OM may well write the Norn Iron version of this in the next couple of years

[Snookie]

My mother never told me motherhood was hard. 'I didn't want to discourage you,' she said

 

 

Actress Brett Paesel's painfully honest account of the struggles of being a Hollywood mum is hilarious and controversial. Here, the 46 year-old mother of two tells Polly Vernon about domestic debauchery, drugs and talking dirty with the girls

 

Sunday November 4, 2007

The Observer

 

Brett Paesel did not mean to write a book that would explode every taboo on modern motherhood. A book that would polarise the breeding faction of the US, where a certain kind of woman embraced it as an inspired, funny, brilliantly rude and long-overdue affirmation; while another kind of woman pilloried it as an inflammatory, gratuitous, irresponsible article of near blasphemy. Paesel, 46, didn't intend to write a book that would inspire Cindy Chupack - legendary executive producer of Sex and the City - to say, 'It's so painfully honest and funny, there should be a two-drink minimum [for readers] ...'; a book, furthermore, that would get banned in Oregon, where it was deemed too sexy. Paesel didn't mean to become a significant voice in what Americans call the Beta Mom Movement, the anti-hot-housing, anti-competitive, haphazard and easy-going school of child-rearing; she did not mean to become a regular on talk shows and the star draw on fashionable reading groups. Brett Paesel didn't mean to write a book at all.

 

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What Paesel meant to do was to have a baby. At the age of 38, following nine years of marriage to Pat ('with whom I'd been running around LA, leading an extended childhood, basically") Paesel intended to get quietly pregnant, have a child ('with a view to having a further three - family of four kids, that was the idea, ha ha!') and then transition effortlessly from her role as high-living, semi-feckless, semi-successful comedian and actress, into the role of accomplished, well-adjusted, effortless Hollywood mother.

 

Things did not go according to plan. Her first pregnancy miscarried: 'which was a shocker, because I thought it was going to work like magic. But apparently not.' And then she had Spencer. The first eight or so months after Paesel gave birth to him were, she says, 'so boring, so lonely, so isolating, so unhappy ... I mean, I was really unhappy'.

 

But she loved Spencer immediately?

 

'Hmm, did I love Spencer immediately? Yeah but ... I didn't even know what love meant. I felt very responsible toward him. I didn't get angry with him. That's one of the nice things I can say ...'

 

Paesel's smiling while she talks; stirring artificial sweetener into a cup of tea in the lobby of a nice hotel in central London. She doesn't look very LA - she's curvy, brunette and Botox-free - and she doesn't act very LA either. She is good on bleak, good on irony, and evidently good on recognising the darkly comic value of grim circumstances. Comedy is her currency, professionally - she works the same LA circuit as Sarah Silverman, a friend who wrote a blurb for her book - and personally. She is, she says, 'the sort of person who can see the funeral of a loved one as a funny experience ... any heightened emotion has a flipside to it, a bit of the absurd.' She sips her tea.

 

Was she suffering with post-natal depression?

 

'Hmm ... Yes. Except I don't know what that means, either. People want to label it, of course, but I think if you take someone who has been an autonomous being for 38 years, and suddenly they have to stay home with this person they have to take care of, this person that's screaming all the time, and they've had a C-section, they're bloated and somewhat helpless ... I didn't know much about children. Um - so, depression ... Wouldn't depression just be a natural response? It seems natural to me.'

 

Sensible, even?

 

'Ha ha! Maybe ...'

 

This was how Paesel's book began. Desperate for reassurance, for 'corroboration of my experience', she hit the self-help sections of her local bookshelves. 'I dreamed of [books with] chapters like: "Smoking: The Road Back to Sanity and a Good Figure". And: "Yes, Some Babies Have Drowned When Left Alone in the Bathtub - But Here Are Many Who Survived and Thrived". And of course: "What Parenting Experts Do Not Want You to Know About the Secret Benefits of Cocaine".' But she didn't find them. She went to see a therapist, who suggested antidepressants, but that wasn't what Paesel felt she needed either.

