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Totally Booked with Zibby
Kelly Cervantes, THE LUCKIEST: A Memoir of Love, Loss, Motherhood, and the Pursuit of Self
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- [00:00]
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Kelly Cervantes
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Kelly Cervantes
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Kelly Cervantes
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Kelly Cervantes
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- [01:45]
Zibby Owens
This is Zibby Owens and you're listening to Totally Booked with zy. Formerly Moms don't have Time to Read Books. In my daily show, I interview today's latest best selling buzziest underrated authors and story creators whose work I think is worth your time. As a bookstore owner, publisher, author and obviously podcaster, I get a comprehensive look at everything that's coming out and spend my time curating the best books so you don't have to stay in the know. Get insider insights and connect with guests like I do every single day. For more information go to zibbymedia.com and follow me on Instagram. Ibioens Kelly Cervantes is the author of the A Memoir of Love, Loss, Motherhood and the Pursuit of Self. Kelly is an award winning writer, speaker, and advocate, best known for her blog Inch Stones, where she shared the stress, love and joy that came with parenting her medically complex daughter, Adelaide. Since Adelaide's passing, just five days short of her fourth birthday in October of 2019, Kelly has continued to write candidly about her arduous and at times contradictory grief journey. Her debut book, Normal Broken, the grief companion for when it's time to heal but you're not sure you want to, is a USA Today bestseller. And her memoir, the memoir of love, lost, motherhood, and the pursuit of self, is the one we're talking about today. She has been published in the Chicago Tribune, the Chicago Sun Times, and Cosmopolitan, as well as quoted in the New York Times, C cnn, and People. She sits on the boards of the Undiagnosed Diseases Network foundation and Cure Epilepsy, in addition to hosting cure's monthly podcast, Seizing Life, where she interviews scientists, doctors, and individuals affected by epilepsy. Kelly resides in Maplewood, New Jersey, with her husband, Broadway star Miguel Cervantes, their children and two dogs, Tabasco and Sriracha. Welcome. Kelly, thanks so much for coming on Totally Booked to discuss your book, the Luckiest, which is so beautiful and heartbreaking and inspiring and all the things. So congratulations.
- [03:48]
Kelly Cervantes
Thank you so much. And thank you for having me on to chat today.
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Zibby Owens
It's my pleasure. Why don't you take listeners a little bit through the book, what it's about, why you wrote it, all those good things.
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Kelly Cervantes
Of course. Yeah. So I have wanted to write a version of this book for many years, but I think I was stumbling through figuring out what the right vehicle was for telling this story. And then I came across, I read Maggie Smith's you could make this place beautiful, and she has a quote in there where she says, we are all nesting dolls carrying around the previous iterations of ourselves inside of us. I've butchered the quote, but that's the general gist of it. And I was thunderstruck. This idea that I feel like I have so many previous lives that I have lived, you know, breaking it down between all the places that I lived or all the careers that I've had. I'm in my early 40s, but I'm on my fourth career already and, you know, all the different iterations of our family, and I could feel all of these layers and how all of that each layer had impacted the other. But I think what struck me the most as I was thinking about these layers of my life was how each of those layers has really built me up to who I am Today and everything that I'm doing today. And so that became the structure for the book. Each chapter is a different layer of my life. A different. All of the chapters are titled after one of those layers. The ingenue, the mother. So it's. They are meant to sort of break out this life and sort of all of these different lessons that I learned whether I wanted to or not. And frankly, most of the time, I don't think we want the lessons that we learn, but they do shape us into who we are. And, you know, as we. We're constantly becoming the next painted doll in the series of our lives.
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Zibby Owens
Oh, I love the way you break down all of our many roles in life. Right.
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Kelly Cervantes
It's true.
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Zibby Owens
And each moment we might be somebody else. You take us through it chronologically and through the many ups and downs that you've gone through yourself, some incredibly profound and others things that happen to most people and that we can all relate to. Talk a little bit about the career aspect of the book. You mentioned you've had four careers already. I know one of your careers is as a caretaker for your late daughter. Talk a little bit about what those careers are and how you've sort of navigated beyond them. I know there was a period where you were definitely not happy with the transition that had happened, so. Which I totally get. Let's talk about that.
