Being Kendra_ Cribs, Cocktails, and Getting My Sexy Back - Kendra Wilkinson [52]
Hank felt like a failure because I had been trapped inside all winter and had no real home to live in, and all I had done for the last year was travel from city to city. He wanted to throw a good first birthday for Hank Jr. as a way to make it all up to me. He was devastated, and even though I was depressed and struggling, I had to brush my issues aside and take care of him and his emotional needs and talk to him about it all. I wanted him to know that in my heart I knew what an amazing job he had done. That was my job as a wife and a mom. Hank had done good. So my brother and Hank’s brother ran out to the grocery store to get a birthday cake (in this weather it took them almost two hours to drive there), and we took pictures and smashed Hank Jr.’s hands in icing. We made it work.
A week went by and the Mall of America told us they’d hold the room for us and the decorations and let us celebrate when the weather cleared up. So we gathered Hank’s teammates and their kids and we celebrated for real, a week later. Hank Jr. (and daddy Hank) got their big birthday celebration after all.
Hank Jr.’s first birthday party—a week late, but still just as fabulous as Hank had planned.
But even when things are going good, there are feelings and emotions that you’ve been bottling up that tend to rise to a boiling point, and if you aren’t careful in a relationship, they can blow up right in your face. Sometimes you can get too comfortable in your marriage and you don’t pay attention to what your partner is feeling or saying. While I know we all have the best intentions (like during baby Hank’s first birthday), I know there have been times certainly where Hank was clueless about what I was feeling.
That’s why we try to sit down and talk as much as we can. On date nights we remind each other how much we are in love. During phone calls we flirt. When we are away we Skype. We don’t ever take our relationship for granted. But I’m the first to admit, it’s not always gumdrops and cotton candy.
As long as I’ve known Hank, we’ve gotten in only two bad fights in our entire relationship. The first was our brutal argument after I had my meltdown in Minnesota. That ended with Hank passing out unconscious on the floor. But we never got physical with each other. We know how to debate and argue, but we rarely fight anymore because we have learned our lesson. One nasty fight in a relationship might happen. But you should learn from it. Having it happen twice is unacceptable. If you had walked in immediately after that verbal sparring in Minnesota, you would have thought I had knocked out my husband. I hadn’t, of course. But during our second bad fight, the shit really hit the fan and I did knock him out.
We were in New Mexico for our annual charity event for the Oasis Children’s Advocacy Center in Albuquerque, New Mexico (Hank’s home state), in 2010. We help raise money to benefit abused children with a golf tournament called the Tee’d Off About Child Abuse Golf Scramble. Hank and I raised a lot of money during the event, so we ended up celebrating with friends and family and both got very drunk pounding shots of tequila at the hotel bar. That was right around the time when the sex tape came out, so I was very self-conscious and my world had been turned upside down; just another dramatic day in the life of Kendra Wilkinson. I assumed that if an ex-boyfriend was out there hawking a sex tape from stuff he had filmed us doing several years back, then I guess the whole world was out to get me. I was feeling down because I felt like I had been publicly humiliated. Well, not even “felt.” I had been publicly humiliated.
So Hank and I were both belligerently drunk. We don’t drink all the time, but we both have wild sides and when we do drink it can get a little crazy. Plus Hank is an athlete, so guys are always buying him drinks and shots and he thinks because he’s six foot four he can just guzzle and