Why Child Stars Go Crazy

My mom started out as a model when she was a baby. Her dad had died right after she was born and her mom was not the brightest star in the sky. Someone said my mom was a cute baby and should be a model, so my grandma took her to a modeling agency and TaDa! my mom got hired as a model.

Most parents weren't up for pimping out there kids in the 40s, but Seattle didn't have many jobs for an infant. So my grandmother packed up my mom and her 10-year-old sister and moved them away from their support network and off to Hollywood. My grandmother got my mom an agent and my mom started working steadily until she was about 17.

She was in a LOT of movies. Most of them well known. She was Eve as a child in Three Faces of Eve, the daughter of the family in Days of Wine and Roses, The Buccaneer, Ten Commandments, Playhouse Theater, etc., etc., etc. Lots and lots of movies, TV shows plus lots of modeling as a kid = super crazy adult.

There's one thing they don't tell child stars. Once you get to be about 15 they can hire an adult and don't have to deal with all the laws around hiring kids.

This is why child stars go crazy. They go from being super important and famous to being nobody. They can't get a job and when they get to be an adult they usually are out of practice as an actor and no one cares about them anymore.

For my mom and many other child actors as well there was also the no money problem. My grandmother was not super bright so the money was all spent when my mom was old enough to need the financial boost to get her through to adulthood.

My mom was also angry. She'd never had a childhood. She missed school to do movies and when she returned to school the teachers were often resentful of her.

My mom told us quite a few stories about working on reports and assignments while she was on set only to have the teacher throw them in the trash right in front of her when she returned to school. She remembered the teachers being jealous of what they thought of as her "glamorous" life so they told her she was stupid and her work was worthless. The only teacher she remembered fondly was one of the studio teachers she would visit once she was in the Motion Picture Retirement Home that no longer exists.

My grandmother was also a terrible advocate for my mom. More worried about her getting the next job than her wellbeing. My mom was cruelly pinched by other actors and directors so her crying would be more realistic, she was on set longer than she should and worked really long hours waiting for her turn to shine.

So when I see Lyndsay Lohan and other former child stars go off the rails I always think about how hard their lives were to that point and how no one in their late teens and early twenties is equipped to deal with the sense of failure they experience when going from starlet to nobody. 

The parents still need to be better parents and advocates for their kids if they're going to push them into this kind of life. A group of former child stars from the 40s and 50s, my mom included, work with SAG to try to help parents be better advocates. Because Hollywood would treat kids better if all the parents were better, but they often choose to work with the "easy" parents who demand nothing from the studios. These are the parents that allow their kids to be worked more hours than they should or their babies to be kept under the hot lights longer than they should and smeared with cream cheese and jam to look like they're newborns. When the Screen Actors Guild runs workshops for parents of child actors the parents often say things like, "But what about my child's career?!!" This is often about their infant being taken advantage of. What career? 

But this blog wouldn't exist if I didn't also think that former child stars need to grow up and take responsibility for their actions. Yes, their childhood might have been terrible, but so was mine and you just need to get on with things.

This is my mom in The Remarkable Mr. Pennypacker.

 She's the girl in the front, on the left.

Girl in the middle.

Perfect Comic

This is so perfect for this blog!

Changing My Diet - On the Metabolically Broken

I have Hyperprolactinemia and Poly Cystic Ovarian Syndrome (PCOS) one of the many problems with this condition is that it's horribly under diagnosed. The other is that this is not a problem rooted in the ovaries, but it is a pituitary gland disease. For this particular disease the pituitary gland swells and it secretes excess prolactin. Since I'm not a doctor, I suggest you use Google from someone qualified to get more information.

My main point is that I have this disease. It went undiagnosed for so long that it ended up breaking my endocrine system, but now that my hormones are managed I'm feeling better.

However, my body is still pretty broken in that my triglycerides are off the charts and if I don't get them down my endocrine nurse is going to have her own heart attack. I also have tragic blood sugar issues. The disease also caused me to gain weight, which I now need to/want to lose.

But right now my body is pretty messed up metabolically and along with the disease  the root of this is....dum dum dum...in my childhood. I know, you're shocked.

So when I was 9 I was told by my mother that I was fat. Because she is just a kind and loving mom like that.When I look back on photos I realize I wasn't fat, but reality and my childhood were not really in agreement anyway.

She kept telling my I was fat, which was super helpful to me in both the development of my sense of self as well as wondering what in the hell I was supposed to do about it. She was the person who fed me. I was 9. It wasn't like I had the wherewithal to go do some research on body development and nutrition.

