Excerpt: 'Burnt Toast' by Teri Hatcher
May 4, 2006 — -- Despite her successful acting career and the current fame she is enjoying with her starring role on "Desperate Housewives," Teri Hatcher, a single mother, says she can still feel "very fragile and very insecure."
She explores these feelings in "Burnt Toast: And Other Philosophies of Life," in which she speaks frankly about her life -- including her sexless honeymoon and the tabloid headlines that call her anorexic -- in hopes that other women will learn from what she has gone through and become stronger from it.
In fact, the title of her new book, "Burnt Toast," is a metaphor for women who too often take the leftovers for themselves -- something Hatcher says she is trying not to do as much, but still does.
You can visit Hatcher's website at www.myburnttoast.com.
Below is an excerpt from the book.
Toast. Think about it for a moment. It probably has the simplest recipe in the world: one ingredient, one instruction. Still, you know when you're trying to make it and you just can't get it right? It's too light or too soft, then... totally burnt. Charred in a matter of seconds -- now it's more like a brick than a piece of toast. So what do you do? Are you the kind of person who tries to scrape off the black? Or do you smother it with jam to hide the taste? Do you throw it away, or do you just eat it? If you shrug and eat the toast, is it because you're willing to settle for less? Maybe you don't want to be wasteful, but if you go ahead and eat that blackened square of bread, then what you're really saying -- to yourself and to the world -- is that the piece of bread is worth more than your own satisfaction.
Up 'til now, I ate the burnt toast. I learned that from my mother -- metaphorically if not literally. I can't actually remember if she even likes toast or how she eats it. But what I know for sure is that although she was a loving and devoted wife and mother, she always took care of everyone and everything else before herself. This habitual self-sacrifice was well intended, but ultimately it's a mixed message for a child. It taught me that in order for me to succeed, someone else had to suffer. I learned to accept whatever was in front of me without complaint because I didn't think I deserved good things.
I can toast bread just fine. I don't know about you, but my toaster only has one button. It's a no-brainer. And still, I've been eating that metaphoric burnt toast all my life, and I think other people do too. Then I hit forty. Jules Renard said, "We don't understand life any better at forty than at twenty, but we know it and admit it." Admitting that there were things I still needed to figure out made me see this new decade as a chance to reconsider some of my behaviors. Did I really want to spend another ten years this way? The easy answer: no. The harder realization was that in order to change, I needed to stop eating the burnt toast. I had to be done anticipating failure. I had to be done feeling like I didn't deserve good things, tasty things. And I was. I decided I was too old to continue this way. I didn't want to do it anymore, and I don't want other people to do it either. There is a way for us to value ourselves without taking away from anyone else. We should settle for nothing less than being good to ourselves and others. But it's hard to break old habits. You can make a new piece of toast in a couple minutes, but happiness takes work. That's why I wrote this book. It's my wacky, serious, skittish, heartfelt attempt to share my jagged route to happiness with other people like me.
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