Warrior Mom
by Sharon Delaney
The Chakram Newsletter: Issue 08
“I’m pregnant, but you can’t tell anyone.”
My eyebrows shot up into my bangs and Lord only knows how far my jaw dropped, but I quickly crossed my heart, spun two times counter-clockwise, spat over my left shoulder and promised to eat raw toads if anyone should make me talk. Tom Sawyer would have been proud of that oath.
And that’s how I found out the Warrior Princess was about to become Warrior Mom because, as Lucy said in her message to the fans, “Yep, we’re having a baby. Which means that at some stage Xena will have one coz you just can’t hide these things forever.” And, last time I looked, there were no sofas or chairs in the forest to stand behind as have been used in other television shows.
In my last interview with her on set, I had been gently teasing Lucy about the ticking of her biological clock and it was after the interview was over, as we were perched on the steps of an Amazon hut with smokepots enveloping us in a sneeze-inducing cloud, that she leaned over and whispered this news in my ear. Rampaging Amazons kept anyone from overhearing what she had just said and, true to my word, I kept her secret for about a year. Uh, er, well, at least two months, although it sure felt like a year!
I opened our conversation with that time-honored question asked of every pregnant woman, every morning, for nine months. “So, how’s it going?”
“Fabulous,” Lucy answered cheerfully. “Not as easy as the last one, but more fun and nicer. But I’m a little tired. Guess the difference is, I wasn’t working last time.”
“At least not twelve hours a day,” I responded, thinking of the typical series actor’s work schedule.
“I’m not working twelve hours a day anymore,” she said. “That’s become a rarity. They’re trying to cut me down as much as they can which is a lot to ask. Very hard to write the lead of the show smaller. What percentage of an episode was I in, Rob?” she asked her husband, who’s been staying in New Zealand to be with Lucy instead of traveling back and forth to Los Angeles.
“You used to be in eighty to ninety percent,” I heard him say in the background, “and now it’s about seventy percent.”
I’d been thinking that, having had a child before, Lucy knows what she will be like physically and emotionally as the months go on. I wondered if she was passing along this information to the writers.
She laughed. “Rob had to censor them yesterday about writing Xena mean, writing her grumpy the whole time. He kept telling them, ‘Lucy’s not like that!’”
“They think a pregnant woman is automatically grumpy?” I said, astonished.
“Yeah, because a lot of them haven’t had kids themselves.”
I told Lucy we have a woman in our office, Alina, who is one month ahead of her and that every time she walks past my office, I check her out. She’s my “pregnancy barometer.” I think, from the sound of Lucy’s laughter, that she was picturing my head popping out of office every time Alina walked by as I eyed her speculatively.
“I just got off the phone with Renee,” I told Lucy, “and I asked her if she was feeling ‘clucky’ the way she did when there were babies on the set during ‘Maternal Instincts.’ She said she went out and bought a dog.”
I patiently waited for Lucy to stop laughing.
“I guess watching it up close and personal…” I continued.
More Kiwi laughter filled the room.
Knowing Lucy's proclivity for hitting the bookstores when she gets involved with something new, I asked if she'd been reading any books on pregnancy and parenting.
“Oh, yes,” she said “Getting a little ahead with what's happening inside me - The baby is 10” long - but they were lent to me by someone at work and are at least 10 or 12 years old. I’ve got to get some new ones. It’s so intensely personal, you know? You want to hear from other people who’ve been through the mill in what you consider now to be 'your' field,” she laughed.
I was beginning to be a bit shy about how personal the questions were getting and said to Lucy, “I hope you don't mind, but I always seem to be asking you questions about things I've never experienced and probably never will.”
“That's okay,” she said softly.
“What’s it like to have a life growing inside you?”
“I never feel alone, I have to say, even given a few moments of discomfort, I've just loved every second of it.”
Alina had told me that, as your body changes, suddenly you begin to bump into yourself.
“Yes,” Lucy confirmed. “You bend down, you might move a little too quickly and you go, 'Whoops, can't do that anymore.’”