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Kelly Cervantes
Yeah. Coming out of college, I moved to New York City to be an actress, which is what I really wanted to do all through college. But I struggled even then with, I think, the. My emotional side and my rational side are very evenly matched. I think in a lot of people that one side sort of wins out over the other. And I think that my two emotional and rational sides have been in constant battle for the majority of my life. And the emotional side ran. Won out. And I pursued a career as an actress in New York City for five years. Met my husband during that time, and we wanted to start a family, but we were both performers. He did more theater, I was doing more tv, film. But his career was going significantly better than mine. And health insurance as an artist is difficult to come by. And so I had the opportunity to go and work for Tom Colicchio's restaurant group, coordinating and selling events. And so that rational side of my brain won out. And I was like, yes, here's a salary. With health insurance, we can start a family. This is the responsible thing to do. And I'm not like some super foodie, but I mean, I enjoy it, a good meal. But I never was like, Gung ho about restaurants and hospitality. But I can put together a mean event and I am highly motivated by sales goals. And so I loved it. And I loved having health insurance and a salary and being able to buy our family's first home in New Jersey when we, after my son was born. Thank you, health insurance. And during all this time, my husband Miguel was sort of in and out of different Broadway or Off Broadway shows and he'd be employed for a year and then unemployed for a year. And we. And my career kept. I kept getting promotions within the company and then everything sort of culminated, blew up, crashed. Within one week in May of 2016, our second child, Adelaide, had a seizure and she was diagnosed with epilepsy that same week. Actually, while Adelaide was in the hospital going through tests, Miguel had been asked to come in and audition for this tiny little show called Hamilton, which was just starting to take over New York City at the time. And Lin Manuel was leaving the show. They needed someone to replace his understudy who was going to be taking over for Lynn. And then they were opening up the first production outside of New York City and Chicago, and they needed someone to helm that. And so Miguel goes in for the role of Alexander Hamilton, leaving Adelaide and I in the hospital. And at the end of that week, it is my last day working for Tom Colicchio's restaurant group. I'm supposed to take over as the director of sales of another prominent restaurant group in the city. And I was so excited. This is a huge step for my career. And I'm out to dinner with my colleagues, celebrating my last night, my last day, and Miguel calls and he's like, well, I got the job. Okay, great. Which one? The one in New York where you're the understudy or the one in Chicago? And he's like, well, both. I'm going to do Hamilton. I'm going to be Hamilton on Broadway for about four or five weeks and then we're moving to Chicago and I'm going to be Hamilton in the Chicago production. And quite literally overnight, my life completely changed as I realized I was not accepting this new job. In fact, I was going to now be our family's caregiver and my daughter's caretaker as her health quickly started to decline from that point forward. After a month long hospitalization for her. That summer, while Miguel was on Broadway, I planned our move to Chicago from her hospital bedside. And by the time we landed in Chicago, it was such a whirlwind. And I remember like three months after being there, sort of waking up and looking around and being like, what the hell just happened? And, you know, Miguel is texting me from the theater after the show, and he's like, I'm going out for drinks, and I've just set up our daughter's G tube overnight feed. And I am very resentful for this position, and I'm eternally grateful that I got to care for our daughter. And I would never have trusted anyone else in that role. I would have been anxious and miserable. I wouldn't have trusted Miguel in that role, to be clear, like, no one. But it was like I had to grieve my care. I resisted that change, and I grieved my career for, like, a year before I was able to, like, find pieces of this new life, this new career that I could appreciate and hold onto and make mine and find control in and be proud of. But it took time in that to, like, find my way in that caregiver role. And then I. You know, just as I was, like, really coming into it in. So we moved to Chicago in 2016. Then in 2019, in the spring of 2019, the doctors confirmed what I think we had known, but I had been in denial of that. Adelaide's condition. We wouldn't find out what was causing it until after she passed away. So at that time, we had no idea. But the doctors could confirm that it was neurodegenerative, and there was nothing they could do. And about six months later, she passed away, and. And all of a sudden, this role of caregiver that I had finally embraced and I had found incredible community as an advocate within the epilepsy and disability communities. And all of a sudden, I was forced into retirement from this job that I don't think I'll ever have another job that fulfills me in the way that that one did. And. And all of a sudden, I found myself in another transition that I hadn't chosen and had to fumble through to get six years. It'll be six years next week since Adelaide passed away. And coming into this next career of continuing the advocacy, but being an author and a public speaker and connecting with families, talking about grief, about disability, raising awareness about epilepsy, and sort of bringing all of these previous careers, you know, the actress is on stage giving that speech. The salesperson is out there asking, you know, fundraising for the various nonprofits that I work with. The advocate, the caregiver is. She is the reason that I do everything that I am doing today. And it all sort of has come together under this umbrella, and it's Pretty remarkable. And while I wouldn't have chosen a lot of those changes, and I would certainly rather have my daughter with me healthy, I do feel like I am where I am supposed to be and incredibly grateful for the opportunities I have.
