MOMAHOLIC: Confessions of a Helicopter Parent

by Dena Higley

Overview

Every mom has felt the need to be perfect.

MOMAHOLIC is one woman’s private, dramatic, and often comical invitation to peek inside a time in her life where everything fell apart and she had to take an honest look at what she was doing right and what she’d been doing terribly wrong. With this simple discovery, her whacky family’s season of becoming unraveled found a new glue (other than her blood, sweat and tears) that would re-bond her family and unite them in a deeper and more functional way than ever before.  

 The real life characters:

• A MOM who is literally the head writer of a network soap opera… at work and at home
• A HUSBAND who expects perfection from his kids and his wife, but who has the wisdom to know he’s being unrealistic and yet, can’t help but scratch his head in frustration as his family’s troubles seem to spiral out of his control
• An autistic SON
• A popular DAUGHTER who is suddenly pregnant
• An ADOPTED DAUGHTER pulled from the jungles of Vietnam with no leg below the right knee and fingers fused together
• An ADOPTED SON from Ethiopia, rescued from the streets at the age of 9.

 This is a story showing the speed with which a “normal” family can fall apart.  No one dies.  No one gets kidnapped.  They just have to deal with each of their own issues….and then one unwanted and unplanned pregnancy.   This was a church-going family whose kids were taught abstinence until marriage. With the family running around as the tornado sirens roared warnings to take cover, mother, Miss Drama, becomes the biggest mess of all and ends up finding a whole new freedom for her soul.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780849964008
Publisher:	Nelson, Thomas, Inc.
Publication date:	04/30/2012
Sold by:	HarperCollins Publishing
Format:	eBook
Pages:	256
File size:	1 MB

About the Author

Dena Higley, an Emmy award-winning writer, has been the head writer for both One Life to Live and Days of Our Lives as well as a playwright in Glendale, CA. She is a graduate of the USC School of Theatre, where she studied acting under the late John Houseman. She currently resides in La Canada-Flintridge, CA with her husband of 24 years, Mark. They have four children and one grandchild. Dena is an active member of Christian Assembly Church.

Read an Excerpt

Momaholic

CRAZY CONFESSIONS OF A HELICOPTER PARENT

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By DENA HIGLEY

Thomas Nelson

Copyright © 2012 Dena Higley
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8499-4736-0

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Chapter One

HOW I GOT THERE

There were a series of events that led up to my spectacular entrance into the hospital. Yes, lots of events but only one reason. I need to back up a bit to explain.

Are you familiar with the term flashback? Of course you are. We see them all the time in movies and books. The television show I have worked on for twenty-five years has perfected the flashback to an art form. So what the heck? Let's flash back ...

At ten o'clock on that bright Sunday morning, I started sucking on a vodka bottle. Hmm ... that seems a tad early. Not only that, but I continued to suck on it throughout the day. You may ask why. My psychologist sure asked. My mom asked. My kids asked. My husband asked. My nearest and dearest friends asked. It seemed to be a fairly popular question. And it's a very good question. I wasn't homeless. I didn't live in a cardboard box. I didn't rummage through garbage cans, looking for dinner. I was an upper-middle-class, working housewife. I had four kids, one husband, three dogs, and one cat, and in my spare time I was responsible for the entire content of a television show that airs at one o'clock in the afternoon. A show that was suffering dwindling ratings. Ratings that were my responsibility to raise. In other words, I was the head writer for Days of Our Lives. It was a stress-filled, nail-biting, soul-sucking job. And it seemed as though I had about a hundred people breathing down my neck all the time.

There were network representatives, producers, various types of executives ... all of whom were my bosses. I call them the Suits. Some of the men and women did actually include suits in their wardrobes, but execs of both sexes opted for leather jackets and jeans—socks optional—if casual was their thing.

I took meetings with the Suits at least once a week, and they were constantly asking me the same question over and over: "What comes next?" "Yeah, Sami shooting EJ in the head sounds good, but then what's next?" "The airplane cabin loses pressure mid-flight and everyone onboard is dead. But then what?" "Hope walks in her sleep, mugs wealthy men, then during the day has amnesia, works as a cop investigating the crimes she has committed ... but then what?"

