Daniel, wearily, that I had reconsidered. I was going to accept the job in Connecticut. His eyes softened, his face pained to see my frustration. “Kiddo, you know, you don’t have to. You’re an adult now; you can do what you want to do. She’ll understand eventually.”

I pressed my lips together, the bottom one beginning to
tremble. “I know.” I nodded. “But I care too much what she thinks of me. More than anything, I just don’t want to disappoint her.”

He sighed, knowing it was hopeless to try to convince me otherwise.

“And she’s given me everything. I want her to be proud of what I’ve done with my life.”

One week later I swirled my signature on the bottom line of a six-month lease in Hamden, Connecticut. Daniel and I looked at each other. How lucky I was that he’d up and move so often with me. As I looked into his eyes, my heart filled.
He’s good to me
, I thought. He’d run clear across the earth if he thought it’d make me happy. The way he loved me was all consuming, unconditional.

How does he love me like this?
I’d wonder. In the mornings, I’d wake to a new handwritten note. Something on the order of “Give ’em hell today. I love you”; or “I love you even though you have the biggest feet I’ve ever seen. Seriously, it’s alarming”; or “I won’t tell anyone that you chew in your sleep. They wouldn’t understand. I love you.”

I felt lucky that he had a profession that allowed him to move as often as I forced us to. Professional poker is good like that. In fact, it was on a trip we’d taken to Las Vegas for the World Series of Poker, just after we’d gotten back together, that I realized the extent of his love for me. Our second day there, my digital camera’s battery died, so I resorted to snapping photos with Daniel’s iPhone. Days later, nearing the end of our trip, he handed me his phone and told me to e-mail the pictures I’d taken to both of our Gmail accounts. Scanning the ones I’d taken during that week—dozens of fuzzy photos taken of food and pools and quasi-prostitutes—I found more I’d never realized he’d taken. Dozens of photos of an unknowing me.

At first I was taken aback by the rawness of a pajama-ed, wild-haired me. Unposed and unprepared. In the photos, I was doing everything from eating to reading to sleeping. I laughed as I thumbed through them. I looked terrible.

In one picture, I drank tea from a sixteen-ounce glass measuring cup. In another, I sat on our kitchen counter, eating frozen strawberries from a party-size bowl. Another showed me drinking water wearing a T-shirt Mom had bought me as a souvenir from a trip. The shirt read “Somebody who loves me very much went to Canada and got me this shirt.”
Priceless
. In yet another photo, I crouched on the kitchen floor, smiling and looking crazy-eyed through the glass door of the oven to watch cupcakes rise.

And then I realized that these photographs were quite special. Because they captured the days I didn’t think to document. Those times that went unmentioned, seemingly irrelevant in the grand scheme of things. Somehow they spoke volumes about my identity. Random images taken throughout the last year. They didn’t have stories and archived memories; they were simply the in-betweens of my life. Each was weird but also revealing.

What was most interesting about those photographs wasn’t that they were a sneak peek inside my daily life, but that Daniel found my life worth documenting. Not what I looked like or what I was doing in particular, but my zaniness. The quirks. The simple facts that I tuck my thermal pants into my socks and sit cross-legged in front of my oven door to watch my own baking projects.

In not even one photo was I dressed well.
What about that time I wore a dress?
Each was just something he found special somehow.

And now, looking through them all, I realized how lucky I was. He’d moved from Amherst to Cambridge to Philadelphia, and now to one forgettable town in Connecticut, just to be with me.
And I loved him for it. Because even when that Connecticut movie crumbled, when the production was abruptly shut down in January and I lost my job because the studio and the director couldn’t come to an agreement on budget, Daniel smiled and offered reassuringly, “The bright side is that now you can start your blog.”

The Monday that my first unemployment check arrived in the mail, I figured I had nothing to lose. I chose a free
WordPress.com
design, and
Can You Stay for Dinner
?—a name Daniel suggested—was born. At the beginning, I posted three times a day. I wanted to document the meals I ate daily to show how a person can lose weight and keep it off while still eating deliciously. It was to be a journal of my life through food. It was the long-winded answer to the questions I was often asked after losing weight. “How did you do it?” and “So … what do you eat?” and “What should I eat to lose weight?”

The challenge was avoiding health zealotry. I feared the self-righteous air that might exist on a blog that shares my path, my lifestyle. If I were to be too dogmatic, or if I set out a rigid list of diet rules, my message would be impractical and impersonal. For those reasons, I kept away from being too prescriptive when writing about weight loss. I needed readers to know that I was not a registered dietitian, not a licensed therapist, not aware of their unique complexities, their individual bodies, and, most glaringly—I wasn’t even that good at turning down a cupcake. I was simply one person who happened to have lots of history and personal experience with dieting, losing weight, and learning to love her whole self.

So the blog was created with the sole intention to show rather than tell. Simply to be an illustration of me, painted colorfully in
food. I hoped that the sharing of my reflections and recipes would mean something to others. I wanted readers to gain from what I’d lost, to develop an understanding of how I’d managed to change my life with food.

