Hilary Liftin - Found : a daughters journey home

FOUND

A Daughters Journey Home

TATUM O NEAL

with Hilary Liftin

To my children, Kevin, Sean, and EmilyThe true loves of my life and the shining stars of my story.And to my dear friend Perry MooreYou taught me to be a more loving and compassionate
person and I will miss you dearly.You were a hero. My dream is to remember to laugh at myself when I've been a fool... and to learn from it, and then let it go. My mother, Joanna Moore (19341997)

Contents

IT WAS SUNDAY evening, June 2, 2008. My cell phone rang, its familiar ring, as if everything were okay. The same old ring, as if it were still six hours ago, or yesterday, or last week, any time in the past, when this wasnt happening, and the day was sorting itself out the way days always did, with to-dos and phone calls and all the mundanities that add up to a normal life. A cheerful, oblivious ring. Who was calling at this terrible juncture? Was it someone who could help? A friend or ally with a sixth sense for when I was in trouble? Or was it just some random caller, barging innocently into this moment like a bystander strolling onto a movie set? I leaned over as far as I could to see the phones display.

Emily.

I sank back into my seat, my heart collapsing in on itself. My sixteen-year-old daughter, Emily, was calling, and I couldnt answer. I was breaking my promise to her, and we both knew what that meant.

I WAS AND continue to be an imperfect mother. My children, like the children of anyone who suffers from addiction, have had to bear the burden of premature knowledge and fear. But my love for them is so strong it can border on obsessive. Always, no matter how I struggled with my own problems, I tried to protect them. I tried to be their mother. I tried to let them be children. But there was a period of time, in the 1990s and the early 2000s, when my sobriety was in flux. My childrens connection to me, the connection that makes children feel like nothing can go wrong in the world, was threatened. During that time, if I was using drugs, I could and would go missing while the kids were at Johns house. Consequently, I would be unreachable by phone. My phone battery, left uncharged, would die. Or my voice mail would fill up. Or Id turn the phone off.

One day in 2003, when I was in much better shape, Emily, who was eleven at the time, brought up the matter of reaching me by phone. We were lying in my bed together, her long brown hair fanned out across the pillow. Without looking directly at me, she said, When you dont answer your phone, I dont know where you are. She didnt elaborate, but I felt the concern in her tone. She was already mature for her age. She had known from the time she was little to worry if Mom was in the bathroom for too long, to worry if I didnt answer the phone or return her calls promptly.

I was a daughter, too. I was a daughter who needed her mother to be sober. I never got that gift. My mother was a kind, loving woman, my angel, and I have long understood and forgiven her failings, but the truth of the matter is that she never got sober, and I never saw her try. But I did not want that destiny. Not for me, and not with kids.

With every fiber of my being, I wanted my childrens experience to be completely different from mine. They were all academic successesfrom a mother who didnt finish high schoolbut that wasnt enough. I wanted to be honest with them and to be sober for them. And I wanted to preserve their childhoods. A kid shouldnt be worrying about her mother. She should be wondering whats for dinner, or whether she has the right outfit for the school dance. My addiction was my own problem. My own issue. My own cross to bear. Mine alone. I was bearing it as best I could. I was fighting, and even though my track record was bad, I planned on winning. I was sorry for every point at which my struggles entered my childrens lives.

Stroking Emilys hair, I told her I would always answer the phone when she called. I would never turn it off. There would always be a line open. Ill always have the phone on for you meant Ill always stay sober for you . That was our deal.

I wish it were that simple. God, do I ever.

NOW , FIVE YEARS later, I was missing Emilys call for the first time since Id made that promise. I couldnt answer Emilys call, and I knew that she would assume the worst. Rightly so. I had just been arrested for trying to buy crack on a street corner on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. I was in a police station, being booked.

There was a turnstile at the entrance to the jail. Before I went through, someone took my watch, my wallet, and my phone, and put them in a basket. My phone started ringing as they plucked it out of my hand, an audible reminder of my failure. No! I wailed, Ive got to get it! But it was too late. This was jail, baby. I had lost everything.

THIS WASN T SUPPOSED to happen. I was supposed to be all better. In the past six years of stability, Id written a memoir called A Paper Life . Writing a book like that was supposed to be cathartic. Ostensibly, if I took all of the suffering and trauma of my childhood and all of the missteps and mistakes of my adulthood and transformed them into little black marks on white pages, then I could literally close the book on the past, put it up on a shelf next to my unread copy of The Great Gatsby, and never think about it again. Publishing the book was supposed to symbolize the end of one life and the beginning of another. It was supposed to mean that from then on I was clean, healed, and finally free.

Unfortunately, my book contract did not guarantee these results. As it turned out, writing the book wasnt remotely healing. Not at first, anyway. I wrote A Paper Life in 2004, after a terrible run in Los Angeles because of which I had lost my kids to my ex-husband. My soul and spirit just werent strong or sober enough to put it all on paper and move on. Opening up about the things that had happened to me as a child didnt erase the past or transform it to a heartwarming tale of triumph over adversity. That would have been swell. Instead, writing the book was painful. When I summoned the past, it rose to the surface like embedded shrapnel, exiting more slowly than it entered, but still sharp, twisted, and destructive. So much for catharsis.

IN A PAPER LIFE , I talked about a childhood in which, under the care of a mother who, in spite of her big heart, was utterly lost to drugs and her own tragedy, my younger brother Griffin and I were left to survive as best we could, living in a run-down ranch in Reseda, California, as little barefoot street urchins whose daily activities included starting fires, playing with knives, and jumping off rooftops. My mother had bought the ranch with the misguided notion that she would save young kids, but it became an unsafe place, harboring teenage runaways and juvenile delinquents. There were drugs and there was criminal activity. My mother had a sixteen-year-old boyfriend, who beat us with switches cut from the fig tree. We were locked in the garage for so long that we ate dog food to quell our hunger. We were unsupervised and wild. My father, Ryan ONeal, the star of Love Story, that golden boy from the big screen, swept in, rescued me, put me in the movie Paper Moon, and I was saved. I won a Best Supporting Actress Oscar for Paper Moon . I was eight years old when we started filming, and I was nine when I took home my statuette, which made me the youngest Academy Award winner in history. For a while, I was my fathers favorite escort around A-list Hollywood. He was brilliantly funny and handsome, and we had a very special bond. But my relief and happiness were short-lived. When I was fifteen and so sadly awkward, Ryan fell in love with beauty Farrah Fawcett and moved to her home in Beverly Hills, leaving me and Griffin alone in his Malibu house to figure out why we had been abandoned by the parent who was supposed to be our savior.

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