Inside Out(51)

Every year, we all went to Parrot Cay the day after Christmas. It was a ritual I started with Bruce: we’d get up and ski in the mountains in Idaho in the morning, and then get on a plane and be swimming in the ocean by nightfall. It was there that I drank in front of the girls for the first time, at the bar by the swimming pool. I ordered a beer. Ashton ordered a cocktail. I was mindful of how much I was having at first, vigilant about how I was feeling. And then our new friend at the bar—Fratboy Phil, we were calling him—said: “Have you ever chugged a beer through a straw?” We had a competition to see who could do it fastest, and I won. We repeated this process three times. It didn’t occur to me that Phil was six feet four inches and probably three times my weight. I was hammered. In the golf cart on the way back to our room, I was slumped in the front seat and Rumer was laughing about how silly I was being. “Oh Mom, I love you,” she said, to which I drunkenly replied, “I feel the same.”

It was funny to them when I drank that time. But it didn’t stay funny. I had always been so careful with my kids to be stable, even-keeled, gentle, even in the way I casually addressed them. When you drink you become more direct and uninhibited—or at least I do—and to them, compared to the way I’d been throughout their childhood, I sounded harsher. And it was just new, different: they’d never seen me, or adults generally, partying. I remember at Rumer’s sixteenth birthday party, Tallulah was terrified because some of the people were drunk, and it was so unfamiliar to her she didn’t know what to make of it. But I was able to reassure and comfort her: I was still her same old mom, and she would always be safe with me.


ASHTON AND I still wanted to have a baby, and we thoroughly enjoyed trying the old-fashioned way. But after a few months, we threw in a little intrauterine insemination, just to be safe. When that hadn’t worked after a year, we moved on to IVF.

The daily shots and constant trips to the doctor’s office that in vitro fertilization requires can make even a young woman feel desperate and out of control. I didn’t care for our first doctor, who kept emphasizing my age. We found another fertility specialist I liked a lot, and I did fairly well with the hormones.

But every time I got my period, proof that another cycle had failed, I felt myself reliving Chaplin’s death, and I went into a terribly dark place.

I kept that completely secret. I soldiered on. From the outside, I looked like my usual optimistic, practical self. Inside, I was dying.

On paper there was no reason why I shouldn’t have been getting pregnant. I was making plenty of eggs. They were fertilizing. But it just wasn’t happening. I must have gone through four or five cycles, all of which ended in heartbreak. Every time, you get your hopes up. You’re getting shots in your stomach and your butt every morning and every night. You’re constantly getting ultrasounds and having your blood drawn to find out when you’re ovulating, when your uterine lining is just right, and so on. You’re organizing your whole life around getting pregnant, and when you find out that—yet again—you’re not, it’s crushing. It takes a toll on a woman when you spend years of your life in that state.

To his credit, Ashton was fine with having a baby however: we could use a surrogate, or we could use a donor egg. But my ego was attached to having a biological child I carried. That’s what I’d always done before. Intellectually, I knew that one can connect with a baby on the deepest level without carrying her. But emotionally, I wanted to have that experience with Ashton. Just as I wanted to be the carefree girl who could have a casual drink, I wanted to be the fertile woman who could have his baby. I was starting to worry that maybe I was, as the tabloids so kindly reminded the world at every chance, past my sell-by date.

Throughout the course of this awful period, I think I began to take my relationships with my daughters for granted. Obviously, I wasn’t going to bother them with the details of my IVF; it wouldn’t have been appropriate. But to them, I had become secretive. In Idaho, they’d felt like we were all in it together, but now it seemed like Ashton and I were shutting them out. To make things even more complicated, they were at the age when kids naturally start to separate from their parents. And as teenagers, Rumer and Scout were racing with hormones, while I was pumped full of them from my IVF.

Ultimately, I assumed that our bond was safe no matter what. When your kids stop looking like kids—they look big and they act big—it can be easy to lose sight of the fact that they will forever see you through the eyes of a child. I think that in my pain, I may have lost sight of how much mothering they still needed.


ASHTON WAS GETTING ready to do a movie called Spread. It was clear from the script it would be very sexual—even graphic. Jennifer Jason Leigh was slated to play the female lead, and one day Ashton came home from the office and told me, “Jennifer is concerned about you being on set.” He seemed really uneasy and told me how much it could hurt his career if she was displeased: she was married at the time to the director Noah Baumbach, who had a big movie just out. “I might want to work with him someday,” Ashton said. “He might not ever cast me because of this.” I was mortified. Jennifer and I had the same manager, and I called him, frantic, and said, “Please let her know I’d never do anything to compromise the film, and I’d never want to make another actor uncomfortable while she’s working!”

My manager called her, then called me back. “Jennifer has absolutely no problem with any of this—she has no issue, and she had no idea what I was talking about.”