Melissa Explains It All: Tales From My Abnormally Normal Life (23 page)

Eventually we calmed down and resolved to keep one bottle cold and one in the pantry. We still do, although I occasionally catch Mark using the cold ketchup now. I guess I should just be glad that Mark doesn’t put his warm ketchup on his pasta. That would be unforgivable.

Though Mark and I never argued about it outright, a more serious sticking point that first year was my mom’s relationship with Mark. Although Mom got along with my three previous long-term relationships, plus a handful of decent boyfriends, she turned green with envy when she met Mark. She must have sensed how serious our relationship was early on, because she always seemed uncomfortable around him, and then once we got engaged, she began to act out. Whenever we talked, she took on a needy tone, and she also began picking ridiciulous fights with me, like about whether my arms were too fat to wear tank tops on
Sabrina
(I said no, but she insisted—this, while I was eating spaghetti with garlic bread that she’d made me). I think she feared that Mark would take her place in my life. Meeting The One meant she’d no longer be my plus-one for parties, award shows, premieres, and trips. In fact, after we got engaged and the initial novelty of being Mother of the Bride wore off, her response was, “Looks like I’ve lost my travel partner.” It seemed a small price to pay for her daughter to gain a husband, but to be fair to Mom,
Sabrina
ended around the same time, and my sister was getting married that same year, so she may have felt overwhelmed by so much change.

What I wish she’d realized was that building a family meant we’d include her in our lives in different, though no less special, ways. Our Encino house was closer to hers, so we never missed birthdays or Sunday night dinners. After a few years, particularly after our first son was born, all that tension dissipated, and she became our strongest support. Their major turning point happened when Mom’s brother died and Mark reached out on his own and offered to help her clean out his apartment. Mom and Mark now have a terrific relationship with mutual understanding and respect that puts my heart at ease.

*   *   *

Almost two years into being a Mrs., it was time to seriously get my post-
Sabrina
career on track. I decided to produce and direct next—I wanted to show the world my vision, and my ability to tell a story on the big screen. In January 2005, I began working on a short film called
Mute
that my agent and good friend Elena helped me set up and get running. I produced and financed it with my friend Steve Fischer, who I knew from my partying days. I met him through Soleil, and we spent a lot of time drinking by his pool, going to spin class, and hanging out at bars; he was a Wall Street guy who I basically convinced to get into the business. I helped cast a bride played by Emily Deschanel, who’d just signed on to shoot
Bones
for Fox, and my buddy Patrick Dempsey as her groom (we met on a private jet to the Indy 500), though
Grey’s Anatomy
caused scheduling conflicts, so I replaced him with Dylan Neal, the love interest from
Sabrina
’s last season. Even director Garry Marshall made a cameo as the priest who married this pair. Casting the lead, a deaf-mute who tells the story with very little dialogue and mostly voice-overs, was much tougher. I needed someone with expressive eyes, and the only person I could think to pull it off was my sister Emily. She had to seem both believable and likable, despite her hurt soul, all while trying to sabotage her sister’s wedding to the man she loved. Because the character was deaf, all of that had to come across on Emily’s face. Although she was initially nervous that she couldn’t do it justice, she agreed to do the part.

As if I weren’t busy enough, Mark and I also decided around the same time to move, after two years in our Encino ranch. We wanted to find a place that was a little less sexy and also smaller, since it was just the two of us and all the extra rooms in the house were inviting squatters—my sister, her boyfriend, my brother, and Mark’s vagabond band members among them. We’d also been itching to find property in our favorite vacation spot in the world, Lake Tahoe, and by selling our giant Encino house, we could use the profit to make that dream come true. We found an unfinished construction in Sherman Oaks, one town over from Encino, which excited us since we could add our own touches to it.

