Burnt Toast

To Emerson, whose birth was the sole source of my personal evolution over the last seven years. Thank you for giving my life meaning. I will try not to eat as much burnt toast as my mom did—and maybe you won’t eat any ever.

And to my mother, for doing her best and for giving me material to write a book.

Table of Contents

Cover Page

Title Page

Dedication

Introduction Burnt Toast

Chickening Out

It’s Your Caviar, You Can Do What You Want with It

Place on Rack and Let Cool

Sour Grapes Can Make a Fine Wine

I’m Too Fried

Recipe for Disaster

It’s Pretty, Let’s Eat It

Once Burnt, Twice Shy

Dare to Compare Apples and Oranges

Will Work for Pie

Afterword: Happy Enchilada

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Copyright

About the Publisher

Introduction Burnt Toast

Toast. Think about it for a moment. It probably has the simplest recipe in the world: one ingredient, one instruction. Still, you know when you’re trying to make it and you just can’t get it right? It’s too light or too soft, then…totally burnt. Charred in a matter of seconds – now it’s more like a brick than a piece of toast. So what do you do? Are you the kind of person who tries to scrape off the black? Or do you smother it with jam to hide the taste? Do you throw it away, or do you just eat it? If you shrug and eat the toast, is it because you’re willing to settle for less? Maybe you don’t want to be wasteful, but if you go ahead and eat that blackened square of bread, then what you’re really saying – to yourself and to the world – is that the piece of bread is worth more than your own satisfaction.

Up ’til now, I ate the burnt toast. I learned that from my mother – metaphorically if not literally. I can’t actually remember if she even likes toast or how she eats it. But what I know for sure is that although she was a loving and devoted wife and mother, she always took care of everyone and everything else before herself. This habitual self-sacrifice was well intended, but ultimately it’s a mixed message for a child. It taught me that in order for me to succeed, someone else had to suffer. I learned to accept whatever was in front of me without complaint because I didn’t think I deserved good things.

I can toast bread just fine. I don’t know about you, but my toaster only has one button. It’s a no-brainer. And still, I’ve been eating that metaphoric burnt toast all my life, and I think other people do too. Then I hit forty. Jules Renard said, “We don’t understand life any better at forty than at twenty, but we know it and admit it.” Admitting that there were things I still needed to figure out made me see this new decade as a chance to reconsider some of my behaviors. Did I really want to spend another ten years this way? The easy answer: no. The harder realization was that in order to change, I needed to stop eating the burnt toast. I had to be done anticipating failure. I had to be done feeling like I didn’t deserve good things, tasty things. And I was. I decided I was too old to continue this way. I didn’t want to do it anymore, and I don’t want other people to do it either. There is a way for us to value ourselves without taking away from anyone else. We should settle for nothing less than being good to ourselves and others. But it’s hard to break old habits. You can make a new piece of toast in a couple of minutes, but happiness takes work. That’s why I wrote this book. It’s my wacky, serious, skittish, heartfelt attempt to share my jagged route to happiness with other people like me.

Toast is small and simple, and maybe eating a lousy piece of it doesn’t seem like the worst thing in the world. Agreed. I can think of far worse things. But this isn’t a book about surviving worst-case scenarios. It’s about weathering the small challenges that we encounter every day. This scar that I have on my left shin might give you an idea of what I’m talking about. I got it when I was at the beach with my daughter, Emerson Rose. It was the first morning of our trip, and Emerson and I spent it playing in the sand and walking along the beach. In front of our hotel, about fifteen feet off the shore in a calm area of the ocean, there was a floating trampoline. Pretty cool, huh? I’d never seen that before. It looked like it was intended to be fun, but was it something I really wanted to do? Not so much. I didn’t want to be bouncing around in front of the whole beach in my less-than-supportive bikini. Nor did I want to plunge into the deep, dark ocean to swim out to the trampoline. Wading was just fine with me. Before I was a mother, I wouldn’t have gone near something like that. But I am a mother now, and I could see that Emerson was afraid, but curious. As a single mom I find myself in this situation a lot – there’s some adventure that doesn’t appeal to me, but there’s no one I can turn to and say, “Your turn, honey. Take Emerson out onto the trampoline.” Same thing when there’s a spider on the wall above the bed. That eight-legged intruder’s got to go, and it’s all me.

We swam out to the trampoline and bounced around for a while. Then Emerson wanted to jump off, but she was scared. I said, “Oh sure, let’s do it. It’ll be really fun. I’ll go first.” Now you and I both know that I did not want to jump off that trampoline. I was scared. But I don’t want to teach that to her. I don’t want to project my overblown imaginative worries onto her wide-eyed innocent hope. Now the thing about this floating trampoline is that it wasn’t very bouncy, and what little bounce it had was weird and off-kilter, so you couldn’t really plan your trajectory. But my daughter was waiting and watching, so what could I do? I flew off the trampoline into – a huge belly flop. A belly flop looks funny. It even sounds funny. But I’m here to say: It’s. Not. Funny. My stomach, my arms, my legs – all my skin burned. I was instantly red and tender all over, but I didn’t want Emerson to see that I was in serious pain. That wasn’t the lesson I wanted to teach. I knew she could do it and I knew that she, unlike her aging mom, would be fine. So I popped my head out of the water and said, “That was so fun! Give it a try.” She jumped straight off, loved it, of course, and did it again and again. When we got back to the beach, I saw that I had a long cut on my leg from the water (who knew that could happen?). Emerson noticed the blood, and I shrugged it off with some stupid excuse. I was in agony, but I didn’t want to cry in front of Emerson. Instead, I got a rum-infused coconut beverage from the guy walking down the beach and subtly iced my wound.

