Instant Mom (2 page)

• 1 •

Birth

It’s late 2008 and
I’m lying on the couch at my home, holding my three-year-old daughter as she cries.

We’re both gasping for breath.

Just a minute ago, I was standing in the kitchen as she walked by, sucking on a hard candy. She was happily jumping on the couch, when she suddenly grabbed her neck and looked at me. The candy had lodged in her throat. She tried to swallow it. She couldn’t breathe. She was white.

Being a parent requires courage and, unfortunately, I’m a bit of a sucky ’fraidy-cat. I sleep with a light on. I get out of an elevator if I’m alone when a man gets in. I never walk down back alleys.

But in that moment, like anyone would, I ran toward my daughter. I knew exactly what to do, because to adopt, you have to take a first aid course. I knew not to put a finger in her throat and push that candy even farther in. I knew not to touch any part of her neck. I knew not to panic. I just grabbed my daughter, turned her upside down, and jumped—and finally that candy fell out.

She breathed. She cried. She was okay.

Now, as I am lying on this couch, holding her against my body, we both breathe in. And out. I try to relax so she’ll feel soothed, comforted, and safe. I try to think of what else I should do now. I don’t know. I wonder if the feeling of being an adult, being a grown-up will ever come naturally to me.

I love being in charge. I am completely comfortable whether I’m throwing a giant dinner party or directing a microbudget independent film. I don’t get stressed and I don’t yell. I like to calmly problem-solve and enjoy getting things done. However, as a grown-up in sophisticated situations, I am not completely at ease. In scenarios that require decorum and restraint, I usually want to make a fart joke and run. But, as a mom, I try to
act
like an adult, especially at this moment.

Tight against each other, my daughter and I eventually calm down, now listening to our hearts beating. We are very still. I realize this is what it might have felt like if I’d grown her inside me. She would have heard my heart beating; I would have felt her move.

Instead, I met my daughter just recently. I’ve only been her mom for a few months. The adoption isn’t even finalized. Anyone who ever wondered how much they could love a child who did not spring from their own loins, know this: it is the same. The feeling of love is so profound, it’s incredible and surprising. I love my daughter so much I want to carry her around in my mouth.

As I’m holding her now, I am in an emotional place I’m not used to. I feel content.

This is new. It’s not at all how I felt for a very long time. For years, I felt exactly the opposite.

• 2 •

A Fistfight with Mother Nature

It’s 8:00
A.M.
in
early 2003 and I am driving through a rare and raging rainstorm in Los Angeles.

My hands are shaking.

I don’t want to have a horrible accident on the freeway that an infamous ex-football player once made famous. It’s a cliché, so of course utterly true, that L.A. people don’t drive well. I’m not talking about me. I’m from Winnipeg—I took my driving test the day after a snowstorm—I’m tough. However, nothing prepared me for early morning Los Angeles morons driving and reading a script they forgot to tell the intern to cover, plus sexting a mistress whilst sipping a gluten-free soy-free GMO-free not-at-all-free power shake.

Therefore, a rainstorm is a particularly foolish time for me to be on the freeway. Hard rain pounds my windshield. Wind whines against the car windows. My palms ache from how hard I am gripping the steering wheel and my eyes blur from trying to focus. I am trembling. But it’s not the storm that’s making me anxious. I’ve just been nominated for an Academy Award.

The shock of this is making my teeth clang. It’s been close to a year since
My Big Fat Greek Wedding
opened, and it’s still playing in theaters. So many nominations, from a Golden Globe for acting and best comedy film to a People’s Choice Award, are hard to comprehend and absorb. And now this has happened. The impossible. I had written a script in an attempt to get an acting job, and this morning I’d been nominated for an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay.

But I didn’t celebrate with champagne. A gaggle of friends didn’t rush over to jump up and down with my husband and me, then devour a lavish brunch. Sure, I’d been woken up before dawn when the phone rang with the amazing news from my best friend, Kathy Greenwood. That led to an exciting round of call waiting from family and friends, lots of noise, excitement . . . then my husband and I looked at each other and somberly accepted the reality of what I had to do that day. He went to work, and I got in the car.

Now I am alone, driving to the fertility clinic for my early morning lab work in yet another attempt to be a mother. I am on IVF #3. For many years I have been hiding a dumb secret: not being able to carry a baby to term has made me deeply unhappy.

While I am grateful for the success of the movie, it just doesn’t matter. Sure, I’m thrilled, but all I can think about this morning is how long I have been trying to carry a child to term. Over the past five years at least, I’d often been pregnant. There is no feeling of disappointment I have ever known like a miscarriage. So I am now in awful, painful, and time-consuming fertility treatments and even working with a wonderful and selfless surrogate. I don’t know if this will work, but I do know I will keep trying.