While unpacking boxes and simultaneously polishing and prepping for
Mute
that spring, I shot a pilot for Fox called
Dirtbags
with Laura Bell Bundy, a regular on
Guiding Light
, and Balthazar Getty, best known for his roles in
Lord of the Flies
and
Brothers & Sisters. Dirtbags
was an acting job for me, not directing or producing, but it felt good to exercise multiple skills on several projects at once. The script was originally written as a small workshop play to test its small-screen potential. I’d done it the previous summer as a favor to the show’s creator, and Fox thought it would make a great series. It was about a group of twenty-something friends who lived in a blue-collar suburb outside Boston and were stuck in their high school glory days.

The weekend after we wrapped the pilot, I became pregnant with my first son, Mason, and I began to worry about how I’d hide my bump on the show if it got picked up. Turns out, I had no reason to sweat it. Five weeks later while I was dancing with Bill Murray at a party held after his annual Caddyshack Charity Golf Tournament in Florida, my agent called to say
Dirtbags
wasn’t on the fall schedule. I was disappointed and really wanted to see this show fly, but with our little one coming, I knew I had something even bigger on the horizon. I blurted out our baby news to Bill—I’d golfed in the event for two years running, so we were friends—and he was the first outside the family to know!

Life began to move again at the pace I liked. I returned to shooting
Mute
in June for six days at Mom’s house, with a crew that was basically paid in lobster: I had Dad overnight us a generous lunch to thank my team for working for so little. My belly grew. We worked on the house, but now with a baby on the way, it began to feel unsuitable for a child, given its steep driveway, busy nearby road, and many stairs. After living there for only six months, we sold the place to comedian Wayne Brady, who I knew from his days as a “pizza delivery boy” guest star on
Clarissa,
and moved to a Mexican-style ranch around the corner. I was nine months pregnant. Come hell or high water, I’d make a home for our new family yet.

Work and family grew in tandem.
Mute
premiered at the Palm Springs International Festival of Short Films, which was a big deal for me and Steve. On January 11, 2006, I gave birth to our first beautiful son, Mason Walter, at a whopping nine pounds. He had big blue eyes and an infectious smile, which made my twenty-four hours of arduous labor feel worth it. I spent that first month recovering in bed from the natural delivery, with help from my family and Mark’s. I may have been home with a newborn, but that didn’t stop me from submitting
Mute
to every prestigious film festival around. Once I was up for it, I dragged the little man to showings all over the country, including the Tribeca Film Festival, Vail Film Festival, and Sonoma International Film Festival. Mommy’s groove was back.

When the festival frenzy died down, I couldn’t help but think,
If I could turn a dream into a project for me, why not do it for my husband too?
I was so proud of my little short film. I thought it turned out fantastically for a low-budget, limited-location film, and it was a passion project that I made happen from beginning to end. As for Mark, he needed a new label, since Lava, his previous one, had dropped him, and he was having major complications with his asshole manager. This meant he had thirty newly written songs but no label to release his record and no manager to find him a new one.

Once Mason was old enough for my sister Ali to babysit him, I set off to take music business classes at UCLA. Mark’s a talented musician but hates the business side of his job, so as his best cheerleader with an enterprising spirit, I thought I’d start a label for him—complete with distribution, radio play, and an iTunes connection, which was a new technology at the time. Mark found a great producer, put together a band, and went to New Jersey to record an album. I stayed home with Mason and took care of business. Once the record was complete, we realized the process was costing us too much money and marital stress, so we passed his tunes on to a smaller label to take over. While all this was happening, unbeknownst to us, one of Mark’s demos made its way to Clive Davis, who liked it for his new
American Idol
rocker Chris Daughtry. In the midst of putting out his own album, Mark was nominated for a Grammy for Daughtry’s song “It’s Not Over.” We were all bummed when he lost to Bruce Springsteen’s “Girls in Their Summer Clothes.”

*   *   *

The day after Mason celebrated his first birthday, I went back to work. I’d landed the part for the ABC Family Christmas movie
Holiday in Handcuffs
, which was shooting in Calgary, Canada, for five weeks. I took Mason and my brother Brian, so he could watch my son, as I didn’t have a nanny. In the movie, I play Trudie, who gets dumped by her boyfriend on Christmas Eve and kidnaps a new guy, played by Mario Lopez, at gunpoint so she isn’t humiliated in front of her family. I worked twelve-hour days, and on weekends, Brian, Mason, and I went to Banff National Park so Brian could get some snowboarding time, and I could practice ice-skating for a big scene in the movie (we traded off babysitting duty). It wasn’t a conventional arrangement, but growing up, our family always combined business with pleasure and family time, so I knew how to make it work for us. My job brings me to such interesting locations that I really like to make the most of my downtime, take in the sights, and share this privilege with my family as often as I can.

