Free Mommywood by Tori Spelling Page A

prime growing years. It gives me grief and guilt every single day.
    I have no idea how to do anything but act. I always have lots of ideas for businesses, and our show made me realize I could actually give them a try. I started by opening a bed-and-breakfast, but it wasn‘t for me. Then I toyed with starting a french fry business. Can‘t you see it? A chain of stores with reliably excellent fries and excellent toppings in food courts across the country? In reality I‘m not going to spend all day working a deep fryer. It would frizz my hair. But I still think it‘s a good idea. And I still fantasize about opening a Mommy and Me store—a store with a play area for children and staff to supervise them while their mothers shop in peace—but that hasn‘t gotten off the ground. I could make my famous red velvet cake and hold bake sales on street corners. We could move to the country and Dean could work in construction. I‘m sure a life coach/spiritual guide/high voodoo priestess could give us some other options, but for now I feel pretty stuck in the life I‘m living. I think lots of people are like this. We‘re afraid of what we don‘t know. And I like my life. I‘m grateful for it. I‘m just conflicted.
    I can‘t control work, but I try to create more time to be with my children. Like any mom (except my own), I have scaled back on the personal maintenance. The hair extensions? Gone.
    The pedicures? Infrequent. I‘m single-handedly trying to bring back the closed-toe shoe, and it‘s not for fashion‘s sake. I‘d love to get back in shape, but if I have an hour or two off, I don‘t want to spend it taking a yoga class or slogging away on the treadmill. I complain about my weight and Dean tells me I should go to the gym. But an hour-long class away from Liam? I can‘t do it. The only weight loss program I can manage is dieting. Being distracted by children during dinner is a great diet program; I don‘t have to go to the gym nearly as often! I discovered that I could get healthy the family way—by taking the kids out in the double jogger, by swimming or biking with Liam, by cooking nutritious food for the whole family. Rather than take time away from the family, I made our family time wholesome for all of us.
    I wasn‘t going to be a stay-at-home mom, but at least Dean and I could find a home in a place that felt more like a neighborhood. When Liam was born we were back and forth between friends in L.A. and the bed-and-breakfast. Then we rented a house up in the canyons with no flat sidewalks where we could walk with the stroller and no real sense of neighborhood. I grew up in a house with a driveway that was so long I can‘t remember ever walking to the bottom of it. So now I fantasized about living in a real neighborhood, where we could go out for walks, chat with the neighbors, and maybe even make some friends with children the same age as ours! As my second pregnancy progressed, Dean and I decided to buy our first house. Maybe the suburban dream house would balance out my working mom angst.
    We found a house on Leave It to Beaver Avenue (let‘s call it Beaver Avenue) in a part of L.A. called Westwood. The neighborhood was flat (yay!), with mostly two-and three-bedroom houses on nice but not huge plots of land. Anyone walking through it could immediately imagine that it was a pleasant neighborhood with lots of unpretentious people. It was a very real neighborhood—by L.A. standards, anyway. The houses were close together, not town houses but right up against one another. Most of them were one-story houses that had been in the same families for generations. The younger people on the block had grown up there and the houses had been passed to them from their parents. Our future house had a pool that filled most of the backyard and it had a patch of green grass where the dogs could do their business. When I looked at that backyard, two images filled my head: Liam swimming to his heart‘s content, and the