Let Me Tell You Something (4 page)

My favorite moment of that day was looking at the faces of my husband and kids as we watched our team's victory. This was the greatest pinch-myself moment of them all. So far . . .

You wanna be on a reality
show? You better toughen up.

I have always considered myself to be a survivor, but in no way was I prepared for what happened when this show hit. Getting bullets shot at you from all directions, about everything you hold dear, really tests you. Dealing with people who don't know you but think they know everything about you has been challenging and strange. But from it all I've also learned that I'm a hell of a lot stronger than I thought I was!

The most important lesson I've taken away from my time with the
Housewives
is the strength of silence. I'm sure a lot of readers have come to this book hoping that I will spill a lot of secrets or talk about my fellow cast mates. Sorry to disappoint you. Everything I need to say about the people on my show has been said on the show. There aren't any secrets or hidden information that I can share.

My trust in human nature has been shaken. Some of the Internet comments that have been written about me have been so awful, they've shocked me, and that's not easy. I quickly learned that people are cowards behind computers, armed with their anonymity they say things they'd never have the courage to say to my face. Drama sells; happiness, cookies, and cream do not. It took me a long time to realize these stories aren't personal, and that the people who read them quickly forget about them the next day. It was a lot of work for me to become OK with it, and accept it as part of my business.

Ultimately I learned that my family can get through anything. Watching the show, I am always happy to see how united we are. My kids have taken beatings on this show, and they've gotten stronger too. They've learned that the best revenge is for them to be successful in the face of someone who's calling them losers.

Fame is a drug, and it's addictive and dangerous. If you don't have your feet firmly on the ground, you're going to get destroyed. You'll be sucked into your own hype, and you will lose your way, and possibly a lot more. That will never happen to me. If my husband saw any sign of that happening to me, he would tell me, and I would quit the show in a heartbeat.

I'm very aware that I'm in the middle of my fifteen minutes. I know that if the show ended tomorrow, my Facebook friends would drop from half a million to nothing in a short amount of time. If I'm not in the public eye, people will stop caring about me pretty quickly. I know that with any fame, out of sight equals out of mind 99 percent of the time. People don't actually love me. They love what I am every week on a TV show. And they'll forget about me as fast as they loved the show when it started. I'm completely fine with this. This whole experience has been fun, and while it lasts, I'll continue to enjoy it. And when it's over, I'll go back to my life with my grace and dignity intact.

This show taught me the value of staying true to myself and being real with my audience. They deserve nothing less. That's the most important thing to me. Everything you see with my name on it, it's me. I write every tweet and status update. I can't answer every message I get anymore—there are too many; it would be a full-time job. But I read them all. People who write to me are my lifeline. These people let me know when I'm doing something wrong. They keep me on the right path—not some stranger writing a gossip piece hiding behind a computer, or a bunch of bullies on Twitter or Facebook. These attacks can't hurt me. I've learned to never compromise my truth and to roll with the punches.

I've met some amazing fans . . .
this one touched me the most.

One of the most heartbreaking things I've ever seen happened while I was at an event down at the Jersey Shore. I was signing autographs when a bunch of nurses came up to me. They told me about a patient that they were treating nearby.

She was suffering from seizures and depression, and had tried to take her own life after her boyfriend left her. The nurses told me that she had wanted to come to see me at this in-store appearance but she wasn't well enough, and that had made her even more depressed.

I listened to the nurses tell me this woman's devastating story, and then I asked them how far away the hospital was. When I heard it was only a couple miles, I told them that I would try to visit the woman before I headed home the following day. I didn't want them to tell anyone I was coming—least of all the patient, in case something came up and I couldn't make it. But I made them promise they wouldn't notify the press, that there'd be no photographers there. They agreed.

The next morning, I went to the hospital to visit this woman. I recognized her as soon as I walked in. She was around my age, and attractive, but you could tell she'd had a hard life. She had red hair and blue eyes. She looked up and saw me come into the room, and then tears started pouring down her face.

She didn't speak, she just sat there crying. I went to her and I told her that I'd heard she wasn't doing too well, and that I was sorry to hear that. She still didn't say anything.

I continued that I'd heard that she had also tried to hurt herself, and I asked her to talk about that with me. She and I sat for about forty-five minutes. She told me her life story—that she'd donated a kidney to her ex-husband, that she had a wonderful relationship with her sixteen-year-old son. But she had recently been dealt a bad hand. She lost her house in a foreclosure and her boyfriend had broken up with her. She told me that watching my show gave her hope that she could be as strong as me. I looked at her, and I told it to her straight.

“You just told me that you adore your sixteen-year-old son and you gave a kidney to your husband
after
you divorced him and you want to end your life just because some guy broke up with you?” I asked. I told her she was stronger than me.

