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Why Tom Hanks’ Daughter E.A. Hanks Doesn’t Call Rita Wilson Her Stepmother
For E.A. Hanks, life was like a box of chocolates.
She never knew what she was going to get when it came to her complicated family—especially when it came to her divorced parents, Tom Hanks and the late Susan Dillingham, who are also parents to Colin Hanks—and it left her with many questions.
“I once asked my father if I was a 'save the marriage' baby," the 42-year-old—who was born three years before her parents separated—wrote in her new book, The 10: A Memoir of Family and the Open Road. “'No,' he assured me, 'but you were a ‘someone died and I feel the urge to create life’ baby.'"
According to E.A., Tom explained that they wanted a second baby after Susan lost her father.
“Turns out, after her father’s death, my mother wanted another child,” E.A. wrote. “Without the death of John Raymond Dillingham, I never enter the picture.”
This was just one example of the complexities of E.A.'s childhood. She also explained that her upbringing consisted of bopping from her mother's house in Sacramento to Tom and Rita Wilson's house in Los Angeles for years following her parents’ separation in 1985.
"I would visit my dad and stepmother (and soon enough my younger half brothers) on the weekends and during summers," she said. "But from ages five to fourteen, years filled with confusion, violence, deprivation, and love, I was a Sacramento girl.”
E.A. continued to delve into her difficult relationship with her mother, who passed in 2002 at age 49.
“I lived in a white house with columns, a backyard with a pool, and a bedroom with pictures of horses plastered on every wall. As the years went on, the backyard became so full of dog shit that you couldn’t walk around it, and the house stank of smoke," she wrote. "The fridge was bare or full of expired food more often than not, and my mother spent more and more time in her big four-poster bed, poring over her Bible.”
So, at age 14, E.A. (short for Elizabeth Ann) transitioned into living with her father. And while she developed a close relationship with step-mom Rita and half-brothers Chet Hanks and Truman Hanks, she said she struggled with being away from her mom.
“As a kid, I was more used to not seeing my father, who at the time was on a streak of blockbusters and Academy Awards," she said. "Being away from my mother, as scary and difficult as she could be, was always much harder.”
A few years after moving out of her mother's house, she received a call. As she put it, her mother "called to say she was dying.” She passed from lung cancer shortly after.
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As so much had happened in her short 19 years of life before her mother passed, E.A. still has difficulties remembering moments from when she was growing up.
“My dad never volunteers stories about his marriage to my mom, though he always answers my questions honestly and openly," she wrote. "Between his reticence to dig up the past, and my mother’s version of events always being unreliable, I didn’t know the beginning, or even the middle, of my own story thus far."
She added, "Because of this, little throwaway memories like 'You’ve actually been here before, with your mom and me' feel seismic. Any story of my family actually being together is mythic—from a time and place that seems so unlikely as to be totally made up. Sometimes it just feels weird, anachronistic even, to think of us all in the same place at the same time. What if the Flintstones hung out with the Jetsons?”
For more on Tom Hanks' family, read on.
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