...And Then I Cried

100% true stories that I am 100% sure you will not believe.

Ramshackle Glam is a website about parenting, divorce, aging, mental health, and other funny stuff. There are lots of free posts on the site, and more published every week, but FYI if you want to upgrade you’ll automatically receive an eBook that I wrote just for paid subscribers. I’m pretty psyched about it :) And remember, if you become a Founding Member you also get a one-on-one consult with me about writing for a living, personal branding, or *literally* whatever’s on your mind.

A couple of posts you may have missed:

• The School Dropoff Uniform (It’s Not Ideal)

• Adventures in DIY Highlights

• My Neediness, My Mess

And now…your post!

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I discovered the sex of my first child while laying on a table in a ballroom in front of four hundred people, and then I cried.

Let me back up.

When I was twelve, I was sort of “discovered” by a commercial director who lived in my apartment building (this kind of thing does occasionally happen when you live in New York City and are a blinky child who visibly and constantly fails to hide her emotions from the general public) and ended up having a pretty cool, if middling, acting and modeling career throughout my junior high and high school years.

At fourteen I signed with Ford Models, a fact that continues to bolster my ego thirty years later even though it really shouldn’t, and was hired for jobs like Seventeen Magazine shoots that paid criminally little (we’re talking like $50 for the entire day) and a runway show during which I was adorned in nipple pasties, had my hair teased to the sky, and carried a whip that I used on the two adult men who had accompanied me down the runway.

Oh, yes. Modeling in the ‘90s was quite the treat.

I also acted in a bunch of TV shows and movies, including two stints on Law and Order wherein I first played a teen prostitute and then, maybe a year and a half later, a completely different teenager whose friend had been killed by Nazis. Kind of strange that they didn’t seem to care about the repeat casting situation, but this meant I got to work with both Jerry Orbach (RIP, literally the kindest man ever, LOVED him) and Benjamin Bratt (holy cute, I could barely even function on set).

OK. So then I went to college, and for those four years only pursued acting and modeling work sporadically. Once I had to go back to the city for an important audition, and asked my classmate Natalie Portman to let me borrow her notes from our cognitive neuroscience class to cover the days I missed. She forgot, or just didn’t give them to me for whatever reason, and I ended up getting a C- on the final. And although it was certainly not her fault that I got a C-, I have to confess that because I am petty this way, I still harbor some resentment to this very day. I also have to say, though, that she looks fantastic in her divorced mom era, and I covet both her skin and her poise.

Anyway. Fast forward ten years, and my acting career had come crashing down around my ears in spectacular fashion (I don’t want to recap the drama today but just google it; you’ll find the story). But that was okay! Because I had a new career as a blogger-person! Said new career was, however, still in its nascent years and not yet particularly lucrative, and so when I got pregnant at age 30 my hormones and my mother (“But you used to be a Ford model!”) somehow combined to make me think that it would be an excellent idea to call up a local maternity modeling agency and try to make a few extra bucks posing for catalogues that sold things like bathing suits cut for mothers-to-be. The agency signed me up (ego boost!), and I waited for the jobs to start rolling in.

Except I forgot one key fact: actual models get pregnant, too. And actual models who are pregnant tend to be the ones who book actual pregnant-model jobs.

The sum total of “pregnant modeling” jobs I was hired for during my gestational period was one, and the only thing getting modeled was my uterus.

Stay with me.