Soap scribes write thousands of words a day. Seven acts a show, five shows a week. We use ridiculous, over-the-top phrases like vortex of emotions and gut-punched and thunderbolt of inspiration, but we never get to write the words The End. And that is why the Suits keep asking the $64,000 question: "And then what?"

That question rang in my ears. I heard it even when no one was saying it. It kept me up at night. It drove me mad. It was tattooed inside my eyelids. Because if you're lucky and blessed, it never ends. Soaps were being canceled right and left. We were under a lot of pressure just to stay afloat.

This Sunday happened to occur in May. As anyone who works in television will tell you, May is a very big deal. May is what we call a sweeps month. That means the advertisers of your particular program look very closely at those four weeks and gauge how many people are watching your show. If a lot of people are watching, the network can charge a lot of money for advertising time. But if those numbers dwindle, everyone starts to panic. Especially the Suits.

I'd had a very good May sweeps the year before, but not this year. This year we tanked. We were in the proverbial toilet. And when that happens, if you happen to be the head writer, the Suits (or Leather Jackets) continually speak at you in harsh, clipped, accusatory, and somewhat frantic tones. Not only that, but NBC was trying to decide if soap operas in general were worth keeping in their daytime lineup. When I first started working in television, NBC had four soaps on the air. Twenty years later, they were down to one. Ours. My bosses kept "reminding" me that the future of Days of Our Lives depended on me and me alone. We were an institution. We were a franchise. We couldn't just fold up our tent and walk away. We'd been on the air forty-five years. If we got canceled it would be for one reason—because I couldn't hack it. They told me this so many times that I actually started to believe them.

I started to feel the weight on my skinny little shoulders. Days employed hundreds of people—actors and crew and support staff—many of whom were my friends. If I failed, if I didn't write a compelling story and bring the ratings up, a lot of people—and I mean a lot of people—would lose their jobs.

I also had a sentimental reason to keep the boat afloat. MacDonald Carey was a wonderful man, a grandfather figure to millions. He played Tom Horton on Days since it first aired in 1968. He died many years ago, but as I wrote the Christmas show every year, I never forgot to have someone hang his Christmas ornament on the tree. It was a symbol. Family never ends. People wanted to be reminded of that. And fan letter after fan letter explained to me in no uncertain terms that the Bradys and the Hortons were the families they'd never had. When Frances Reid passed away recently, it was emotional for me. She, too, had been on the show since the beginning, as Alice Horton, Tom's loving and supportive wife. Frances and the fictional character she played had been a part of my whole adult life. And I wasn't the only one who felt this way. If the show was ripped off the screens of our dwindling-yet-loyal fans, I would feel as if I were orphaning real people. Good people. People who worked hard for a living and just wanted to come home to unwind to their "stories."

But times were changing. And our audience was slowly disappearing. And no one knew what to do about it. The entire landscape of television was morphing. NBC was about to be sold. General Electric had owned the network for years, but the majority of stock was being sold to the cable giant Comcast. No one knew what that meant. Were the new owners going to blaze in and start lopping off heads? Or would they enter uncharted waters tentatively? Would they tread softly or carry a big stick? No one knew. Panic ensued. Blood pressures spiked and nerves were strained and fingers pointed. And most of the fingers were pointing at me. As the takeover grew closer and closer, the wind shifted; it felt as though change was afoot. And not for the better. Especially not for the better if someone new to the scene viewed soaps as an antiquated genre.

But my job wasn't the reason I was in the hospital.

Allow me to continue ...

My firstborn, Connor, was diagnosed with autism at age four. One month before my hospital trip, Connor completed his sophomore year at Azusa Pacific University with OK grades. But it had been a struggle for him. Countless tutors, pulling all-nighters for a final only to find out he'd studied the wrong material, knowing he wasn't "getting it," longing for friends he didn't have and couldn't seem to make, anxiety, depression. I hated seeing him go through that. I prayed for him. I urged him to keep up the good fight and threw every other motherly cliché I could think of at him. Now he was on summer break. Since the last semester had been such a drain, I felt that he needed a break. So I didn't push him to get a job bagging groceries or washing dishes, although, in hindsight, I probably should have. Instead, he got a part-time job teaching tae kwon do to little kids and learning how to skydive. But his commitments didn't take up much time. Mostly he just self-isolated, and that had me more worried than when he had practically buckled under the weight of a sixteen-unit class schedule.