Because I am obtusely obstinate.

I am the type of person to whom the word “no” is a shortened version of “try a different way.” I just never accept the word “no.” The fact that I’m a working actress and writer is simply because I am incredibly stubborn. Over the last years, many, many people told me “no,” as in “Get lost, Fatty.” They would look me right in the eye and say “no,” but I just heard, “Go around me. Fatty.”

It’s ironic, bordering on tragic, that I share common traits with psychopaths and serial killers, in that we’re focused and truly believe we’re right. I have no idea how I got this way.

I am the second
daughter born to two fantastic and funny parents. I was raised in Winnipeg, an excellent Canadian city of pleasant and cultured people. I have two wonderful sisters and a delightful brother. We’re very close and yet all quite different. I was always a bookworm and loved performing, so I decided to be an actress even though my parents wanted me to be a dental hygienist. Or better yet marry a dentist. Yes, a Greek one.

I did community theater and many musicals in Winnipeg. Then I auditioned for professional classical theater schools across Canada and got into all of them because I was so beautiful and talented!

Actually, no. No, I wasn’t. I got rejected by every single school. I was an overweight and overconfident hairy girl with a very loud voice. Nobody knew what to do with me. But I was a boisterously exuberant person living a good life in Winnipeg. I took university classes, did more community musicals, dramatic theater, some large professional productions, and made a good living working as a florist. This is a skill I still have and I will do your wedding if you ask politely. If you’re gay, I will definitely do your wedding because of your absolute right to be. . . . I digress. One day this issue will be as dated as the vote for women and most of my hairstyles. Back to the backstory.

I wanted to be a professional actor so I kept auditioning for the theater schools. Then a friend put in a good word for me with a classical theater school in Toronto and I finally got in. I opened that acceptance letter and stared at it. This was what I had been waiting for. Validation. This theater school was going to train me to become a classical actress.

I moved from Manitoba to Ontario and decided to really pursue acting; yes, much to my family’s dismay. If you have an image of a brave girl turning away from her people’s traditional ways, then I’m not being clear. It’s not like there was some sweet Greek guy offering me a comfortable life if I stayed in Winnipeg with him. No one asked me to stay. All the cute Greek boys I grew up with were like brothers to me. Most of them loved my older, perfect sister, who was actually quite worthy of their attention. I was dating one non-Greek guy who slept with my then-closest friend. So it’s not like I had guys weeping, begging me to stay and marry them.

I was extremely close to my family. With Greeks, your cousins are like siblings, your aunts and uncles are more parents. The entire family is comical—everyone can tell a good story and, in a completely good-natured way, we all incessantly make fun of each other. My mom and I are extremely close. She is warm and witty and the type of person you just want to make laugh because she really cracks up hard. I do not know why I wanted to leave all that love and support in favor of an industry of judgment and denigration. But I did. I really, really wanted to go to that classical theater school and become a classical actress.

Within two weeks at that classical theater school, I knew I would never be a classical actress. I enjoyed performing Shakespeare but how many roles were there for a robust and curly-haired loudmouth? I loved my classmates, but I didn’t really fit in with the classical program. This would be about the umpteenth time in my life when I would realize I was trying to jam my square peggedness into yet another round hole. The first time was in junior high school when I heard the whole class was coming to see our production of
Free To Be
. I was sure this would finally make me popular, yet instead during my performance the boys screamed, “Vardalos, shave your sideburns.” Then in high school, it was when the straight-haired, straight-leg-jeaned girls ran from me when I suggested we have a sleepover
Evita
sing-along. Then during university, there was the time at my weekend job I suggested to my florist co-worker that we attach a tape recorder on a timer under a casket floral arrangement that, ten minutes into the funeral service, would emit a from-inside-the-casket knocking sound.

Even though I don’t seek it or enjoy the feeling, I’ve gotten used to people staring at me like I’m an idiot.

Big surprise: like most people in comedy I have never been popular and cool. “What?” you clutch your chest and screech. “You mean people who go into comedy are actually insecure and seeking approval?” We all know the answer is uh-huh. But c’mon, isn’t every- one insecure in some way?

