My Voice: A Memoir (17 page)

This was the year that Summer Jam moved from Nassau Coliseum on Long Island to the Giants Stadium football arena, with sixty thousand in attendance. It was bigger than ever! Eminem stole the show that year, dissing
The Source
and smashing onstage the Lyricist of the Year trophy the magazine had awarded him.

In the meantime, back at the station, Sunny Anderson had been filling my time slot. I’m sure Sunny wondered if I was ever going to come back. As it happened, my time off was more than a maternity leave. Actually, they never paid me for my maternity leave. Technically my contract was up and I was in no rush to sign another one. My explanation was that I needed time to figure things out. Not only was I moving into a new house and having a baby, but I hadn’t taken a break since I was eighteen years old and desperately needed one.

Other than becoming a mother, I didn’t have the bandwidth to consider what the next phase of my life or career would be. For the first time, in a long, long time, I wasn’t going to just keep pushing to the next opportunity. I was going to experience this rite of passage to a different life and all that it entailed.

As motherhood inched closer, my ob-gyn kept waving off my insistence that I knew my own body. Throughout the pregnancy I’d been telling her, “Listen, all the women in my family have C-sections.” I don’t know if it’s a curse. We don’t dilate. My mother had one, my grandmother, my aunts. “Just schedule me as a C-section,” I said.

“No, you have to try natural labor,” she encouraged. “You’ll heal so much faster.”

Okay, lady
.

During the last month of my pregnancy, they did a test and told me that if I didn’t get the baby out soon, it would be ten pounds. Dr. Marks decided, “We’re going to induce you on June eleventh.”

On June 11, 2003, I arrived at the hospital at four a.m. or six a.m. or some ungodly hour and went through twenty-six hours of labor. SO TERRIBLE. Three epidurals! Why? Because the first two didn’t work. I have a huge needle in my back and it isn’t working. I’m screaming, “Try again! Put it in again!” I needed them to keep trying because the contractions felt like they were going to kill me. Finally, the third epidural kicks in. A few hours later, they tell me that I’m not dilating enough and that I am going to have to have a C-section.

All of that labor for no reason!!!

Then I go to have a C-section and they give me morphine for the pain. Well, it turns out that I have some sort of allergy to morphine. So I break out in hives. I’m scratching everywhere. Could it get any worse? No, instead everything becomes perfect because in that next moment, I’m holding my son for the first time and he is amazing and worth every moment and more. Niko Tamir Ruffin. Eight pounds, nine ounces, a hefty baby.

I was so high from the morphine, the first thing I’m told I said to my son was: “You’re not gonna bring home any dirty girls to Mommy’s house, right?”

By choice, that wouldn’t have been the first thing I should have said to him. As part of a larger conversation, maybe.

At this moment, I just wanted a healthy baby. That’s really all that mattered. Then I held him in my arms and fell in love and I realized my life was changed forever.

The thing that people rarely tell you is that having a baby is a big fucking deal. Sure, people do it all the time, so the attitude tends to be,
Oh, it’s just a baby
. No. It’s a big deal. The media makes it look like,
She bounced back in two weeks and she’s a size zero! She’s back at work three days after having a baby!
You see all these new moms out brunching. Those women are aliens. I always tell my friends who are new moms, “Don’t compare yourself to the aliens.” God bless them; they inspire me. But for most women, it does not work like that. And for me it didn’t. Reality is that you feel like shit. Your body is different. Your life is different. It’s amazing and phenomenal and overwhelming and emotional, but it is a legitimate change and by no means a small one.

I had a baby and everything stopped. I felt all types of shit that nobody had prepared me for. When Niko was a newborn, at least four times a night I would go to his crib and put my hand over his chest to make sure it was moving.
Is he okay?
I rested my face gently next to him to make sure he was still breathing. I was paranoid. I was terrified. There was this constant worry.

