Free Instant Mom by Nia Vardalos

mourn. So I grieved for my unborn children, my mortality, and for my ever-understanding husband.
    It was the feeling of failure that I was getting over. This was difficult for me. As an intractable person managing to have an acting career against all odds, it was humbling to come up against Mother Nature and get a poke in the eyeball.
    There’s no way around grief. You have to go through it. You have to cry it out of your body, then wade through your own tears to the other side. Where there is cake. Moist cake. Have a piece. It will make you feel better. Have a second piece. Lick your fingers. You will feel better. I promise.
    As time passed, I could now cope when a sweet stranger at the supermarket patted my cake-pudgy stomach and said, “Are you making a big fat Greek baby?” I didn’t burst into tears. Well, not in front of her. In my car, yep.
    Once you get over yourself, you feel everything. You cry for every- one, knowing full well they’ve got it worse than you. I cried for victims of the tsunami, victims of Katrina. Soldiers in Iraq. I cried for unloved children. Unwanted children. I cried for the incredible inequality that comes with geographical birth. I discovered what really helps when you’re tired of thinking about you is that you think about someone else. I threw myself into charity work, donating and flying to cities to do fundraisers for rare diseases and Greek churches that sent money to the underprivileged. I recorded a lullaby for an album to get music into schools, taught screenwriting, mentored inner-city girls, spoke at AIDSWALK, and shot a magazine photo for the Until There’s a Cure bracelet. Occasionally, I was photographed for friends’ film premieres or charity events. My weight was up, my weight was down. I didn’t care. Actually, no one did. No one noticed.
    No one was concerned that on the night of my Broadway debut I was crying onstage. My good friend SNL alum Rachel Dratch and I were cast in 24 Hour Plays together—a charity event that benefits inner-city kids. This is a process that takes place within twenty-four hours—the plays are written during the night, the actors are cast that morning, and the play is performed that night. For Rachel and me, being from the improv world of Second City, its fun recklessness is challenging. But that morning, I was stunned when I saw the subject matter of the play I was cast in: adoption. Rachel was playing a mom who had once placed her child for adoption. I was handed my role—a mom who has adopted that child and is urging him to call his birth mother.
    My eyes distorted the text as I flipped through the script pages. Right away, my chest pinged with that familiar ache. I couldn’t look at anyone. All day during rehearsal, I kept a distance from the material. I learned the lines quickly and rehearsed them without emotion.
    But then, that night onstage, I turned to an actor to say the lines and found that my face was soaked. I was weeping at how painful these words were and even though, sure, part of me wondered if I could get nominated for a Tony Award for this, I couldn’t believe it was happening. It was really painful to play this role.
    I got back to L.A. and kept writing screenplays and doing charity work. And after a while, the tears were gone. I just felt spent.
     
    So now, it’s 2006 and I’m on this Internet site at two o’clock in the morning looking at dogs. I look back at the friendly dog with the brown eyes and see he has been abandoned at the pound. Abandoned. On a whim, I fill out the form and press Send.
    A few days later, a friendly volunteer brings the dog to us. She pulls into our driveway, opens the hatch of her car, and a big furry beast bounds out and pants up at me, like “I’m heeeeeeeeeeeere!”
    I feel something go spro-oi-oi-oing in my chest. Like when you’ve swallowed a too-big chunk of bread and it’s been lodged in your throat forever, and then it suddenly goes down a pipe. That’s what I feel when I