5 Trigger Tears
FIVE
Trigger Tears
When I was almost eight years old, I got the role of Lizzie Spaulding on CBS’s Guiding Light.
I said goodbye to One Life to Live, moved down to a set nine blocks south of ABC, on West Fifty-Seventh Street, and prepared myself to become a troubled child from Springfield’s most prestigious family.
Little did I know, Lizzie was about to have a rough few years under my watch: she’d get kidnapped, shoot and kill her mom’s boyfriend, develop leukemia—which was cured through a grueling bone marrow transplant—and then fake a second case of leukemia.
I was only supposed to appear in a few episodes, but Mom told me if I upped my game and learned lines as well as I’d memorized scenes, the directors might consider making me a regular character.
This means you’re written into the script for almost every episode, and it hadn’t happened on One Life to Live.
“I know you’ve committed the scene to memory, so say that line with more authority,” Mom said from the front seat as she pushed the pedal to the metal. “This isn’t a kitchen sink drama.”
I cleared my throat and started all over.
“Still not there,” Mom demanded. “Try again.”
I did as I was told, all the way across two states and one mighty river.
The other reason Mom was convinced I might become a regular character was because she had taught me how to start crying at the exact moment a script called for it.
She called these “trigger tears,” and to summon them up, all I had to do was imagine the most horrific thing that could happen to an eight-year-old—like my cat dying or Dad suffering an agonizing death in a blazing house—and the tears would well up.
After a lot of practice, I also figured out that if I held in my tears until my body felt like it might crack and crumble, the drama doubled. Then the waterworks really got going.
The first big test of my trigger tears came when we filmed a scene in which my TV mom, Beth Raines—who was mentally unstable after a lifetime of trauma—stormed out of the house in her mink coat, walked in front of a moving car, got hit, and suffered a head injury.
When Lizzie went to the hospital to see her, Beth was lying on a stretcher, blood covering her forehead.
This was my big moment. A bloody, suicidal mom in a cold, sterile place, about to be wheeled off to God knows where…
that was enough to make any kid upset. But Beth Raines and Lizzie Spaulding were fictional.
My pet guinea pig, Christopher Robin the Third, however, was entirely real.
I conjured him up, and I pictured myself holding his soft, furry body in the palms of my hands, where it was dark, warm, and hidden, just the way he liked.
Sometimes I even tucked him under my chin to make him feel extra safe and comfy.
Then I thought of the adorable high-pitched squeaks he let out anytime I approached him.
I adored Christopher Robin the Third. I held in my tears, and I imagined his funeral.
I’d make a little headstone for him and bury him under a tree in our yard.
I felt the pressure inside me building and the tears welling up.
Hold it in, Hayden. Hold it in. When I felt like I was about to pop, I let loose and turned it on, just like Mom had taught me to do.
“Mommy!… Mommy!” I screamed, sobbing.
My TV dad, played by Grant Aleksander, lifted me into his arms as technicians rolled the stretcher away.
Then I broke free and ran, screaming, to a window, where I peered down a hall and saw my bloody, bruised mother disappear.
My chest heaved, my voice cracked, my face turned red, and honest to God tears streamed down my face.
The second the scene ended, the director turned to my mom. “What just happened?”
“That’s my girl,” answered Mom.
Later that day, the producer, Paul Rauch, approached my mom and asked if he could make Lizzie Spaulding a regular character on the show. He said they couldn’t fit me into the rest of the season’s episodes, but when the next season started up, I was in.
The trigger tears had sealed the deal.
When Lizzie was about to begin chemotherapy, she got on her knees and prayed to God that her hair wouldn’t fall out, and I cried like my cat had just died.
When Lizzie shot and killed Carl Stevens, the man who threatened her mother one day with a gun, I wailed like Mom had abandoned our family—and had taken Dad with her.
The tears were genuine because the emotions were genuine.
None of this was good for my developing brain.
Over the past few years, I’ve spent a lot of time reading about how the brain processes stressful events.