“Even seeing your shape change in the mirror isn't quite the same as reaching for something,” I added.
“That's right. All of a sudden, there's a ball inside you!”
“At four months, is there any kicking?” I wondered.
“Yep! Kicking like a son of a gun,” she laughed. “It's really delightful. Still quite endearing at this stage.”
I wondered about the emotional difference between the birth of her first child, which was unplanned, and now.
“There's none of the stress that you inevitably go through when you're nineteen and discover you're pregnant,” she stated. “Even though I had the support of my father who was terrific, at nineteen, everyone thought your life would go another way. There is the perception that you were going to be a highly successful something and now your life is over. I think a lot of people did feel that for me.”
“But you wouldn't let what other people were thinking stop you from doing what you wanted to do? You didn’t see your life as over?” I asked.
“Hell no!” she said emphatically. “That was never a question. The first week after the baby was born, I was hopping around like a flea writing skits that I went and produced a couple weeks later to make a really funny 'show' reel. I made up a character called Patricia Beasley of beautiful Manuwatu,” she laughed.
“A lot of women might have given in to the pressure around them” I said.
“I don’t think I was that sensitive,” she chuckled.
“To your benefit,” I added.
“I guess so. The Aries trait of ‘I am.’” She continued, “You are sensitive to other people’s opinions, but, somehow, you can’t help pushing ahead, forging your own path through life.”
Our conversation about people forging their own path or, should I say, know-it-all nineteen-year-olds, brought to mind the latest character to be introduced on Xena. I asked Lucy, “Is Amarice being brought in to take over some of the fighting while you’re pregnant?”
“It’s not just that,” Lucy explained. “She plays a role neither Gabrielle nor Xena can play anymore. Gabrielle has outgrown being the wrong, brash character who can be foolish and get the others into scrapes. We need somebody who gets us into a different kind of hot water than Xena and Gabrielle used to.”
I wondered if she’d started working with the new head writers, Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman.
Lucy laughed. “They don’t need my help. I don’t actually have any contact with the writers except if I have a heart attack about something. I just take the scripts as they come. And it’s always a good thing to have a bit of fresh blood.”
It’s funny how the mind works. At the words “fresh bloody,” my mind flashed on the young, evil woman Xena was in her past. The blood on her hands that she’d spent the last four years trying to wipe clean. Lucy said at the Santa Monica convention, when asked if there was anything Evil Xena wouldn’t have done, “No, she was so damaged that if she hadn’t killed women and children, it was good management.”
“Is there any limit to how dark you would feel comfortable taking Xena?” I queried.
“No. No limit to her darkness,” she stated. But I could tell she was still thinking this out. “As for what we do on the show, I have reservations as a human being about portraying sex and violence together in a certain way. It depends on the context, of course, but this is not a show that can portray that to the good of humanity. Other shows can do episodes about that type of thing because they are trying to teach the audience to empathize and to make them think. Our show’s not that type of forum. We don’t do grim realism, we do grim fantasy. And you can’t touch on those subjects in a light-hearted manner.
“Something that suggested violence and sex occurred in an action sequence early on in the show and I went bananas and Rob made sure that it never happened again. That is not our show. We don’t go there and that ain’t funny. No context for that is acceptable.”
Suddenly I’m hearing shufflings, mumblings, yoo-hooings and Lucy’s beginning to grumble.
“There are hordes of people here!” she said.
“What are they doing?” I asked.
“Tradesmen and we have neighbors coming over to see the garden. Let me put you on hold while I go to someplace quieter.”
No problem, I tell her. She puts me on hold and suddenly I’m hearing “The Entertainer.” It’s Muzak! I hum along as I wait for Lucy to pick up again.
“Did you know you’ve got Muzak on your phone?” I asked, bewildered. “I’ve never heard Muzak on a home phone.”
“Da da da da, da da, da da,” she sang. “I’ve never heard it. I’ve never been on hold to my own house. It was in the phone system from the previous owner,” she laughed.