One evening when Niko was about a month old, I was in the kitchen making a whole wheat English muffin with a piece of turkey bacon. That was my diet as I started trying to lose my baby weight. I was sleep deprived, completely exhausted from being up all night breastfeeding. Suddenly, I stopped breathing for a couple of seconds. I had this feeling like,
Okay, when is this part going to be over?
When am I going to stop being worried?
And then I had this moment.
Holy shit
, I realized.
Never
. Anger swelled inside.
Well, why the fuck did nobody ever tell me that?
Nobody tells you that. Nobody prepares you. A terrifying feeling sank in. As a mother,
now I have to worry about somebody forever, for the rest of my life
. I didn’t even think about that ahead of time.

My son’s nursery was my version of what I thought a Pottery Barn pamphlet should look like. I bought all the things you’re supposed to buy—the crib, the mobile, the changing table that I never used because I always changed him on the bed. And then he wound up sleeping in the
little bassinet next to my bed. Since I was breastfeeding him every two or three hours, a lot of times he would be lying in the bed with me even though they say that’s not safe. I was always half awake anyway, so he was fine.

But after being sleep deprived for three months, it started making me nuts. I thought I was going to die. Two hours of sleep here. One hour here. Two hours tonight. Three hours tomorrow. It was making me nuts.

I’m living in this secluded cul-de-sac in Westwood, New Jersey. It’s beautiful, but I’m in this big house in this neighborhood that I don’t know and I just had a baby with somebody that I barely know. I haven’t even known him for a year. It was a weird time.

There I am, sitting in the living room in my chair facing the TV. The TV is on, but I am not watching it. I’m going through the Rolodex in my brain to think if I can remember ever hearing about anybody who died from exhaustion.

This was a serious thought; I wasn’t being funny. The notion taunted me—
Wait . . . can people die from this? Have I known anyone who has passed away from sleep deprivation???
Am I going to die?
In the moment, I was really trying to figure this out. Could I die from being so tired?

My son’s father almost didn’t factor in, in such a weird way. At one point I began to wonder
, Is this guy going to do more? How does this work?
Is he supposed to share more of this worry and responsibility
?

“You don’t want them to do more because they’re never going to do it right or the way you want it done,” my girlfriend Yvette advised me. “So you should just do it yourself.”

“You are so right,” I agreed. It was such great advice. Let me just handle this.

This is not to say that Tamir didn’t do anything, but in my own
little world, he just didn’t really play in. I mean, he was there. But the mother—the breast-feeder—you are
the one
. The guy will be sleeping and you are up at two in the morning, three in the morning, five in the morning, seven in the morning. At this point I was doing what I had to for Niko by myself.

My son was three months old when I started getting calls from management at Hot, asking, “Hey, are you coming back to work?”

Work???!
I’m still trying to motivate myself to change out of these gray sweats and brush my hair.

I was more tired than ever, trying to adjust to being a mother, to living with somebody in a new place. In every way I felt disconnected from myself. While I could relate to those women who would say, “I couldn’t wait to get back to work,” a part of me was not pressed to go back to that set of demands. But I was still trying to clear my mommy brain and needed something to snap me out of it. It wasn’t like I was financially set to not work. At some point I had to go back. But in that period I wasn’t ready, so I ignored all the calls from the station.

It was Flex who drove out to my house to bring me back to work. I don’t know if the station sent him or if it was his idea. He hid his shock at finding me in this hole, deep in Jersey, removed from everything. My roots were to my earlobes (this was way before ombré was cool) as I sat there in my gray sweats every day.

“You gotta come back, Ang,” Flex said, trying to convince me. “There’s a new general manager there.” Judy Ellis had resigned and Barry Mayo had been brought in to replace her. Flex said, “You should go in and tell Barry how you feel about being underpaid. I think, at this point, they’d be willing to make a change there.”

He hit a nerve. On a primal level, I knew that I still loved my job. But I was stuck. I had to get past the exhaustion before I could restart
the engines. I had been working so hard for so long. Sometimes you’ve got to shut down.

“I just need a minute,” I explained.

