Free Being Kendra by Kendra Wilkinson Page B

I had no idea what real life was like. Real life, bills, taxes—I just thought you lived day to day and things didn’t really affect you. I knew a little about taxes, but I thought they were just something you tack on to the end of a meal or a purchase. I thought I could get away without acknowledging it for a while. I mean, it’s not like I was going to get into trouble because I didn’t pay taxes! I didn’t think I would. But because of that attitude, taxes and finances became one of the biggest stresses of my life in the last decade. I was so delinquent in paying taxes and simple bills that cleaning up finances has been a several-year process. I’ve since received hundreds of letters, and though I’ve taken care of most of it, I still to this day get notices from places that have tracked me down saying I owe them money. They’re probably right. I really don’t know what I spent my money on because I never kept track. So at this point, I don’t even question it. If they say I bought something in 2002, I probably did.
    My credit score was so bad because I was never responsible enough to pay anything. And while I know I’m fully to blame, it’s not something even if I was responsible I’d have been able to keep track of. The amount of residences I’ve had since leaving home, whether it was the mansion or Philadelphia or Minnesota or Indianapolis or one of the more than five cities in California I’ve lived in—my bills and taxes were sent all over. The minute I changed my address from one town to the next, I was off to a new one. Bills never caught up to me, and I was of the mind-set that it would all just go away. If the bills from L.A. didn’t reach me in Philadelphia, and my bills from Indianapolis didn’t follow me to Minnesota, it was like they never existed. Or at least in my head they never existed. In reality, they did.
    Around when baby Hank was born, I realized I needed to settle my losses and get set up for my future. I had so much clean-up to do that I ended up hiring a business manager to handle our money properly. Being a parent makes you mature whether you like it or not. It was one thing to screw up my life, but it was another to screw up my child’s. It was one of the most mature things we ever did: realize that with all of the financial trouble I was in and the various outlets we had money coming in from and going out to, we needed someone to keep track of it all. “Kendra” is a business. I couldn’t let a stripper be the CFO of Kendra Inc. I just wasn’t cut out for it.
    Now our business manager has the passwords to our bank, he does our taxes, he pays our bills, and does it all on time and correctly. I know not everyone has that luxury, but for me it’s not a luxury, it’s a necessity. I’d probably be in jail if not for this. I haven’t seen a bill in more than a year, my paychecks go straight to him, and all past credit issues are directly handled. I have clarity and security now.

Chapter 7
Full-Body Blues
    T hrowing plates against the wall, screaming four-letter words at the top of my lungs, and trying to pull my hair out of my head may have been the climax of my problems, but it certainly didn’t start there. Everything wrong that happened during the first few months of Hank Jr.’s life can be traced to one small body part: my brain. I had an imbalance, wires were fried, things weren’t communicating properly. Physically, mentally, and emotionally I felt like a giant jigsaw puzzle with all the pieces mixed up. With the meltdown in Minnesota, my weight gain, and marital problems with Hank, my depression was dominating every moment of Kendra . But at the time I didn’t realize all of my problems were classic postpartum symptoms.
    When you are knee-deep in it, you just don’t get why everything is aggravating you. I blamed my anger on the fact that we had no place to call home, I blamed my anxiety on the fact that we were cooped up in tiny little living spaces, and I