Now I look at the scar on my leg and wonder if I did the right thing. Should I have let Emerson know that I was hurt? Should I have called over a (preferably cute) lifeguard for some first aid? Why didn’t I do that? Why did I hide the truth about what was going on with me? Did I do it for her or for me? Was I trying to be cool or tough? There’s an emotional experience embedded in that scar. There’s a lesson locked in it. I’m done making silent self-sacrifices. I’m done hiding the truth. Here it is. Have at it.

I hope you’ll discover as you read this book that vulnerability plays a key role in my life. It’s hard for me – I have trouble admitting that I need other people. I’ve always tried to be honest about my fears and insecurities and self-doubt. When I was doing the photo shoot for the cover of this book, I spent the first hour thinking, This is ridiculous. I haven’t even written the book yet. (I guess this is how they do things in the world of publishing – they need the jacket before the book’s done.) So I was up there posing and thinking, Maybe there is no book. Maybe I have nothing to say. Maybe I’m just an idiot. Who do I think I am? Then I started talking to the photographer and the makeup guy and the wardrobe guy and the photo assistants. We were laughing and feeling good, and suddenly someone revealed that, like me, he’d had no sex on his honeymoon. We both had felt embarrassed and inadequate, like we were the only people in the history of time who couldn’t get it together to have sex on a honeymoon. And I said, “See, we really are all the same!” Maybe this is too much information for an introduction – I’m already telling you about my sex life (or sad lack thereof) and I’m only on page 4. (It was the publisher’s mandate – write whatever you want so long as you mention sex before Chapter 2.) But that’s what this book is about – how when we feel fragile and vulnerable and hopeful and human, we’re not alone. And if I can have these feelings and work through them then you can too. My hope for this book is that you’ll read it in the bathtub. Maybe with a glass of wine. And that you’ll laugh a little and feel a little inspired.

Just because I’m up front about this stuff doesn’t mean I’ve figured it all out. Not even close. Even if I do have some good ideas about how to help you live a happier life, I’m not sure I always practice them, and I certainly don’t practice them every day. It’s too hard. Some days I’m like Alice, trapped deep down in that rabbit hole. And instead of trying to find my way out, I just hide away, watch B movies until I can’t keep my eyes open, and then sleep for a really long time. But I rarely have time for that self-indulgence, so I put on my mom clothes or my “Teri Hatcher” costume, as I like to call it, and pretend everything’s fine.

In my scrapbook from 1999 there’s a fortune-cookie fortune that says, “Your luck has been completely changed today.” But you don’t change in a day. Just because you’re getting older or more successful doesn’t mean you automatically grow as a human being. You learn things when life presents you with an opportunity and you’re ready to receive it. When Desperate Housewives came along, I was, like many an aging female actress in Hollywood, a big has-been. I’ve made no secret of that. I never expected to get a second chance, though I must have saved that fortune in hope that everything actually could change overnight. When it did, when Desperate Housewives became a hit, I suddenly had the job and security and affirmation that I’d given up on long before.

Over time, when they don’t come true, you lose sight of your dreams. Years go by and you look back and wonder how you got so far without starting a band, making a sculpture, doing the things that you wanted to do but couldn’t because now you have a family or kids or a mortgage. For whatever reason, it didn’t ever happen. So when my dream actually became reality, my response wasn’t “better late than never.” I’d just turned forty, was a divorced mom of a young daughter, and I didn’t want to simply ride my wave of success. I wanted to live it – not as the twenty-year-old who desired it, but as the forty-year-old who worked hard for it but thought her opportunity had passed. It woke me up to the realization that though life is unpredictable, things can change for the better, dreams we thought were long past can still come true, and that we increase our chances of that happening by believing that we are deserving – of golden-brown buttered toast, and success and happiness. Mmm. I’m getting hungry.

I wrote most of this book sitting on the floor in my living room. I like the floor. There’s no place to fall. The first time I sat down with a little blank book, a pen, and the mandate from my editor to start writing down my thoughts and feelings, I stared at the page. Before I could hook any of the ideas that worm their way in and out of my tired brain, I just sat there in awe. Wow. I have an editor. I wrote that down. And crappy penmanship. I wrote that down too. Yeah, I’m finally old enough, used enough, hailed enough to put some of it on paper. That got me started. I kept going until the first page was almost full and I was on to the next, but my hand was starting to hurt. I’d finally seen, touched, and tasted enough; I’d loved, struggled, and learned enough to have a tale to tell, and my hand was having an arthritic attack. Leave it to me to figure out how to stand in my own way. Time after time as I shuffled through scrawled notes and fragmented thoughts, I was paralyzed by my lack of confidence. This wasn’t an unfamiliar state of affairs. No matter what the challenge before me – an audition, a photo shoot, writing a book, or a relationship – for all my past accomplishments, I torture myself on the way, always wondering, Why would they pick me? Why am I good enough to do this? He’ll never like me as much as I like him. Who the hell do I think I am – I’m not that special. This book itself was a journey for me. Writing it forced me to face my self-doubt and fears – the same kind of struggles that this book contemplates. I kept thinking, I need to read this book. In fact, I’ll probably be the first one to buy a copy because then a) I’ll know that at least one copy sold and b) I really will be able to remind myself of the lessons I’ve learned every once in a while.

The lessons here are about how to forgive, love, enjoy, and explore yourself as a woman. I’ve finally gotten to a place where I’m easier on myself. I’m comfortable and happy being a mother. Being in my body. Feeling sensual as a forty-year-old woman. Most of the time. I sure hope you’re one of the people who managed to have sex at some point during your honeymoon. Good for you! But if you’ve ever felt like a spicy gumbo of fear and confidence, despair and hope, desire and satisfaction, mother and child, pretty and ugly, strong and weak, then read on. The journey’s a whole lot easier if we take it together.

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