This Will Only Hurt a Little(76)

As soon as I found out I was pregnant, I panicked. What the fuck? We couldn’t do this. Birdie was a handful, already starting with her terrible temper tantrums and refusing to sleep in her bed at night. Marc didn’t want this baby. Most days, I didn’t think Marc particularly wanted to be married to me. Jesus. What a fucking mistake. At least I had the job. I cried and cried all through my pregnancy. I had terrible panic that the baby was dead inside me. I had to get an at-home fetal heart rate monitor just to make sure. I had terrible panic that I was about to die too. Also, I was going to have to push this baby out? Oh fuck. I really hadn’t thought it through.

I spent no time talking to my unborn child, reassuring her that my tears weren’t about her, because of course they were and she was no fucking idiot. She knew perfectly well why I was upset. I half-heartedly made a list of names, most of them repeats from the list for Birdie. Some days I tried to be excited. My friend Jennah told me to try going to prenatal yoga, where we’d met and formed such a close bond with Birdie and her son Killian. I went to one class and the model Amber Rose was there with her non-pregnant assistant. The vibe just wasn’t the same.

I hired the baby nurse and made sure she knew that I was probably going to be early so she should be available. I took Birdie to New York to see some theater with Abby and Phoebe, and Birdie was a nightmare, throwing horrible tantrums and screaming at me in Central Park. I couldn’t calm her down. Marc was at Coachella with his friends. “What do you want me to do, Busy? I’m four thousand miles away!”

I had several friends all due around the same time, including Colin’s now-wife, Samantha, whom I had become close with. One by one, all the babies came, even Kim Kardashian’s, who I didn’t know personally, but I was tracking her pregnancy like a hawk since our babies were due around the same time and I knew from the show that Dr. Crane was her ob-gyn. I would not be okay if he ditched me in the delivery room for a more famous baby.

Finally, on Marc’s birthday, I went to see Dr. Crane by myself. My due date was July 4, but Dr. Crane thought maybe the baby was just about ready. He did a membrane sweep. Marc came to meet me in Beverly Hills and we walked over to one of the nondescript Italian places and had dinner for his birthday as my contractions were starting. We drove home and hid outside by the pool so that Iliana would put Birdie to bed and we wouldn’t have to. I thought maybe the baby would come fast and be born on his birthday, but she didn’t. We went to the hospital at 3 a.m. and she arrived around seven in the morning. She was a little blue and having trouble breathing, so she needed to be sucked out and given oxygen. But then she was fine. And beautiful. Smaller than Birdie by a pound. Eight pounds, seven ounces. Twenty-one inches. She had no name. I called her “the baby.” The name I had liked most seemed ridiculous. She wasn’t a “Ginger Silverstein.” Ugh. Certainly not.

Birdie came to visit after her day camp and lay down on the bed and covered the baby with kisses and pushed into my stomach and laughed at how big it still was.

“Why, Mama? The baby’s out. Why’re you still so fluffy??”

“Just my body, baby.”

The baby was so sweet and smiley almost immediately. She literally sparkled. She was tough, unflappable. You could tell. And she liked to rub her little baby newborn legs together inside her swaddle. She ate right away with no trouble and slept soundly and burped with no issues. She seemed like magic. Loretta, my baby nurse, said she was one of the best babies she’d ever seen. We didn’t know what to call her. Marc and Birdie had tried to get me to agree to Cricket but I thought for sure people would be mean about it. “THOSE ACTRESSES NAME THEIR KIDS THE DUMBEST THINGS.”

But Marc wasn’t having any of that. “No! Cricket is the best name! Cricket is like, the coolest girl at summer camp!!”

After five days, the hospital called and told us we would have to come name her or it was going to be a huge pain for us. They had let us go, because the holiday weekend was coming up, but now the Fourth of July had come and gone and we had to name this baby ASAP.

I sighed, resigned. “Fine. Name her Cricket. Cricket Ann.”

Marc left for the hospital to turn in the paperwork and I called my mom. “Busy. No. Not Cricket. No! What about Dorothy? You love that name.”

But she wasn’t a Dorothy. Or she could be? I didn’t know. Also. This was coming from a woman who’d called her own child Busy.

I hung up the phone, crying, and called Marc. “Cricket Ann sounds weird. I don’t like it.”

“Okay. What should I do?” He sounded exasperated.

“I don’t know! Ummm. Can we name her Cricket Pearl? That way if I really hate Cricket, I can call her Pearl?”

“Sure, Buddy. But you’re not gonna hate it! She’s our Cricket. Trust me!”

He was right. She was our Cricket and she was the fucking best. What wasn’t the best, however, was going back to work four weeks after she was born. Bill had left in order to run his new show and had left Blake McCormick in charge, a writer who seemed fine. I had sent him an email before Cricket was born, letting him know that if they wanted to address my weight gain in any way, they could, like how it had been done on Will & Grace or Frasier. But that ultimately not to worry, I would be coming back to work immediately and would figure out all my baby stuff with the ADs, all of whom were like family by that point.

A week before I had to start shooting, I went in for my wardrobe fitting with my beloved costume department, who had taken such good care of me since day one. Heidi had all kinds of Spanx ready for me and even told me how she had once sewn together three different pairs of Spanx for an actress and that she could do the same for me. We tried on clothes, and while I certainly wasn’t close to being back to my original weight—I probably still needed to lose twenty or thirty pounds—I felt like it was okay and I could deal with it. That is, until she said, “And what do you want to do about this stupid hot-tub scene? Or the shower-sex scene with Dan??”