A working woman having a baby has to take her job into consideration. In this case, even more so because she’s the lead actor on the show. I asked Lucy if she thought about having the child after the series was over.
“I don’t feel that was an option,” she said. “And, you know, having a child also makes his year new and fresh and interesting. I’m not doing a fifth season waiting to finish so that I can have a baby. I’m happy in my work. Happy as a woman.”
“Do you know if Rob would have had Xena be pregnant whether or not you were?” I asked.
“No,” she stated emphatically. “It’s too hard. And we’re going to have to be very careful because, as one director recently said, fourteen-year-old boys do not want to be reminded every two seconds that Xena is pregnant. This is an action/fantasy show with heart. The woman/pregnancy issue will have an appeal to part of our audience, but we don’t want to alienate the viewers that won’t be interested in that aspect.”
“Good point,” I said. “I’m so curious about how the writers are going to handle this, that I’m forgetting about any viewer that watches the show for different reasons than I do.”
“People forget about fourteen-year-old boys,” she laughed. “And the people who are watching the show to see the bare legs flying!”
“Speaking of directors,” I segued neatly, “you and Renee work differently as actors. She knows this. Did her knowing how you work have an impact on how she directed you?”
“I’d be very interested to hear Renee’s answer to this question,” Lucy laughed. “I’ll tell you what I think and then you let me know how she answered.
“She knows her brain and my brain think in very different ways. And she knows that she could not handle me in the same way she would explain something to herself. I don't know how much difficulty she had with that. She had a certain vision for the show that we all wanted to fulfill because we love and respect her and wanted to give her our full support.”
Lucy chuckled. “I really had a tough time getting through that episode because I was newly pregnant and that's the most exhausting time, but I was putting my heart and soul into trying to fulfill her vision. I don't analyze what I’m doing I just be whatever the character is. Once Renee called ‘cut’, there were times, just as the film was running over a little bit, I would go ahead and do something silly, something incredibly idiosyncratic because that was my character. It’s not anything a director could have directed me to do. And some of these snippets did make it into the final cut.”
“Annie was so sweet, " I commented. “Loopy as a lamb but sweet.”
“And a good person,” Lucy added. “She was happy at the end and so pleased with herself,” she laughed.
Lucy playing Annie playing Joxer skipping down the sidewalk at the end of “Deja Vu” was one of the most carefree, happy-go-lucky moments in the series. It reminded me of the end of “Blind Faith” or the bit in “A Day In The Life” when Xena skips off leaving Gabrielle flying the kite. I think there's a lot of Lucy In moments like that. The child that most actors say lives inside them and to whom they turn to find the freedom to play make-believe for a living.
And as the clock on our session was winding down, there was one more “mom” question I wanted to ask her. There’s something that most children say when they feel their parents are not being fair - “I'm doing to do things differently when I have kids!” Are there things she’s doing differently with Daisy than her parents did with her?
“Oh, I did a lot of things different with Daisy,” Lucy responded. “I was essentially a child raising a child with very highfalutin ideas that this child was an equal and would have a say in the family. I just thought I knew better than my parents. That 60s mentality of ‘all is cool, baby’ - the Austin Powers way of raising a child. I wouldn’t do that anymore.
“I don't think kids can stand that responsibility. It’s too much for them to have to make those choices. They need to know their parents are caring for them, providing them a safe, secure world so they can go out and flourish. That their parents will look after them no matter what happens. So they feel safe. I'm talking about the first 7-10 years. Their parents need to give them skills and increased responsibility as they get older. I will raise this new child a lot closer to my own upbringing. I know better than I did eleven years ago.
“But Daisy was immediately the third pillar of our triumvirate and I would not do that again. I had to really backtrack with Daisy because she couldn’t bear it. It was just much too much for her poor little soul. But she's the most fabulous kid. Oh my God, she’s the joy of my life. Rob's the love of my life and she's the joy.”