So here I was at the stellar theater school I had yearned to get into, and it was not a good fit. I didn’t know what to do with this information. I did see one thing very clearly though—while some of my teachers were urging me to be true to myself and find out what kind of actor I wanted to be, one teacher was an absolute dink. He treated me with disdain, quite openly making fun of my ethnic physicality and weight. He actually told me he would cut me from the program if I didn’t lose weight. Now, I was a big girl, but it’s not like I was circus-fat. I looked around me—many of the male students were overweight and funny. But I was being chided. Just me. The men were being encouraged to be irreverent. I wasn’t. This teacher made me feel as if I was all kinds of wrong for being a funny, fat girl. As if there’s any other kind. I don’t know if you carry your fat on the outside or if you’re waving your freak flag from within—funny people are funny because we don’t feel like we fit in. The less you soared in high school, the more likely you are to have success in Hollywood. Because observing and loving/hating pretty people from the sidelines is what makes us funny. Our kind knows if we’re funny, we’ll get some attention. And bonus: we’ll stop getting picked on. My industry is filled with successful people who were once most likely to have been locked in a high school locker.

Feeling dejected and rejected at theater school, on a whim, I attended an evening performance at a comedy theater called The Second City. It was the first time I’d seen sketch comedy and improvisation. In the third act, the actors took suggestions for scenes from the audience and performed the ideas on the spot. It was so spontaneous and fun—and it felt familiar. It felt like when my cousins and I would lie around after a giant meal and just have fun in the living room, imitating our parents and each other. It was made up on the spot, just like the improvised act at Second City.

I was mesmerized and hooked.

As I said, not everyone on the staff at theater school loathed me. In fact, several of the teachers, acknowledging I didn’t fit in, felt I’d be happier working in musical theater and encouraged me to leave the program and start working. So with most of my teachers’ support, I auditioned for Second City. After years of performing everything from musical theater to Shakespeare, that comedy stage was my goal. I could truly envision it: I could really see myself in that cast. I walked into that audition with a ton of brash confidence. I walked out with a red-hot shame-face and not just a trickle of butt-crack flop sweat. When it came to improvisation, I had no idea what I was doing. I was not good. At all. But that didn’t stop me. Nope. I just auditioned again and again, never getting into the cast. I now know this to be true about Hollywood: the really talented people are not necessarily the ones working in the industry. It’s the people with the highest tolerance for swimming in a sea storm of viscous excrement who make it.

I auditioned and got jobs in musical theater summer stock companies, performing in every musical from
Anything Goes
to
Oklahoma.
In between these jobs I would waitress at a comedy club. To this day I overtip because I was such a lousy waitress—I would often win the Bartenders’ Dork of the Night contest by accidentally spilling trays of beer on myself. The bartenders would openly hope I would get hired in another musical so I would take more time off.

But my eye was on getting into that Second City cast. I learned there were improvisation classes at Second City and that employees could take the classes for free. So I got a job in the box office and took those classes. I loved the improv lessons during the day. But if anyone knew what I was up to in the box office at night, I would have been fired. After the audience was in, I would guiltlessly take the phones off the hook and go into the theater to watch the performance. I loved watching the show. The first two acts were short sketches—this was material that had started as suggestions from earlier audiences and been improvised until they became scenes. The sketches that went well in the improvised act were placed into those first two acts, replacing older material that had been developed via improvisation months before. The first two acts of the show were constantly changing as new material went in approximately every six months. The third act was always improvised by the actors in their search for new material.

Well, for the three weeks I worked in the box office, I watched those first two acts of scenes diligently, mouthing every word. After the show, I’d run back and close up the box office before a manager could notice that I hadn’t been in there all night.

One night before the show, an actress got sick. She had an inner ear infection and was rushed to the hospital. As the audience was filing into the theater, the stage manager ran into the box office to find the understudy’s phone number. I watched with my eyes a-popping. As the phone rang, I was whispering a mantra, “Don’t answer. Do not answer that phone.” Maybe because I’m a witch, it rang and rang. Finally the stage manager left a voice mail and rushed backstage to figure out what to do.

Something made me stand up. As I’ve said, it’s not bravery—it’s more along the lines of senseless and resolute fortitude. I blithely went backstage, walked right up to the stage manager, and said, “I am a member of Actors’ Equity and I know your show.”

After a long moment in which I did not blink once, while wondering if she could call the union at this hour and find out I was still gathering enough points in professional productions to join but actually was not a member, she said, “Get out.”

I said, “Okay,” turned, and ran hard into the chest of a cast member, Mark, who asked, “What’s going on?” The stage manager explained the actress was sick, adding, “I can’t find an understudy and the box office girl thinks she knows the show.” Mark laughed, lit a smoke, and looked me over. I should mention I was 220 pounds of bravado flaunting a never-in-fashion home perm. Oh, and I wore harem pants a lot. And, a gold-braided headband stretched across my zitty forehead. It was the ’80s. I’m not saying I was chic for the era. No, no, I just didn’t know what fashion was. I wore what I thought a thespian would wear. My harem pants were comfortable and stitched within them was an awesome gold thread that matched my superhero headband. As I said, I had a lot of confidence. I liked my look and I rocked it hard.