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Zibby Owens
Wow, what a story. What an experience you went through. I mean, I'm sure. I'm so sorry, as we've discussed already, for the loss of Adelaide and all of what you went through, but losing a job, so to speak, it's funny to hear. Not funny, it's. It's different, it's unique. To hear it referred to as a job when you are deep in the weeds of an emergency situation or caring for someone you love and then that. That immediacy and urgency and is gone. To feel like you lost a job. You know, it's an interesting. An interesting way to think about it.
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Kelly Cervantes
I mean, it was. I lost my purpose. She was, you know, you get it. You think of your, you know, you get up and you get ready for the day and you go to work and you. And she was my work. She was my purpose. She was what got me out of bed every morning and several times during the night. But no, I sort of dove headfirst into. Into being her caregiver. And I. I sort of. You know, it took me a minute to realize because I was like, she's my daughter. This is not a job. I'm her mother. But there is a distinct difference between being a mother and being a caregiver to your child. Because I had to stop being her mother for several years. And I didn't realize that I had stopped being her mother until we finally got home nursing in our home to help me take care of her as her needs got so intense. And only then was I able to be her mother again and, you know, read stories with her and cuddle and raise her and be in tune to all of that, beyond just the doctor's appointments and the medication schedule and the therapies, all of that was so time consuming that there were years where I missed out on being her mom.
- [15:53]
Zibby Owens
I feel like there are lots of ways to be a mom.
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Kelly Cervantes
Yeah, there are.
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Zibby Owens
I mean, you were doing the ultimate sacrifice. I mean, not being able to read, that's one little thing. But you are absolutely being her mom. You were stepping up in the biggest way possible.
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Kelly Cervantes
It just looks significantly different. And when you have additional help to come in, it gives you back the. The fun times, it gives you back the warm times. It gives you back the heart of being a mother. Beyond just the logistics.
- [16:31]
Zibby Owens
Today's episode is sponsored by ORA Frames. I'm so grateful to Aura Frames because I loaded mine filled with pictures of my late stepfather right after he passed away. Images of him with all of his grandchildren, my mom, my brother, everyone in our family. Not only did I display it during our memorial service, but I have it in our kitchen. And every time I make a cup of coffee or walk in the kitchen, which is a million times a day, I get to see him with different images and even videos up to 30 seconds showcasing how great he was. It's helping keep my family together. My kids get to look at it and be reminded of him and it makes me feel closer to my mom who's across the country. It's become such a personal, important thing in my home and I am just deeply, deeply grateful. Plus, I have to say, in a time when I was really stressed, it took only about two minutes to set up and was so easy to collaborate on that I could ask all of my stepfather's grandchildren and kids to upload their own photos without my having to do it. It's really amazing and I am so grateful. For a limited time, visit auraframes.com and get $45 off Aura's bestselling Carver Mat frames, named number one by Wirecutter by using promo code Zibby at checkout. That's a U R A frames.com promo code ZIBBY. This exclusive Black Friday Cyber Monday deal is their best of the year, so order now before it ends. Support the show by mentioning us at checkout. Terms and conditions apply. Thank you Aura Frames, for bringing meaning into my life and joy into so many others.
- [18:12]
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- [18:38]
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- [18:43]
Kelly Cervantes
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- [19:14]
Zibby Owens
Well, I was really struck in the book about your community of friends. And you have this really amazing scene where your son is invited for a playdate and the mother says, well, you're coming too. And you're like, no, I'm not coming. Like, I'm going to go home. I have a daughter with epilepsy. I'm going to go home. And she's like, no, no, you're going to bring her. And you're like, what? And you have this amazing thing where you bring Adelaide there and the other mom. I'm forgetting her name. Jill, maybe Jenny. Jenny just, like, is, like, marveling over her feet and, like, all these great things and, you know, just embracing her. And I feel like that was such a turning point to feel that community and support physically as well as emotionally.
- [19:53]
Kelly Cervantes
Yeah, Jenny, she's still one of my dearest friends, and I can't imagine having gone through Chicago without the community that we had her leading the way, just sort of always being a support system. She became a second mother to my son Jackson, who's three years older than Adelaide. And so Adelaide would go into the hospital and Jackson would go to her house instead of us having a revolving door of babysitters. And she never let me take myself too seriously. She was always there with a laugh. But she had a deep connection with Adelaide and was the first person to call me after she died. She just knew. And it's interesting, as I was going, I didn't really realize it as I was writing the book, but when I went back and I was editing it, it struck me how so many different pivotal moments of my life were impacted by strong female friendships and just someone stepping in and holding my hand at the right time. You know, my Colle roommates being there for me after the crushing end of a horribly codependent college relationship. My girlfriend in one of my high school best friends holding my hand via text messages from my couch in Chicago while she's in Westchester, and I'm navigating this new world of disability, and she is just holding my hand every step of that way. To Jenny, who is in person and just like enveloping our entire family in this giant, warm hug while making killer margaritas. And, you know, it's just, I feel so fortunate to have had these wonderful, wonderful women step into my life or step up in my life in these moments when I needed them most. And it's. It's inspired me to really key in and Try and be that friend for other women in my life. And I just, I don't think we can. You can ever underestimate the value of those female friendships.