To do this, I asked them to stay for dinner. I invited readers into my home and showed them my breakfast, my salad at lunch, and my dinner, because I thought,
Well, I’m making it anyway, eating it anyway … might as well photograph it
.

I loved cooking and eating enough to snap an obscene number of photos of anything and everything edible in my home. I found something stylish, something sexy, in every picture, and I posted them for the world to see. I loved blogging immediately. The sharing, the give-and-take of commenting, the sense of community. A whole new world opened up.

I knew I had things to say about gaining and losing and maintaining that others might want to hear. And I knew that the things I’d say would not always make sense, not always be valuable to everyone. But I also knew that, at the very least, putting my feelings out there would be therapeutic.

And so I blogged every day. Before long, I began to receive comments and e-mails that made me glow from the inside out. Strangers told me their stories about food and weight; they related to me; they thanked me for putting myself out there in such a vulnerable way. The conversation, the staying for dinner—it made me the happiest I’d ever been.

Two months into the blog, our lease in Connecticut was nearing its end. I was committed to blogging, and I wanted the next job I took to be in line with food and writing. Daniel and I debated where to move next. San Francisco? Too expensive. Chicago? Too
central, too landlocked. Down south? Too polite, too hot. And then Seattle came to mind. Our friend Justin had moved out there after college. He’d fallen in love with a girl, and they’d chosen to spend a few years in the Pacific Northwest, where she was from. He told us how fantastic it was.

I knew that the food culture there would be perfect for a wannabe food writer. For someone obsessed with cooking and all things edible, Pike Place Market would be a dream. Plus, I’d always had a fascination with the Northwest. I’d always wanted to travel west and live on the Pacific side of the United States, and this could be a great new adventure.

Weeks later, after selling all our belongings, we bought one-way tickets to Seattle. Telling Mom sent me into an anxiety attack.
What will she think? She won’t like it … Am I making a mistake?
I went back and forth, thinking of all her reactions to life changes I’d made throughout the years since becoming an adult.

When I was eighteen, I pierced my nose. Mom lay in her bed and cried for two hours.

At nineteen, I told her I didn’t want to pursue the honors track in college because “Who cares?” Mom lay in her bed and cried for two hours.

At twenty, I lost 135 pounds. Mom lay in her bed and cried for two hours.

At twenty-one, I told her I was deeply sad and didn’t know how to go on. Mom lay in her bed and cried for two hours.

At twenty-three, I told her I’d just spent the night chatting with Leonardo DiCaprio and laughing with Mark Ruffalo on the set of
Shutter Island
. Mom was so excited and overwhelmed she lay in her bed and cried for two hours.

At twenty-four, I told her I was moving to Philadelphia to work on another film, but this time with Jack Nicholson and Paul Rudd. Mom lay in her bed and cried for two hours.

That same year, I told her I was going to stop working in film and start writing. A cooking blog. Not knowing what a blog was, Mom convinced me otherwise and then lay in her bed and cried for two hours.

At twenty-five, I called her to tell her I had sold my belongings and was moving to Seattle.
Just because I could and I wanted to and I’d already made up my mind
. Mom said, “Okay, follow your heart.”

And I did.

She kissed me at the flight gate. “I’m so proud of you. Just remember, you can always come home.” She fought back tears, as hard as I fought mine. I knew that at first she had only come around to the idea of blogging because I’d lost my job. She would never have consented for me to walk away from something stable, something more prestigious than cooking and clicking away at my computer—not when she knew what it was like to need a steady paycheck. But now, I had no other options. A month after I’d begun
Can You Stay for Dinner?
she called me to say “It’s incredible.”

“You mean that?” I asked her.

“I do. You’re a writer, Andrea, and I guess I’m just figuring that out.”

It was Mom and Paul who became my biggest fans—the ones who checked the site for updates three times every day, who called me constantly to comment, who told everyone they knew about it with pride. Paul would e-mail me a picture of a perfectly grilled steak with the caption “Thought this would be great for the blog!” while Mom would mail me pretty place mats and colorful dishes
for food photography. Their support encouraged me to keep writing.

For the first time in quite a while, I felt secure. There I was, twenty-five, having lost a lot in life: my front teeth on the seesaw, my first spelling bee, my dad, 135 pounds, multiple pairs of sunglasses, and, most often, my way.

What I’d come to realize as I left for Seattle is that the gentle sensation of ants in my pants at all times is just letting me know I’m alive. That I’m on the verge. Of doing stuff. Or not. But just that there’s something ahead.

I’m being reminded to take chances, to make illegal turns a time or ten, to crash, fail, and seriously consider a fallback plan at Starbucks.

I couldn’t have said—in that moment or any other—that I always knew the right choice. I never did. I never do. I’d made Mom cry a thousand times. Salty joy and pain. But as I waved to her on my way through security, she and I both smiled.