Family ties
When Sharon Stone was young, she dreamt of one day having a big family. It was only in her mid-40s that she finally achieved her dream.
When Sharon Stone was young, she dreamt of one day having a big family. It was only in her mid-40s, after separating from her fiancé Bob Wagner and suffering several miscarriages because of an autoimmune condition, that she finally achieved her dream: adopting three sons Roan, Laird and Quinn, and raising them as a single mother. In her new book, the actress writes about the love she has for this family she chose.
Iremember being 10 years old, taking a holiday meal to Betty Vozar’s. She had eight or nine kids. They lived about four houses from us, which was around two miles in Pennsylvania country. She looked much like Anna Magnani, in her pale housedress and apron. There was stuff everywhere, on the stairs, on the table, on the floor, and the kids would come flying by, carrying on like a bunch of maniacs. I thought they looked so happy. Betty was always standing in the kitchen or at the kitchen table reading. While cooking.
I wanted a family like that, a house full of noise and motion. A house full of love. Learning wild love happened when I looked at my childhood. Sure, I had loved before. Deeply, passionately, but there is a new kind of love that happens when you love your child, at least to me. I would actually get a pain in my chest; it felt like my body might not be able to contain so much love. I might blow up.
This identity has a fuzzy-socks basket, a fire in the fireplace, dogs snoring on the couch. A library full of books to read and to look at. We are, of course, always in the kitchen. Isn’t everybody? I used to just stand there when I ate the microwave dinners I had between my very important engagements.
Now I have dinners where we go around the table with the regular questions of what were the best thing and the worst thing that happened today. This made for some great dinner conversations. Lots of laughter. I think of the time when Quinn, aged five, pulled
No one can ever make your dream perfect but you. There will always be the detractors telling everyone how you could have done it better or differently
down his PJ pants and mooned all of us in the middle of dinner, his personality set in motion as the family clown. Or Roan, who could build a computer from the outside in at 12. Laird always explaining the dearest things to us, sweet as sugar, calm and kind.
It is not a thing I do alone. It is a thing I do with help. At first, with nannies who changed in and out, and at last with a singular extraordinary woman named Cathy. Cathy has continued to study while working with us. She has earned her master’s degree in earlychildhood education. She is an athlete, who had a scholarship in basketball. She swims like a demon. She is tall and strong and powerful and loving. She loves and protects my children with all of her might. She is our Alice in our unconventional Brady Bunch.
I know I’m good at night, less good in the early morning. I get help for the early morning. I know that after a stroke [Stone had a brain haemorrhage in 2001] and with three children, I need good help to be the best parent I can be. That doesn’t make me less; that allows me to do all of the things I do well. It allows me to do the important things. And I determine what those things are. Me, not the judgers.
If you should choose a path such as this or find yourself on a similar path, don’t be afraid to ask for help if the resources are available to you. This is not a weakness and you will enrich others’ lives by sharing yours with theirs. It can take a village.
Sometimes, within that village, you are the prince or princess, sometimes the teacher or student, and some days you might find that you are the village idiot. Those days are filled with so much humour and learning. Especially when your kids’ little faces are there, turned up at you, smiling.
As they grow and we grow and the house fills out, I find myself amazed over and over again and I wonder why I waited so long. Each day I look at them and they seem new. I seem new and it is extraordinary to think that I ever hesitated. I’m not saying three kids is easy. It’s not. It’s a lot of work. Being a single mum is a lot of work. And I don’t think that society gives a lot of respect to the single mum. I don’t care if you, like me, are a wealthy single mum. If there is no dad, people look down on you. When I go to work, I don’t always get the same respect. I am very proud to have had the wonderful opportunities I’ve had and to have been successful in my life and in my career. I am very honoured to have been able to share that success with my family. Yet when I work, there are those who still behave as if I am abandoning my children. There still exists a double standard. Surprisingly, it is sometimes other women who apply this scrutiny.
I would have been very happy to have a good and devoted partner. But if I could do it again, maybe I would not have waited to put one before the other, or waited until my 40s to have my kids, as I did. I think all of the societal judgements were so heavy in my generation that it held me up, even though I was a bit of a renegade. I didn’t realise I was still trying to fulfil a picture of an idea that I had in my head. Or an idea that was developed centuries ago.
While Bob and I didn’t stay together, he always demonstrated to me what it meant to have a man to show up for me and to do the right thing, to be honest and good. I realised the other day that my children named nearly all of the childhood pets – all of the goldfish, mice, turtles and one of our cats – ‘Bob.’ I thought it was so funny at the time; now I wonder if somehow they intuited that this was what we call love and caring.
No one can ever make your dream perfect but you. No one ever will. There will always be the detractors telling everyone how you could have done it better or differently. There will always be someone who thinks I was nuts to adopt three kids on my own. There will always be someone who thinks I work too much or not enough or in the wrong way or that I believe in the wrong things. There will always be someone who doesn’t know how tired I really am. There will always be someone who doesn’t know how much I really care. There will always be someone.
But at the end of my day, there will also always be my family: my beautiful family, my choice.
This is an edited extract from The Beauty of Living Twice (Allen &
Unwin, $29.99) by Sharon Stone, on sale now.