 

It wasn't until she embarked upon a programme of regular Friday afternoon cocktail sessions with like-minded friends - all of whom were also mothers, all of whom were equally unwilling and unable to give themselves up to prevailing notions of how a mother should behave - that Paesel began to adjust. And then, she wrote her book - a memoir/confessional/comedy of errors called Mommies Who Drink, in which she detailed the first five years of her life as a mother. The book was published, (after 13 publishers rejected it under the original title Slow To Warm; and Warner Books snapped it up the moment Paesel hit on the unquestionably brilliant Mommies Who Drink); at which point, the ructions began.

 

Mommies Who Drink is funny, rare, honest and complicated. It's contradictory. It's brave.

 

It's a paean to domestic debauchery: to getting tipsy at upmarket handbag sales and mistakenly believing you've bonded really significantly with the bag designer in question, who then has to semi-evict you from her premises because you want to live there forever (she gives you a plastic beaker for your leftover wine, en route). It's about attempting to organise nights out on the town with girlfriends, limos and drugs, only to discover that you no longer know where to score drugs, and worse yet, you can't schedule your hangovers and come-downs so that they'll accommodate everyone's play-dates comfortably. It's about smoking weed with your husband on Christmas Eve, while your (unaware) mother-in-law babysits. Mommies Who Drink is a celebration of the possibilities of going totally off the rails, of staging a coup during an especially pretentious and celebrity-obsessed pre-natal yoga group, and of stealing lipstick from another mother at a particularly drab mummies group.

 

It's lascivious - Paesel's Friday cocktail interludes revolve around lurid dissections of the group's more decadent sexual proclivities. Paesel becomes a celebrity at her son's nursery, after Spencer tells his teacher, assorted classmates and their mothers, that he saw 'Mummy sitting on Daddy's head' early one morning, (the currency Spencer's revelation gives Paesel leaves her convinced she can use it as leverage to get another friend's child into the school). It was the sex that got Paesel banned in Oregon. One particular chapter was published as part of an anthology on toddlers: in it, Paesel finds herself thinking about sex, while surrounded by women who are talking endlessly about the merits of hiding carrots in their child's tuna sandwiches. There was an uproar in Oregon in particular, 'for some reason ...', people called in to complain, and the chapter was removed - 'so that was insane'.

 

And obviously, Mommies Who Drink is not entirely sober. 'Americans are rigid about drinking, rigid about having a cocktail,' Paesel says. 'A lot of people think you shouldn't even have one glass of wine in front of a child ...' Never mind championing ritual boozing as your emotional crutch, and then dedicating an entire book to it.

 

If Paesel's surprised at the way America reacted to her book, she's pretty much alone. I ask her how she thinks Mommies Who Drink will be received in the UK when it's published here later this month, and she says she doesn't know. I suspect it'll inspire similar drama, similar divisions. Never mind how liberal, tolerant and non-judgmental we believe ourselves to be in comparison to our American equivalents. The usual rules do not apply, when it comes to motherhood.

 

Nothing provokes us like motherhood. Nothing divides us quite as violently. Mothers - British, American, whoever - are perceived to inhabit a separate world from non-mothers, a world that's subject to stringent regulation, to harsh judgment, and to close scrutiny by the state, by the media, by the neighbours. We judge mothers constantly - the ones we know, the ones we don't. We judge them on how harshly they do or don't reprimand their children in supermarkets and on buses. We judge them on how much TV we think they let their children watch, on the kind of food we think they feed them; on how much they swear in front of them; and how flagrantly they use their BlackBerries. We judge them on the names they've burdened their kids with, on the toys they let them have, on the tastes they encourage in them. We judge them for the way they dress their kids, and the way they cut their hair; we judge them on their Bugaboos. We judge them independently of their children too - but never independently of their status as mothers. We categorise them accordingly. We give them names: Slummy Mummies and Yummy Mummies and MILFs; Earth Mothers and Mummies With Tummies, Organic Mummies and Fashion Mummies - the kind of mummy whose dream it is to convince her daughter to go and audition with her for a role in the next Comptoir des Cotonniers advertising campaign. If they're an American 'mommy', then they have to choose sides in the Mommy Wars - which sees the stay-at-home mothers pitted against the working mothers. And if they're a celebrity mummy, then they're open game. We gossip about their perceived virtues as mothers, in the same way that we dissect their personal style: should Madonna have been allowed to adopt David Banda; should Britney get custody of her children by Kevin Federline; and you do realise, don't you, that the moment Angelina steps out of the range of the paparazzi, she hands her children over to the crack team of nannies constantly languishing somewhere in the background ...?