I told her she was stronger than most people on this earth, and that things were going right for her. I told her that she, not me, should be out on the circuit talking to people about how to overcome difficulties in life. I told her I didn't have half the courage that she did. I told her to own the fire that came to her naturally (she's a natural redhead, mine is from the bottle). I told her that she was going to be OK and I made her promise me to have a better attitude when it came to her own safety.

Then I looked her in the eye and said, “I'm going to be honest with you. I'm never going to see you again. But I know you have the power to overcome this.”

I knew she had her own strength, but she hadn't realized it yet. I hugged her and I said good-bye.

A few months later, one of the nurses called to tell me that the woman was doing really well. She'd gotten a new apartment and she'd turned her life around. I can't explain what I mean to complete strangers, but it is moments like this that make me so grateful that I can help, in a little way.

Your kid is gay? So what?
He's still your kid!

Since the show started, I have absolutely loved meeting people who watch. I've loved the connection that people feel; I've loved the stories they've shared with me. Some of these encounters will stay with me for the rest of my life.

One of my favorites, which still brings tears to my eyes, was a chance meeting with a young boy last Christmas. I was out shopping by myself at Riverside Mall when a man, a typical Jersey guy, came up to me. I could tell he wanted to talk. He pointed at me, right in the chest, and told me that I was “from that show on TV” and then he lost his steam. He just stood in front of me, silently, looking at the ground.

I waited, and I noticed that he was starting to get choked up. After a while, he got himself together and looked me in the eye. “I want to thank you,” he said, his voice thick with emotion.

“For what?” I asked.

“You gave me my son back,” he said.

We started talking and he explained that his family watched
Housewives
and saw many similarities between my family and theirs.

The man told me the episode where Albie failed law school had changed his family focus. There was a moment in the scene when I looked at my son, told him that I loved him, and believed he could do anything.

“When my son saw that, he turned to my wife and asked her if she was just like Caroline, if she would love him no matter what he told her?” the man said.

At this point in his story, right there in the middle of Saks, this man started to cry. But he was able to continue his story. In response to her son, his wife said that yes, she was just like me and she would love him no matter what. Their son then asked if that meant he could tell them anything, and they assured him that he could.

This complete stranger then told me that this was a huge step for his family, to have his son talk to them like this. For the past year leading up to this moment, he had shut himself off from the world. He had become quiet and distracted, his grades had dropped, and his parents had lost the ability to communicate with him.

But when this kid saw me tell Albie that I'd love him no matter what, it triggered something in him, and he asked his parents if their love was unconditional. When they told him that yes it was, he looked them both in their eyes and told them that he was gay. His parents hugged and kissed him and told him that that was OK.

This guy, this complete stranger, was by now completely crying as he recounted this story to me. He said that without watching the show, without seeing me as a parent with such unconditional love, his son would not have had the confidence to come out, and he wanted to thank me. I was astounded. It was such a beautiful story that I didn't know what to say.

Then he explained to me that today happened to be his son's birthday, and that his son was at a restaurant in the mall with his mother. He asked if I would come with him and meet his family.

When we got to the restaurant, and the kid saw me standing with his dad, he literally crumbled into my arms, he was crying so hard. It was an incredible moment, I was crying my ass off. I just held his face in my hands while he cried. I kept saying “happy birthday, you're so beautiful”—I didn't know what else to say. I was a mess.

Suddenly the boy looked at his father and asked how his father had found me.

His father was crying too. “I didn't find her, she found us,” he said.

It's moments like this, moments of pure, real emotion and healing, for people I don't even know, that make everything else about doing this show completely worth it.

Loyalty is important, but
it's a two-way street.

There's something I want to get straight with you. You've seen me deal with a lot of complex emotional situations over the past four years. From the mail I get, it seems that a lot of viewers are confused by my words and my actions. People write me and say I always talk about loyalty, but I haven't shown loyalty to my fellow cast mates. I consider myself loyal to a fault, but that doesn't mean I'm an idiot.

Loyalty means always telling the truth, even if someone doesn't want to hear it. And sometimes, your loyalty demands that you walk away from somebody rather than turn on them or be a fake friend.

First and foremost, I am loyal to myself. I cannot fake it with anyone. There's no way on earth I can sit at a table with a person I don't like and not let it show. I find it impossible to look at someone who's doing something horribly, drastically wrong and say “that's OK” when it's not. I just can't. Maybe if I could, things would be easier.

I think it's been proven that I prefer to stay quiet on the show. I have avoided as many confrontations as I can. I have tried so hard to never add any fuel to the fights or feuds that happen around me. And somehow I have gained a reputation for being forceful. I don't understand it.