I’ve learned that my childhood catastrophizing activated my amygdala, hippocampus, hypothalamus, and prefrontal cortex, areas of the brain that are responsible for processing fear and anxiety.
When I thought of something devastating, these parts of my brain sent messages throughout my body, and my heart rate rose and my stress hormones—including cortisol and adrenaline—flooded my body.
I would go into an artificial fight-or-flight response every time I willed myself to cry—even though absolutely nothing had happened.
Very quickly that level of disaster preparation will wear a person down.
Directors, fans, and Mom praised me endlessly for my over-the-top dramatic responses.
Subconsciously, I began to associate catastrophe with adoration; people loved me because make-believe bad things happened to me.
Grown-ups gave me positive attention when—as an actor—I failed, got sick, screamed and cried, killed, grieved, and suffered.
Reality merged with my imagination and burrowed into my core memories, where all my shame and trauma lived.
Is it any wonder why I’ve faced so many real struggles in my life?
I’ve often wondered whether—unintentionally—I’ve brought on my traumas because I’m wired to think they’re good for me.
Of course, no one realized the damage that was being done to my body and spirit at the time—least of all Mom and Dad.
My time on Guiding Light felt like a huge achievement, and I loved it because it was fun.
Once, Lizzie Spaulding wandered through the woods in the dark and fell down a well.
Her stepmom, Harley Cooper—who later became her aunt (don’t ask)—rescued her by scaling into the well, then climbing out with me on her back.
I accepted that challenge with open arms. Gymnastics had made me sturdy and strong, and I flung my body into the well and clung on to Harley like we were both made of Velcro.
Ever since that day, I’ve loved how physical acting can be.
As far as I’m concerned, bring on all the stunts because I’ll do them in a heartbeat.
Today I see the positive emotional benefits of physicality.
Experts say that one of the healthiest and most accessible ways to process trauma is to move your muscles.
Exercise of any sort releases the emotional and physical discomfort created by the fight or flight response, allowing the painful memories that reside in your body to dissipate.
To rephrase and reframe the words of trauma researcher and psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk, the body will no longer keep the score.
While I climbed out of that well, I was releasing all my self-created bad thoughts.
Just like that, my lifequakes floated away.
Not everything about my body followed my acting schedule, especially my teeth.
It’s a fact of life that kids lose their baby teeth.
Fortunately, One Life to Live and Guiding Light didn’t care.
Sarah Roberts and Lizzie Spaulding were children, and they matured in all the physical ways a young child does.
If I returned to the set without my front teeth, that meant the tooth fairy had come to the Spaulding house. Life moved on in Springfield.
Commercials were different. A lost tooth was a lost job.
“Mom…?” I said tentatively one day when I was eight. “Bad news.” I opened my mouth to show her my right front tooth was no longer there.
“Oh no, what are we going to do?” Mom pleaded as my stomach started roiling. I’d been cast in a commercial that was shooting in two days, and Mom knew what was at stake. “Hang on, I have an idea,” Mom said, moving toward the kitchen phone. “I need to make a call.”
Two hours later, Mom announced that I should get my shoes and coat on right away because we were going to the dentist. Dr. Bob was a family friend, and while he’d never been my dentist, Mom assured me that whatever procedure he was going to do was simple.
“In a few days, you are going to have a tooth again,” Mom said with authority. “Just trust me.”
I winced. God knows what Mom had in mind.
Dr. Bob walked into the room not long after I’d situated myself in a dental chair that was much too big for me. He asked me to open my mouth, and when I did, he looked up at Mom.
“Piece of cake, Lesley. We’ll give her a flipper.”
I looked skeptically at Mom. What in the world was a flipper?
A nice dental assistant took a mold of my top teeth, and Dr. Bob explained to me and Mom that a flipper is a retainer with an acrylic “palate.” However, because a flipper doesn’t straighten anything, there are no wires.
Instead, stuck to the front of the palate is an artificial tooth that fits squarely where the missing tooth used to be.
When I put the flipper in my mouth, no one would know I’d lost a tooth.