But he wasn't the reason I was in the hospital either.

My fourteen-year-old baby-but-not-a-baby, Adelle, was becoming a young woman right before my very eyes. Several weeks before my "Chernobyl with the vodka," Adelle had reconstructive surgery on the one foot she has. Some of her toes had been fused together at birth, and they were starting to curl downward. She needed it corrected before her one and only beloved foot became useless. The problem was, once the surgery was completed and her foot was in a cast, she had no mobility at all. She was not supposed to put any weight on it. None. We got her a wheelchair, but getting her into the car, the bathroom, or the bed meant we had to carry her. She was understandably irritable and angry. She hadn't wanted the surgery in the first place, and now the most active, independent, and proud teen in the world was forced into a life of complete dependence on others. She hated it.

Even more, her pain was intense and difficult to manage. I slept the first four nights after the surgery on the floor of her room in case she needed meds at three o'clock in the morning.

On top of all of that, there was a ticking clock: she wanted to walk through her eighth grade graduation ceremony just weeks after the operation. Not to mention her sister's wedding, in which she was slated to be the maid of honor. She needed to heal. And time was not on her side.

But all the pain and the stress of her foot surgery didn't push me to the brink. Wait ... there's more ...

Helio, my other son, was adopted from Ethiopia at age nine. Several months before my husband flopped me down on an ER table, Helio was enjoying his last semester of eighth grade. During the school year, he had started a sort of entrepreneurial enterprise on campus that was partly shady and partly genius. I didn't know how I felt about it.

The state of California, in all its wisdom, decided to take soda out of school vending machines, thinking that would be a step toward a healthier young generation. But it wasn't against the rules to bring your own soda to school. Apparently a citizen's right to consume caffeinated, carbonated beverages is in the Constitution somewhere. So, while the possession of soda was discouraged, it was not illegal.

Helio saw an opportunity and seized it. He began buying large quantities of canned soda at the store and sold them at school. His mark-up was something like 100 percent. He would on occasion take an IOU, but you had to pay 50 percent interest every day until the debt was paid in full. Helio then went online and started studying the stock market. He took the profit he made at school and asked his father to invest in certain stocks for him—stocks he had personally done the research on and had decided to believe in. He did very well, even in tough and volatile economic times. I loved his outside-the-box thinking and his initiative. And I didn't question his motives. He wasn't greedy or materialistic. He loved the game. Still, these kids' parents hadn't necessarily given them permission to drink soda during the school day. Yet they had pockets full of cash. We live in a fairly affluent neighborhood; more often than not, parents give their junior high kids a lot of money, and who knows what they were spending it all on? Something worse than soda? Possibly. So I didn't shut the operation down. Still, I fully expected to be called at any moment into the principal's office and lectured on what a terrible mother I was to let my son do such reprehensible things. It was a conversation I was not looking forward to.

But Helio's antics didn't cause my tailspin either.

Let me introduce my oldest daughter, Jensen. She is so beautiful, so smart, so amazing, so talented. Everyone loves Jensen. But I get to love her the best and the deepest because I am her mother. And she's not just my daughter; she's also my very dear friend. So you can imagine my shock when she came home for spring break her sophomore year at USC and told me she was pregnant.

Chapter Two

THE LAST STRAW

I panicked. I yelled. I spun out of control. Even the soap opera writer in me cannot come up with words to describe the way I felt. I was angry and heartbroken. My husband, Mark, was devastated. Some young man had impregnated his daughter. His "virginal," beautiful daughter. The one who held such promise. Such a bright future had been thrown away on a night of sex with some guy we barely knew. Why did she do that? We'll never know. She had grown up hearing sermons about abstinence and lectures at school about unprotected sex. It wasn't that she lacked in education. I just didn't understand how this could have possibly happened.

Mark and I unloaded on her. In her defense, she took our rage right in the face. She didn't back down, but she did let the tears flow. She knew her mom and dad pretty well, so I think she had prepared herself for the onslaught.

Mark and I could only yell for so long before we needed to take a breath. Jensen used the pause to finally get a word in edgewise. She fully intended to keep this baby. This pronouncement forced us to stop our tirade and be practical for a moment. Even though we were still numb with shock, we told her we supported her decision completely. Even though Jensen was only two weeks along, we knew instantly we were dealing with a baby here.