 

Then, of course, we compare celebrity mothers and non-celebrity mothers, and we admire the speed at which the celebrity mothers got their pre-pregnancy bodies back ...

 

This is why Brett Paesel's book is important. By virtue of being a very individual account of motherhood, it's a rebellion against all that. Against the prejudices and the judgments. Paesel's eccentricities, her skewed perspectives on pretty much everything, her paranoias, her mini-madnesses are all documented. She acknowledges her myriad flaws as a mother and a human, her particular battle to reconcile how much she loved her son with how desperately she missed her life before him. She doesn't generalise, she doesn't make assumptions about anyone else, and while she paints hilarious and irreverent pictures of the other mothers she encounters, she says her starting point was that, 'I was the biggest idiot by far. I approached it from my weaknesses, my deficit, and at no point, in no way, was I saying that I was any better than anyone else.'

 

Paesel says she wrote her book as part of her bid to reclaim 'as much of myself as possible, because I felt that the message I was getting was that being a mother had to be my major identity, now that I was one'. Consequently her book doesn't entertain any clichés. She worked incredibly hard, for example, 'not to ever, ever reassure the reader that I am really a good mother, who really loves her son, because I think that book may have been written once or twice already ... Oh, I wanted to, though!' And she explains that the sex and swearing was all part of maintaining authenticity and edge. 'It was certainly missing in the books I read before I wrote Mommies.'

 

Ultimately, Paesel thinks that, for all the debate and judgment around contemporary motherhood: 'there's a silence around real motherhood. That, too, was partly why I wrote the book. I think mothers feel like it's complaining, especially when we're older, we've waited too long and it's harder to get pregnant, and so, how can you say after all that, after wanting it so much and trying for it so hard, that it's not wonderful? That it's hard? My mother never said it was difficult. Now, she admits that it was. And I say: "Why didn't you tell me before?" And she says: "Well, I didn't want to discourage you! Ha ha!"'

 

The initial furore over Paesel's book has calmed down in the US now. No one else has banned her, no more critics have published reviews that began, 'Of course, I personally would never read a book with a title like that ... however ...', or that admired her writing skills while 'questioning the wisdom of my writing about my son's penis ...' Instead, she receives a steady stream of emails from grateful women. Oh, and HBO are developing Mommies Who Drink as a TV series ('I want Toni Colette to play me, and, er ... David Duchovny to play Pat'.)

 

Personally, things stabilised, too. Spencer's now seven, and Paesel has another son, Murphy, who's four. 'I have come to the conclusion,' she wrote, in Mommies Who Drink, of her decision to have a second child, 'that raising a young child involves long stretches of terror, and bursts of supernatural joy - which sounds awfully close to the definition of "psychosis". One would think that, knowing this, I would send Spence off to boarding school and surgically ensure that I never have another child. But no. For a reason I cannot name, I have become obsessed with having another one.' Now, she says: 'I love being a mother. I'm just not sure I'm entirely suited to the early stages. But yeah, I totally wished I'd had four.'

 

She still has her cocktails with girlfriends on Fridays - although I'm somewhat disappointed to discover that 'no one ever gets completely smashed'; and also she's finally given up smoking. She's still resolutely individual about being a mother.

 

Brett Paesel's last word on motherhood runs like this: 'Do what you need to do, have your life, be yourself, because I don't care. As long as your kid isn't hammering my kid's head into the sand in the playground, I do not care how you're bringing him up.' Which is the most sensible thing anyone's said on the subject in a long while.

 

From: here