•   •   •

N
iko was almost four months old when I got a call about being a guest host on
The View.
I was still in that cloudy state, in a daze. I still had my baby weight and felt swollen and gross. I didn’t think it was the right fit for me, but it was an opportunity to be on a really successful show. That was some of the old me coming back to life, telling myself,
No matter how you’re feeling, you get up and you show up. Of course you have to go.

I arrived at
The View
studio on the west side of Midtown Manhattan and was shocked! I looked around like,
Oh, the world is still happening? People are still doing this? Everybody is still working?

It was the
Twilight Zone
. During the show, I barely said anything. I didn’t feel connected to anything that they were talking about. I mean, I’m okay with going outside of my comfort zone. I’m just not into putting a square peg into a round hole. The cast at the time was Barbara Walters, Joy Behar, Meredith Vieira, Elisabeth Hasselbeck, Star Jones, and that group. Those women, they talk fast. You have to be aggressive, get in there, get your points out. They don’t wait for you to say your opinion. It was intense and did not feel particularly inviting or warm.

In my oversized black jacket, trying to cover my post-baby weight, I sat there feeling bloated and just wanted to get home to my kid. Ironically,
The View
appearance did plant seeds in my mind for one day having a TV show of my own that was more like the vibe I liked to have with guests on the radio. It wasn’t a total loss as far as opportunities go, and I’ve actually been back on several times since then and the experience was much better. That was a lesson I was just starting to understand—
how everything leads to something and that even the losses can become material to grow from later.

Still, at that point in time I had this feeling of navigating with an outdated map. This whole period felt weird and foggy. Wasn’t I doing what women were supposed to do? That was the map—
I am supposed to meet somebody. We are going to have a baby. We are going to get a big house.
I redid the house. I was cooking all the time. All of a sudden I was transforming into this domestic person because I thought that was what my life was supposed to be now. And it was uncomfortable for me. Reality check—
okay, well, what’s real here? What’s happening?
I started contemplating.
What is inspiring me?
Then I realized:
Oh, nothing
.

Not that I don’t like to cook or that I don’t like to be around my family. I do. But I was doing it in a way that was not authentic or organic.

The wheels started to turn. What map had I been using for my career? It was probably the one that said even if I wasn’t making what I should have—and I was way, way underpaid for quite some time—I was still just grateful to be there. I loved what I did. I liked making money, but I wasn’t pressed to make more. Maybe I felt like I didn’t deserve it. My mother once told me that everybody is replaceable. She told me about radio personalities who were the hot shit and then if they left someone else replaced them. I always felt replaceable. So I never wanted to make too much money because I always thought that would mean I would be the first person that would be looked at like, “Well, is she worth it?” I still think that to an extent; I do know my value, but I try never to get too comfortable or to take anything at all for granted.

Then again, after all those years when I never really pushed for a raise, that began to change once I became a mother. Now I had a kid. I had a house. Maybe it was time to say,
Okay, I think I paid my dues already
.
It’s time to pay me what I am worth.
I knew I wanted more.

As Flex had suggested, I finally set up a meeting with Barry, the new general manager at the station. When I arrived, bypassing all the familiar faces, I took a deep breath and walked into Barry’s office. For the first time I just asked for it—what I thought I was worth. It was much easier asking him than it would have been if Judy were still in that chair. I had so much loyalty to Judy and felt so indebted to her for giving me my career that a conversation about what I was worth would have had to come from a more humble place. Barry and I had no history—which in this case was good.

“You’re right. You deserve more,” Barry said. I think he was probably surprised at how little I was making. Bottom line, they wanted me back.

And they doubled my salary.

•   •   •

C
ut to: Friday, October 29, 2004, the parking garage of Madison Square Garden, where I’m waiting in a long line to get my car after seeing one of the most amazing and bizarre concerts of my life. Just then I get a call from Mike Kyser of Def Jam.

“Yo, where you at?” Mike asks.

“Just left the building,” I say. It’s late and I have to get on the road. But Mike has an interview that needs to happen right away.