Mom smiled. “It sounds perfect. But if there are no wires, how does the flipper stay in?”
Dr. Jones sat forward and pointed his rubber-gloved fingers in the direction of my mouth, a move that made me wince. “Simple. Use Fixodent. Just smear it on the pink palate and stick the flipper to the top of her mouth. Then you’re good to go.”
Fixodent. The name was familiar. It sounded a little like some kind of gross medicine.
Then I remembered: I’d seen it on TV. Fixodent came in a toothpaste tube but wasn’t toothpaste.
It was sticky, pink slime. In its commercial, someone would smear it on a scary-looking set of fake teeth and put the teeth in hot water to show you how well the Fixodent could hold them.
Suddenly, it hit me. Fixodent was used on dentures. And only old people had dentures.
On the day of the commercial shoot, Mom and I pulled into our parking spot right outside the studio.
Mom reached into her purse and removed a tube of Fixodent, followed by my flipper.
She squeezed pink goo out of the tube onto the palate, then handed me the flipper, its one fake tooth extending down like a claw.
“Put it in,” Mom said.
I took a deep breath, said a silent prayer that my tongue wouldn’t touch the slime, and put the torture device into my mouth.
“Thith tastes terrible, Mom,” I pleaded.
The flipper hadn’t just given me a new tooth, it had also given me a lisp.
With each new lost tooth, I got a new flipper. Or, at least, a new tooth for the same old flipper until my mouth was too big for the acrylic palate to fit. I never got used to the taste of Fixodent; it was supposed to be minty fresh, but it tasted more like slimy metal.
This all worked just fine until one day, it didn’t.
When I was about nine, Mom and I flew to Chicago for a commercial shoot.
At the time, Chicago was a major base for commercial filming, probably because producers got more bang for their buck there than on either coast. I’d lost a tooth a few weeks before, so I had my flipper packed and ready.
Because I was convinced that if I wished hard enough nothing would happen, I didn’t tell Mom I had another wiggly tooth. There wasn’t any sense in worrying her.
The night before the audition, I bit into something sticky and hard, and the tooth promptly exited my mouth.
“Mom!” I yelled under my breath, terrified about her reaction. “I just lost a tooth!”
We were far away from home, with an important job in less than twenty-four hours.
There was no Dr. Bob on speed dial. Nor was there any dentist Mom could strong arm for a last-minute appointment for something purely cosmetic—and completely absurd.
Mom held out her hand, and I dropped the tooth into it.
She ran to our hotel bathroom and returned with her makeup bag, then pulled out a tube of Fixodent.
“Open your mouth,” she insisted, and I did as I was told. Mom squeezed a dab of Fixodent onto the tooth, used a tissue to wipe my gums dry, and then popped the tooth into the gap.
A metallic taste filled my mouth, and within seconds, the baby tooth fell out.
“What are we going to do?” I cried. I could tell Mom was on edge, and when Mom got a bad case of the nerves, I did too.
“Get your coat on,” Mom said after a few tense seconds. “We’re going to the hardware store.”
Half an hour later, when we’d returned to our hotel room, Mom emptied her bag and placed a small tube of superglue next to my flipper.
“Give me the tooth you lost,” she said. “And cross your fingers.”
I dutifully handed Mom the tooth and watched her squeeze a dab of superglue onto it. Then she affixed the tooth to the flipper.
“We have to wait ten seconds till it dries,” she said. “But this is going to work. I know it.”
Partly in horror and partly out of respect for the MacGyver-like skills I had no idea she possessed, I stepped back to give Mom some room. “What if it’s crooked and doesn’t fit?” I asked.
Mom smiled devilishly. “Then we try again.”
A few seconds later, Mom handed me the flipper, now containing two teeth, and I slipped it tentatively into my mouth. A little voice in my head told me that if the superglue wasn’t dry, I was going to live with this flipper for all eternity.
I closed my mouth and licked my top teeth. Then I opened my mouth and smiled.
“It fits?” Mom asked.
“Yeth, Mom,” I answered. “It fitths.”
Lisp be damned, I got the job.