Being on set again made me realize how incomplete I felt without working for the year I stayed home with Mason. This was confusing to me, since I always thought motherhood would be an entirely satisfying job that would trump all others. But I realized in Calgary that my own need-to-be-needed feelings seem to be more fulfilled on set than at home, and the smell of newly painted props and a collaborative creative process were much more satisfying to me than Gymboree and backyard picnics. Don’t get me wrong—there’s nothing I love more than spending time with my children, but I like to feel useful and satisfied in more creative and immediately gratifying ways. The last time I checked, I was also good at what I did, and I didn’t want to ignore how satisfied I felt after I completed a job well done. From then on, I decided I had to work but I’d take my family with me as often as I could, because they were also my world. I’d do my best to “have it all”—work long days, be there for my kids, and still find the energy to get it on with my husband at night, as often as I could see him. Career and family always intersected in my own mom’s life, and she seemed to handle it just fine. I could do the same! When the ratings for
Holiday in Handcuffs
came out, they told me my instincts were guiding me in the right direction. The movie was, and still is, the most watched telecast in ABC Family history.

That said, Mark and I also wanted to have a second child, and I knew I wouldn’t be able to get back on set right away after that little one was born. So in the spring of 2007, I was anxious to knock a goal off my professional bucket list: to guest star on Mark’s and my favorite show,
Law & Order: Special Victims Unit.
Nearly every talented actor I knew had done this, and I was desperate to join the club. I met with the casting director and asked my agents to annoy the hell out of them, but we didn’t hear anything for months. Then, as luck would have it, Kellie Martin and I went to a charity tea in Beverly Hills and Mariska Hargitay was there (that’s Detective Olivia Benson to you). Kellie knew Mariska, since she’d been a guest star on the show already, and introduced me with the side note that it was one of my dreams to be on her show. Shortly after, my agent called and said I’d been offered a role. Mark, Mason, and I were going to New York.

Shooting
SVU
wasn’t the joyride I’d hoped it would be. No, it was intense for me. I was out of practice with dramatic acting, and I didn’t know the set or crew. I was nervous all the time and felt out of my element, but I tried to channel this discomfort into my performance. My character was a schoolteacher accused of rape by a young boy, though the whole time she swears that he raped her. Every day, the director called for more overwrought emotion than the day before, so I did everything I could to muster a raw performance. I wrote suicide letters in my dressing room, listened to songs that upset me, and watched the rape scene from
The Accused
on a loop. Even still, I came off as emotionally timid and the director was unimpressed. It didn’t help that I’ve never been a great “crier” on camera, or off, for that matter. I can never produce the pretty, single tear down my cheek the way Claire Danes and Demi Moore do. They seem to just turn on a tiny faucet the second the director calls action. I, however, get a red, blotchy face and build up a lot of snot before my ducts give way. I’ve had sound guys remove my microphone, because my heart beats too loud to hear the dialogue. Even at my own wedding, Mark was the one who needed the vintage hanky I’d shoved in my cleavage, not me.

For two weeks, I tried everything to give a poignant performance. I took the opposite approach of being a downer and kept my spirits light, I worked my way into character an hour before my scenes … nothing worked. I was lost. Having given up for the most part, I decided on the last day to pop into character as the camera rolled with help from the makeup girls blowing menthol crystals into my eyeballs, which is a trick used to help actors cry. After a little vapor action with no real emotion from me, I finally shed the tears they wanted. The director and crew effusively congratulated me on “really getting there.” I’ll never kill myself over making real tears again, especially when there’s help nearby (unless Jerry Bruckheimer or Martin Scorsese insists).