Melissa Gilbert Decided She Needed to Change Her Life After a Roof Collapsed on Her Head
After Melissa Gilbert’s divorce from second husband Bruce Boxleitner, she went through a transformative time. She found herself dating the wrong guy, driving a car she didn’t need, and altering her appearance to appease the never-satisfied Hollywood machine. Then a roof fell on her head and it became crystal clear to her that she needed to make some big changes.
Melissa Gilbert was in a bad place following her second divorce
Not long after her divorce from Boxleitner, Gilbert hopped right back on the dating horse. She started seeing someone who wasn’t a good fit for her. She bought a new convertible. And she did what she could to appear younger than she was.
Around that time, she was invited to compete on Dancing With The Stars, an experience she looks back on negatively, calling it “the ultimate spray-tan-glitter-fake-hair-fake-everything festival of falsity.” During her time on the show, she suffered a concussion.
“My Dancing injuries were only the most immediate problems I faced,” she wrote in her 2022 memoir, Back to the Prairie. “My whole life was spinning out of control. And that was so typical of me at the time. I was making things more difficult than they needed to be. My brain was always going a million miles an hour. The rest of me was going the same speed. Everything in me going and doing and moving and trying to prove something. Except my forehead. It was frozen.”
The ‘Little House on the Prairie’ star’s roof collapsed on her
“Then one day my patio roof literally collapsed on me,” she wrote.
She and her kids had walked outside so she could show them some potted plants she was planning on hanging. As she was showing them where she planned on hanging the plants, there was a loud crack. All of a sudden, the eight-hundred-pound roof collapsed on Gilbert and her children.
The actor’s first concern was her kids. She asked them if they were alright and they said that they were. She thought she was fine, too, but her son Michael pointed out, alarmed, that she was bleeding.
So, once again, she headed back to the ER where she was once again diagnosed with a concussion. This time, she received a few stitches in her head.
Melissa Gilbert decided to reprioritize her life
While Gilbert recovered from her concussion, she contemplated her life.
“The roof’s collapsing on me was a none-too-subtle message from God,” she wrote. “She was literally smacking me in the head and asking what I was doing with my life. Wake up, Melissa! You’re driving a Mustang convertible. Your face doesn’t move. Your boobs are too big. You’re with the wrong guy. The list went on and on. The next day I was lying in bed with an ice pack on my head, the throbbing of pain serving as an imperative for the need to make changes. My life clearly wasn’t working.”
So she made some changes.
She ended things with the unnamed bad boyfriend to focus on herself. She resolved to let her face and body simply be.
“I had to figure out who I was and where I was headed and what was good and healthy for me,” she wrote.
Read more about Gilbert’s life in Back to the Prairie: A Home Remade, A Life Rediscovered.