My mom decided to take me to a doctor that  "helped" overweight children and he put me on the tragic 1,000 calorie, low fat, high carb diet that helped make my body the trainwreck it is today.

I was on this diet of horrors until I was in my 20s and my lovely husband helped me to get a grip on reality. Unfortunately the damage had already been done and this along with my disease left me confused and lost.

In my quest to get healthy while I was sick I did lots of research on nutrition, micro-nutrients, alternative diets, etc. My family and friends had the poor pleasure of living with me through the many trends of no sugar baking, putting kale in everything and a whole lot of other nutrition ploys I tried in an attempt to stop feeling like I'd been run over by a car.

So now my body is healing, but I'm still not healthy. I need to change the way I eat so I can get the triglycerides down, manage the blood sugar and lose the weight.

So I'm on Atkins. Which sucks. Atkins is a low carb diet that should include veggies and starts at 20 grams of carbs a day. I have found that I need to stick to less then 12 grams of carbs a day or my body goes off ketosis, which is how you can measure weather Atkins is working or not.

So my body is so metabolically broken that it freaks out if I have really any carbs at all. I think that is so weird. It also means that I eat meat and eggs. That's pretty much it. I dream of brussel sprouts, but if I try to eat one, my body goes of ketosis.

This means that my body is SOOOO sensitive to what I eat that it is like dealing with a twitch control on a video game. One little push and my avatar falls off a cliff.

For a woman raised that veggies are better than anything, fat's the devil and carbs are great. This is a huge shift for me. I keep trying to sneak veggies into my diet, but then my body freaks out. It's so weird!

So I now have a list on my fridge of what I can eat so I stop trying to add in veggies and I'm stuck on this for probably a year. That seems to be how long it should take for my body to reset and stop flipping out.

I am not happy about this. So when you eat your brussels sprouts and your beets think of me kindly.

Traveling to Revolutionary Lithuania

My mother had a rather cavalier view toward my well being. She seemed to think that as long as I wasn't dead or missing any limbs then all was good.

This played out when I was spending a semester in Washington DC and asked by the Non Governmental Organization (NGO) I was working for if I would go over to Lithuania to be their first Field Officer. They were offering me the grand total of $350 and a round trip plane ticket. I mean how could I say no?!

So I called my mom to ask if she minded and she said that I had her full support. Not emotional or financial support, but you know, her support as my legal guardian. So that's awesome.

Now, let's play a pretend game where your real or imaginary child tells you that she's been offered a round trip ticket and $350 to go live in a country undergoing a revolution. If you have more sense than a duck you would probably say no. I would say, "HELL NO!" If my child were so confused as to ask me this.

I would then wonder where I had gone wrong in my parenting that my 19 year-old child thought that they were in any way prepared to live in a country in the midst of a revolution.

Did I speak the language? No.

Did I understand the culture? No.

Did I have an exist strategy if things went to hell? No.

Did I have any support from the NGO sending me over there? No

Was there anyone on the ground I could rely upon to get me up to speed? Nope.


It was a great plan.

My mom did help me borrow a full-length down coat from a friend of hers, so there's that.
 
My initial flight to Lithuania was delayed because the Soviet Union in protest of Lithuania declaring independence, sent in soldiers to take over the television towers in Vilnius, Lithuania where 13 people were killed. It was a huge deal in the international news and in many ways a turning point in the revolution.
My NGO moved back my travel date and instead of living in Vilnius, I was supposed to live in Kaunas, Lithuania and work for the University there along with working for the NGO on the conference.


I was told by the NGO that I was traveling under a visa with a false description of my work. I would be working with the revolutionary governments of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia to set up a conference with the USAID on how to run municipalities once they had their freedom. But in order to get the visa from the Soviet Union, my visa was applied for saying that I was going to do research at a university.

I was told that I should not get stopped by the police or KGB, because that would cause difficulties and if I got in trouble no one would be able to help me. (I know, I was brilliant for agreeing to this. But remember my other choice was my mother and this actually seemed like the better option.)

My plane landed at the Riga airport and was immediately surrounded by Soviet soldiers with their AK-47s pointed at the plane. This has to be one of the most frightening things to see when you're entering a country undergoing a revolution. Especially when your NGO told you that no one would come to your aid.

The soldiers didn't shoot me, but they did riffle through my luggage and I was on my way to do something that I was convinced had to be worthwhile.

