The Plus-One Problem

Living through other people is a plus-one danger zone. I learned this in the most humiliating way. It involved a rescue dog and a puddle of pee. When we lived in LA we adopted a dog. I thought I’d done an excellent job training her, she was adorable and biddable apart from the fact that she peed everywhere. My carpets have never recovered. The day I brought her to my friend Sharon’s all-white Malibu cottage, and she peed on the white carpet, then cocked her leg and peed on the white sofa I was mortified. Sharon was gracious and immediately christened her “Pissy Missy.” She’s never lived the name down. I of course felt responsible.

If your kids are nailing milestones, then great, you’re clearly doing something right. But if they’re not you’re in trouble. When you are a full time mum your kids’ behavior is your actual job performance. So when a new babysitter took Daughter Number Two to the park and she went full vampire on another kid, the neck bite drew blood, it was clearly all my fault. Her behavior was a direct reflection of me rather than, you know, the unpredictable nature of kids learning to navigate social situations with their teeth.

When my charming mother, who everyone adores, accidentally but on purpose decides to rename someone else’s child or mother or friend with the confidence of someone who believes she’s being helpful. I go into a kind of hyper overdrive. Convinced that her choices are a disaster.

The Actor has been famous for a long time. We’ve been together for all of it. There’s been ups and there’s been downs. I dont know when it happened but at some point I started to watch them with the the intensity of a stalker. I’m not proud of this. It’s just the way it is. It all started innocently enough, feeling happy when he got good reviews, anxious when projects didn’t work out. But at some point around the time our first daughter was born and I stopped working it shifted into something else.

The first time I really understood what was happening was during what we call the “Hollywood jail” period. The Actor had been cast as Captain Hook in what was supposed to be his big break, a major studio blockbuster that would make him a household name. Universal flew us to Australia for the filming. We stopped in Singapore on the way and ate the best noodles we’d ever tasted. Daughter number one, who was four months old at the time, slept the whole way. It felt auspicious.

On set, they treated him like a movie star and we believed it. We should have known something was up when the shoot extended by almost a year. But I was too busy falling in love with our new baby to notice. When they asked us to move to LA for post-production, we packed up our tiny family and rented a lovely house in Venice Beach.

The woman renting to us seemed delightful. She’d roasted us a chicken and left it on the kitchen island. She made a point to mention she’d roasted it herself. After she left, I found the plastic supermarket tray in the bin. A week later, we discovered she was living in the garage with her teenage daughter. She’d lost everything in a brutal divorce. She was kind, slightly manic and trying desperately to keep up appearances. It was a tragic story.

Then came another tragic story. The film came out. After all the build-up Peter Pan flopped. It flopped so hard it knocked everyone involved directly into Hollywood jail. Do not pass go. Do not collect $200. The Actor’s career was in free fall. We’d rented the house for a year, would we be stranded in Hollywood? Would we end up in the garage like our landlady?

I couldn’t think about that so I directed my plus-one energy into Daughter Number One and she rose to the occasion. I took her to Mommy & Me music class, where she behaved like a miniature mozart while I found myself sitting next to Jennifer Grey, yes, Baby from Dirty Dancing herself, who, it struck me, might also be serving an extended sentence in Hollywood jail. We smiled and sang “Wheels on the Bus.”

I turned forty in that house. The Actor hired a psychic to entertain. There are lots of psychics in Hollywood, an industry built on rejection and uncertainty creates a robust market for people claiming to know what happens next. The director of Peter Pan came to the party. He probably regretted it after she told him he wouldn’t work again for ten years. She told The Actor it would all be fine. She told me I’d get pregnant. I left that house with baby number two on the way.