- [22:07]
Zibby Owens
Totally agree. And love that you showed us over and over how much they were there for you and all of that. How do you navigate marriage in the midst of all of this then now? I mean, in the best of times, kids add stress. But having Adelaide and the loss and the major careers and all of it, like how, how.
- [22:33]
Kelly Cervantes
Yeah, our marriage journey has been. It's had its moments, I think. You know, there were, there were times I remember walking out of. There's a scene in the book where I'm like walking out of a drugstore and I've got Adelaide's medications in my purse and I'm walking by a newspaper stand and I see Miguel on the COVID of a magazine with Lin Manuel Miranda. And I'm like, the dichotomy of this. And I'm like trying to rush home so he can get to the theater. And I'm like, what is happening? And Miguel described it. He's like, you know, it's like holding onto a rocket in one hand and a parachute in the other and you're being pulled in these directions. And I feel like that was what so much of our marriage was. I think we realized those first few months after moving to Chicago were hard. It was really hard. I resented Miguel immensely. He was struggling because he felt so much pressure being in this lead role of this show that had reached this like blockbuster icon status. And then our daughter is sick and her care is becoming increasingly complicated. And at the end of the day, I think what we realized is that there has like, it's said a million times, but communication is everything. And sometimes communication means like writing down a schedule or like clearly delineating who's tasks are what. And that's not sexy. But it is necessary to ease some of that resentment to find ways that you can help and support each other. I also think that the physical component of our relationship was exceptionally important to maintain that. And so that we put sex on a schedule which like 20 year old me would have been horrified by. But. But when your husband works five, six nights a week and you have a child who is in and out of the hospital, yeah, you schedule sex. But that became so important too that we still had that physical time together. But then afterwards we're laying in our bed in the dark and we can have these very frank conversations, these honest conversations and check ins about where we're both at emotionally and what is worrying us. And I think those intimate conversations afterwards were just as strengthening to our marriage as the physical connection we experienced before. And then again after Adelaide died, we went through this really rocky period. And actually, in some of the earlier versions of the book, I had friends read it who knew Miguel well, and they were like, I, they. His behavior angered them. You know, there's, you know, I would be on the floor of the bathroom hysterically crying. Just cannot hold it together. It's like a grief exorcism. And Miguel would, like, peek in and check on me and then leave. And it took us going to therapy to realize I knew we were grieving differently, and I knew that people grieve differently. I couldn't control my grief, nor did I care to. My grief needed to be public. I think I needed it to be witnessed. I needed to be shared. I needed people to not forget Adelaide, and I needed them to know that I was still grieving her. And so there was this need for it to be public. But Miguel was the exact opposite for him, I suppose, ironically too, as a performer. But he needed to grieve privately for him. That was something that was. That he did on his own. He. I would later find out that he would be like, walking our dog at night and he would be crying while he's, like, picking up the dog poop. Or later on, he would tell me he was. We had moved back to New. We'd left Chicago and moved back to New Jersey during the pandemic. And he's like renovating one of our bathrooms and he's grouting the shower and he started crying because he's like realizing that Adelaide's never gonna to live in this house. And the conclusion that we sort of came to was that I'm not going to tell him how to grieve and he's not going to tell me how to grieve. And he never once made me feel guilty or less than or too much for the way that I was grieving. And from him, I just asked, when you have those moments when you're grieving her, when you're thinking about her, when her loss is impacting her, can you just tell me about it? And so he would. We'd be getting morning coffee, chatting, and he would tell me that, you know, last night he was crying over shower grout. And it sounds silly, but it made me feel so much less alone in my grief. I also came to the conclusion that, like, your partner can't be everything for you. They. They cannot fill all the Roles. And the second that you start to think that they can be everything and everyone for you is when that disappointment and that resentment really starts to build. I use this example where, you know, if you're. If your sink breaks and it's leaking and your partner can't fix it, you don't get mad at them. You call a plumber. Right. So Miguel struggled to be there for me in these emotional aspects of my grief. So I outsourced it. I found those friends. I called Jenny, I called Courtney. I called my girlfriends in to be around me and to support me in the way that Miguel couldn't. And it wasn't fair of me to ask him of that. He was grieving on his own. He was managing in his own way. And so I think as we're moving through our relationships and through these different seasons of life, as our relationships evolve and change with us, we have to continuously look at that relationship and be like, okay, can my person fill this need? No. Then it's okay to outsource it. Maybe not the sex part. Maybe that needs to stay in the marriage.