I was met at the airport by an American-Lithuania young woman and a driver who took me to Kaunas.

I immediately started to learn new things just on the loooong drive. Things like, there are no gas stations on this route. Bathrooms are a luxury item not encouraged by the Soviet State. If you are hungry, you will stay hungry because there is nowhere to get food.

These are vital lessons. Especially if you need to pee and have to pee in the trees. I am still not skilled in this area.

We arrived in Kaunas, which is beautiful, it was late at night and I was promptly placed in a hotel across from the university and told who I should meet with the next day.

I think I passed out in my clothes that night. But I had arrived and that was a point in my favor.

On Being Popular

I have social anxiety. This means that interacting with people freaks me the hell out. 

This was not really a problem at my small high school of 350 kids with a graduating class of around 90. I had some friends. I moved between social groups. It was all good.

But when I became a Sophomore in college I became inexplicably popular, for me anyway.

I joined a pre-law fraternity that year where I met my best friend and my kids godmother. It was the first time I found an entire group of people who made sense to me. We had conversations about international relations and politics. Argued about religion and human nature. It was great.

But these people were tragic party organizers so my friend and I became the social chairs and started to organize all the parties. They became more fun and I started to really enjoy the social aspects of school.

However, these people REALLY liked me and my friend. One or two of these people would take us out and treat us to dinner. They would find us when we were jogging at night so they could join us. We had to plan coffee nights so that we could all hang out in the evenings.They would even call out to us on campus and run over to talk with us while we walked to class.

To say that we had no idea what to do with this attention is an understatement. 

I was completely lost. Why in the hell did these people want to spend so much time with me. I'd spent a lot of time with me and I was fairly certain I was a dork and not nearly this interesting. 

Here I'm going to insert the obvious fact that the way I was raised, my terrible childhood and resulting low self esteem all came into play here along with my social anxiety, which I didn't know I had. 

So people kept coming up to talk with me and freaking me the hell out so I did the most obvious thing to me and became even more introverted.

I started to wear my Walkman ALL THE TIME. I would walk to class with the music up staring down at the ground so that the odds that I would hear these people was reduced. THEY STILL FOUND ME. So I turned the music up louder and took unexpected routes. It was not a normal response. But I'm not normal, so there you go.

My friend and I had regular conversations about why in the hell we were suddenly so popular. We still don't understand.

As the year wore on people took us out to fancy dinners to try and sway our votes for the next year's election. What the heck!

I think college should have like Friendship 101 for people like me, where they explain that this is normal behavior and people are allowed to like me and want to be my friend. It would have helped.

Both my friend and I went away the next year to do semesters abroad so I never reconnected with those friends because it was back in the stone ages when Facebook was just a dream. I still only talk to the best friend I made, but it was a bizarre life lesson.

I think I learned that I could be popular, which is a good thing to know. The fact that there are other people like me in the world and a place where I made sense is still comforting.

Abandoned at the Airport

So now you know that I was already traumatized from being left in the UK.

I got on the plane to head back home to LAX and I was drained of both energy and money. I did sit next to an older British woman who introduced me to the delight that is Dramboie in tea, so the flight was a win in my book.

I landed at LAX and walked out to baggage claim where I was expecting to find my family. You see, if you had normal parents, or even not my parents then they would be there. They would apologize for abandoning you in the UK, when they knew months before they would not be able to make it. Those types of things.

But because this is me and my family. No one was there. Nope. No one.

So I gathered all my bags including the ones that carried the gifts that I was told I must return home with, since you know they sent me to the UK and all.

Still no parents. This was before cell phones, so I used the airport house phone to see if a message had been left for me. Nope.

So I went to the street outside baggage claim to wait for them to arrive.

I waited 2 hours. That's right, two hours after getting off an international flight and getting abandoned without any money in the UK.

So I called the friend I had met in the UK to see if she could come get me. At this point it was the middle of the night so I woke her from a deep sleep. I don't think I was very clear because she mumbled at me and hung up. (To this day she still feels guilty, which shows what an amazing person she is. I mean who feels guilty that they didn't realize that my shitty parents had abandoned me at the airport.)

So I called my friend, Andrea, and she came running to my rescue. It took her a while to get to the airport since she lived in a distant part of LA, but she came as fast as she could.

As Andrea and her brother arrived 45 minutes later, my parents drove up.

This is probably 4 hours after my flight had landed.