Still, things were a disaster on all sides. Mark and I went to bed that night and still were shell-shocked. We turned on each other. Mark felt that this was my fault. I'd babied her. I hadn't explained the facts of life well enough. I sputtered, hoping he was kidding. I was not to blame for this, and he was nuts for thinking so. And on and on it went, well into the daylight hours.

Family dynamics didn't get a whole lot better after Jensen's baby-daddy proposed marriage, Jensen accepted, and I began planning a very expensive wedding.

Mark's gotten perturbed with me many times in our twenty-three years of marriage, and most of the time it has been for a darn good reason. But he had never been this mad at me. He told me in no uncertain terms that we were not going to "reward" Jensen's irresponsible sexual behavior with a lavish wedding. I begged him not to think in terms of reward or blame. This was a wedding. That's all. Just a wedding.

I felt that Jensen was giving up enough and facing tough times ahead. No sleep ... a baby crying all night ... taking care of a household when she had never cooked so much as a noodle in her life. Being a wife and a mother when she'd never finished being a kid herself. Not to mention varicose veins, a bladder that would never quite work the right way again, breast feeding, leaking nipples that cracked and bled, midnight arguments with her husband about whether the one-year-old should self-soothe or be held. Deciding when to give up pacifiers, when to give up bottles, when to enroll the kid in preschool. She was going to have to make all these decisions when she could have been going to USC football games and sorority parties.

And then there was the long-term plan. Trying to save enough money to buy a house (in this economy)! And even if they could manage to do that, what if she and her husband hated each other by then? They loved each other now, but they didn't know each other. I saw it all in one horrible vision. (You know how in the Bible Saint John had a vision of what heaven was going to be like when Christ returns? It was just like that vision ... only the opposite.)

Speaking of religion, my future son-in-law was a staunch Catholic, and Jensen was raised super-Protestant. Now, don't get me wrong. I love me some pope. But the Higley family was very entrenched in our home church. Eventually, this would be an issue. In the sudden onslaught of all these new realities, I was determined to lighten Jensen's load of regrets as much as I could. She'd made a mistake. Had my husband never made a mistake? Had I? Who were we to decide how big her punishment was to be? Regardless of what Mark and I did or didn't do to her, Jensen was going to pay for that mistake more than we could possibly imagine. But I couldn't even go there yet. There was a wedding to plan.

* * *

I knew my little girl had dreamed and planned for her wedding, as most girls do, her whole life. She was devastated that she would be giving up her college years. I was not going to let her wedding dream be stolen from her too. I didn't work so hard at my job for fancy cars and big houses. No, I wanted to be able to pay for stuff like this. Mark didn't think that was the issue. He said no big wedding. I wasn't going to listen to anything he had to say. The problem is, I'm an emotionally powerful person. So is my husband. We had never issued ultimatums to each other like this before—gone head-to-head—neither of us willing to back down. But that's what was happening. Thus began World War III.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Momaholic by DENA HIGLEY Copyright © 2012 by Dena Higley. Excerpted by permission of Thomas Nelson. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

Prologue xi

Part 1

1 How I Got There 3

2 The Last Straw 13

3 I Own It All 19

4 The (Very Brief) Enegagement 27

5 The Crash 33

6 Conner 39

7 Jensen 47

8 Adelle 55

9 Helio 65

10 My Job 71

11 Hovering 79

12 Faith 85

13 I Mucked It Up 87

14 My Oldest Daughter'S Wedding Plans 95

15 The Day Before The Wedding 99

16 The Wedding Day 103

17 Fairy Tale, For Some 109

18 Grounded 119

19 God Is Good—Even All The Time 127

Addendum To Part 1 133

Part 2

20 The Birth 137

21 A Baby In Crisis 143

22 I Want What I Don't Want 151

23 Harload Had Aids 159

24 The Baptism 165

25 Boys Will Be Boys 171

26 Conner's Big Adventure 179

27 Dear Christopher,… 187

28 Everything Old Is New Again 191

29 Speaking Of Being A Working Grandmother 197

30 Deep Stuff 203

31 Clousure 207

32 The Truth About Truth 211

33 Men 215

34 Are You In The Club? 219

35 The Test 225

Acknowlrdgements 233

About The Authour 235