Pamela Anderson: Sons Learned 'Age-Appropriate and Not Age-Appropriate' Past

Getty

“Of course, over the years, as they learned about things in my past, both age-appropriate and not age-appropriate, unfortunately, they thought I was taken advantage of in some ways,” Anderson admitted.

Pamela Anderson has put it all out there.

And while she’s tried to shield her kids from some of the darker sides of her wild life, over the course of her decades-long career she says, her two sons, Brandon, 28, and Dylan, 26, have heard about her past — the age-appropriate things and the not-so age-appropriate things.

“Yes, my kids are old enough now to understand the big picture. They look at me and say, ‘Mom, this is your time.’ Of course, over the years, as they learned about things in my past, both age-appropriate and not age-appropriate, unfortunately, they thought I was taken advantage of in some ways,” Anderson, who shares the pair with ex-husband and Mötley Crüe rocker Tommy Lee, said in a new cover story for Better Homes & Gardens.

She continued, “They told me, ‘Whatever you’ve created by being you, just keep being you. We’re going to try and find ways for you to keep doing what you love but also sharing it with people in a way where it benefits you too. You can create a life. You can keep writing. You can keep doing all the things you love.’ My sons are young, bold, hardworking men. They’re ambitious, they’re talented, they’re creative, they’re gentlemen, and they’re good cooks.”

Pamela Anderson, who in her Netflix documentary, Pamela, A Love Story, revealed her penchant for writing, keeping years-worth of journals has been doing just that and plans to continue on that path with the support of her two sons.

“There are yellow legal pads everywhere. I write all the time. I do a Substack newsletter called The Open Journal, which is nice because it gives me a way to empty my mind and not torture my children with my thoughts,” she quipped. “Dylan came up with the idea to get it out of my system. It’s helpful for me to write, and I do it every morning. I get up at 4 or 5 every day — that’s my time. I like to write with the sunrise. It’s very peaceful, and I’m always baking bread then. So I keep baker’s hours.”

As for what’s next, Anderson, who released her memoir last year and is now dropping a cookbook, is looking to her sons there too, telling Better Homes & Gardens that Brandon “has it all mapped out.”

“He tells me, ‘Mom, if you want to retire one day, you’ve got to do this and this and this,'” she shared, teasing the possibility of a garden book as well, as she spoke to the outlet from her picturesque property on Vancouver Island.

Elsewhere in the interview, Anderson opened up about her decision to leave Hollywood following her film and TV career and return back to her home in Canada, a move she called “profound.”

“I thought, ‘Well, I guess that’s just what people think of me.’ I was not in a good space when I moved back to Canada. I don’t know what happened over the last few decades, but I feel now so far removed from the image of who I was. I felt very sad and lonely. I didn’t feel just misunderstood, I felt like I had really screwed up, that my whole life was a bundle of mistakes,” Anderson remarked, referencing a career that was riddled by the scandal of her sex tape with Lee, public romances and box office bombs. “I was hard on myself, and I thought I put my family through a lot and put my kids through so much.”

She continued, “I came to a point where I decided to move home and disappear and get into my garden. And when I started building the garden, it was really like a metaphor of putting my life back together. I began planting seeds, and the smallest things became really profound.”

“It was weird going home, because it felt like it was the end, not the real end or anything too dramatic,” the 57-year-old model-actress added about moving back during the COVID-19 pandemic. “But I thought, ‘OK, I’m going home, and I don’t know what I’m doing.'”

It wasn’t easy, and definitely wasn’t comfortable, with Anderson telling the outlet it took a couple years before she was able to really unpack her past and get comfortable with what her future was going to look like.

“It took me a couple years of transitioning and thinking. I was finally able to sit with myself. There was nothing else to do but write a lot. I wrote my memoir on that property. Brandon was with me co-producing the Netflix documentary and helping me put the pieces of my former life together,” she said. “We were going through all my journals, which were in storage. That was painful to me. I didn’t plan on this whole healing experience, but as the days went on, it’s what happened. It was like I went back home to ‘face it and erase it,’ as they say, to face things from back then that weren’t very comfortable.”

“That brought everything rushing back,” Anderson added. “I slowly started working through it while putting all my heart and soul into my garden.”