- [28:37]
Zibby Owens
But, you know you're in trouble when you start outsourcing those nights.
- [28:43]
Kelly Cervantes
Yes. But I do think that there's certain pieces where it's okay, you know, And I think that that is what has kept our. Our marriage together and supporting each other and, you know, the handoff that. And he's incredibly charming and handsome and talented.
- [29:02]
Zibby Owens
You at our Greenwich retreat, which you just came to last weekend, you mentioned that. Now you get such a kick out of it when you're with Miguel and people say, oh, this is Kelly's husband.
- [29:14]
Kelly Cervantes
Tell us about that. It's my favorite. I spent. I mean, this is part of, like, a genuine part of my identity struggles in Chicago because I would attend events with Miguel, and it was always, oh, Miguel. And this is his wife, Kelly. Or just his wife. Everywhere we went, it was just his wife Kelly. And then I would go to doctor's appointments with Adelaide, or we'd be in the hospital, and I was just Mom. Doctors, nurses, everyone. And I get it. They're not going to learn every guardian's name. But it was, mom, do you need any water? Mom. When was her last seizure? And so I lost Kelly in the mix of that just. I mean, not even who. I just. I certainly lost the pursuit of who I was and the core of me. But I lost me in the physical world. Like, I lost my. I became the most present and visual part of me was as these roles to other people and this supporting nature And I want that main character energy, man. Like, I am ambitious and I, I can step into a support background piece, but at the end of the day, I want my spotlight too. And I, it's taken me years to not be ashamed of that. And so this has been really fun. We're planning this book tour and we're going to these cities for these ticketed events and Miguel is gonna be performing and singing and then he gets to introduce me as, you know, the star and the reason that people are there to like come and experience this book. And it is, it's so fun and I, and it's this sort of back and forth balance, but it allows me to appreciate and be proud of those moments where I can still go back and be Miguel's wife and I am still Jackson and Adelaide and now Anessa's mom. But I think that we need our moments. We need our moments in the spotlight and to be seen and to be appreciated. And this book is allowing me to take that back a little bit and I cannot wait.
- [31:18]
Zibby Owens
Amazing. Kelly, thank you so much for coming on. Congratulations to you and wishing you all the best in the journey.
- [31:27]
Kelly Cervantes
Thank you.
- [31:27]
Zibby Owens
I appreciate you. Thank you. Thank you for listening to Totally Booked with Zibby, formerly Moms don't have time to read books. If you loved the show, tell a friend, leave a review, follow me on Instagram ibbeowens and spread the word. Thanks so much. Oh, and buy the books.
- [31:51]
Capital One Travel Advertiser
If you love to travel, Capital One has a rewards credit card that's perfect for you. With the Capital One Venture X card, you earn unlimited double miles on everything you buy. Plus you get premium benefits at a collection of luxury hotels when you book on Capital One travel. And with Venture X you get access to over 1,000 airport lounges worldwide. Open up a world of travel possibilities with a Capital One Venture X card. What's in your wallet?
- [32:17]
Capital One / Sleep Number Advertiser
Terms apply. Lounge access is subject to change. See capitalone.com for details. Why choose a sleep number Smart bed?
- [32:23]
Kelly Cervantes
Can I make my site softer?
- [32:24]
Capital One / Sleep Number Advertiser
Can I make my site firmer? Can we sleep cooler? Sleep number does that cools up to eight times faster and let you choose your ideal comfort on either side. Your sleep number setting Enjoy personalized comfort for better sleep night after night. It's the final days of our Black Friday sale. Recharge this season with a bundle of cozy, soothing comfort. Now only $17.99 for our C2 mattress and base plus free premium delivery price is higher in Alaska and Hawaii. Check it out at a sleep number store or sleepnumber.com today.
- [32:52]
Kelly Cervantes
Dear Career Ladder, you've had your moment. You're linear and one dimensional. Ambition doesn't just go up anymore. It zigs and zags and squiggles. We're CEOs, executives, founders. We're advising companies, launching side hustles, taking breaks, defining our next act, ambition on our terms. The possibilities are endless. Chief Lead on join us@chief.com.