The kicker is that they didn't even apologize. My mother said, "We were seeing Dancing with Wolves, it was longer than we expected, but we weren't going to walk out of a movie." (This is in quotes because I still remember this sentence. It is probably the sentence that most clearly sums up what a catastrophically bad parent this woman was.)

When you live with crazy, it becomes normal. Terrible parents are able to justify their terrible behavior in a way that makes the kid accept it. They don't have to like it or agree with it, but the child will accept it.

We drove off to the new house they were living in since they moved every year of my life except for the 5 years I was in high school through my first year in college.

They didn't ask me about the flight or my trip instead they talked about the movie they had just seen. I fell asleep in the car and when I woke up I was asked to give them the gifts I had brought.

This is the point in my life where I finally realized that these were crazy people who should be avoided at all cost. It took me a while to get away from them for good, but this was my start.

I met my now husband of many years soon after this incident and my daughter recently pointed out to me that all of my stories that are about good things in my life begin after I met him and this is because he is amazing, but also because I had finally had enough crazy and I was now old enough to take more control over my life.

Abandoned in the UK

So this is a really clear view into the mind of the crazy woman who raised me.

I spent the fall semester of my junior year in Washington DC, which was great. I took classes and worked for a non-profit organization and went to a lot of museums. I'm terrible with people so I naturally was cut off from my roommate by the end of the semester, but it was ok. My parents came to visit me for Thanksgiving and I was going to visit my best friend in London before my parents joined me for Christmas.

It was my dream! I was traveling, life was good. My mom showed up in DC wearing a new fur coat and there was no mention of money trouble.

I don't think I should need to remind you that Thanksgiving is at the end of November. This was about 2.5 weeks before I was supposed to leave for the UK. Clearly any glaring money trouble would have been discussed at this point...right?

Hahahaha! (maniacal laughter)

So I left for London to visit my best friend in the whole world all happy and content that my life was finally starting to look up.

(Insert maniacal laughter again)

I had a great time with my friend and the friends she had made while on her semester abroad. We were kind of broke, but it was all good because my parents were coming and they would take me to do the expensive stuff.

This may seem naive for me given the insanity of my mother, but I have always been an optimist and still am to this day. I think that things can always get better and this firm belief that I hold for no damn good reason is really the one thing that kept me going through my childhood. I had the faith that I would continue to age and eventually get away from these crazy people.

I went to the airport to see my dear friend off since I had a day before I would meet my family at the airport. She called her parents on the airport pay phone to let them know she was getting on the plane when all hell broke loose. She told me that I had to call my parents, something had come up.

So I called my parents from a pay phone in the Heathrow airport to find out that they weren't coming to London. That they had a flight back for my in 3 days and I was to take that. Oh right! There would not be any more money for me.

I landed on the floor of the airport in shock. I couldn't stand or speak for a while, I just sat there. I really could not believe that they would do this. My friend was panicked, because she had to get on the plane, so I waved her off and told her I'd be fine, pulled myself together and went forward. I was 19 and had just been abandoned without money in the UK.

Just writing this is leaving me with shivers running through my body. I haven't really talked this through in detail with any of my many therapists and I had forgotten how incredibly traumatic it was to be abandoned in another country.

I can't remember due to the shock, but knowing my friend, I will assume she gave me some money. I brushed myself off metaphorically, left the airport and went to figure out what I was going to do. My mom had me leave my luggage at the hotel they were planning to stay in and I was hoping that they had already paid for one room night. They hadn't, but that wasn't a big shock at this point.

So I took all of my luggage and stored as much of it as would fit it in a locker at a train station. I still had an active Eurorail pass so I looked at what the longest train ride would be so I would have a place to sleep that night and I took the train there. It took me overnight to Aberdeen, which was delightful. I had been up to Edinburgh with my friend the week before and my love affair with Scotland just grew from there when I got a look at Aberdeen. It was cold with snow drifting lightly in the air and I was happy to be there and it helped me forget my worries.

I tried to go visit a loch, but being alone made me too nervous to walk out on the lonely lane on my own.

I just took the train all over the place using it to sleep and keep me safe while I waited for my plane to leave. I had to stay a night in the youth hostel in London, which was truly terrifying to me. I can't read social cues so being in a big room with a lot of strangers is my own personal nightmare.

I got back home to find out that my mother had not been paying for my tuition or housing while I was in DC, so that would have been a clue. But one I didn't have until I got back.

I don't think I've processed this enough to find the humor in it, so I guess some of these stories will be a bit raw. My goal was really to find the humor in all of the stories I share, but I see that's not going to be the case. Oh well.