Fifty Things That Aren't My Fault

by Cathy Guisewite

  I peel off the part of the label that will come off. Cover with a new label and, more carefully this time, write Bubble Nrap. The W looks like an N, so I write a new label. And then another new one and then . . .

  4:30 p.m.: I decide the label should be made on the computer. Four failed printing attempts later—including one in which the sticky part of a whole sheet of labels gets welded to the roller thing inside my printer and I have to spend another hour with the online troubleshooting guide learning how to unstick it—I have a label. It’s 7:00 p.m. I have achieved one label on one plastic storage drawer: Buble Wrap.

  Misspelled. I quit.

  One Bubble Wrap scrap used up my whole day, and by the time I’m done driving back to all the stores and standing in customer service lines to return all the storage system versions I don’t want, it will have used up my whole weekend. It will use even more time next month as the credit card statements come in, and all those charges and credits have to be reconciled with my new stack of receipts. A month-long drama, launched by the classic primal urge to please Mom, respect Mom, and emulate Mom, all while figuring out how to be my own unique person, which I know is Mom’s deepest wish. Honoring and rejecting, synchronizing and separating. Wound through every minute of my life. Mom’s impact as unbreakable as if it were wrapped in its own perfectly good little piece of Bubble Wrap.

  I can picture Mom now, three thousand miles away in a different time zone, tossing in her sleep. I can almost see her wrestle awake, stare at the ceiling, and ask that sweet ancient insane middle-of-the-night Mom question:

  “Do you suppose she ever thinks of me?”

  17.

  I’M FLUNKING RETIREMENT

  The interrogations started the day after my comic strip ended, the first day in thirty-four years that Cathy hadn’t been in the newspaper. The cashier at the corner market where I’d been stopping for a decade glanced up from her register and hit me with the first brutal question:

  “What are you up to these days?” she asked.

  She’d apparently missed the previous two months of moving multimedia tributes leading up to my strip’s finale, so I answered proudly, speaking the words for the very first time:

  “I retired!” I said.

  “Retired . . .” she repeated kind of wistfully as she rang me up. “So what are you up to now?”

  “Ha-ha,” I answered, shaking my head. “I’m taking a break!”

  “Nice. Doing what?” she asked—just nonchalantly enough that it made me think she might not know what I’d been doing for the last three decades. I’d said hello to her for ten years, but she and I had never really talked.

  “Well . . .” I began, pulling a newspaper from the stand next to the counter, allowing myself to beam just a bit while also trying to speak with great grace and humility, “I just finished a rather successful career.” I opened the paper to the comic page and pointed to the space where Cathy had always been in the Los Angeles Times, now filled by someone else’s strip. “I wrote and drew a comic strip that ran right there for thirty-four years!” I explained. “My name was in the paper every day right there!”

  My words hit before the feeling did, like how it is when you slam your hand in a door and only experience the pain seconds after the fact. Until that moment, the reality of ending the strip hadn’t really occurred to me. I stared at the page. Someone else was in my spot. After all this time, there was no trace of me on the comic page at all. I peered at where my strip used to be, verified how bad it felt to not see my characters and name there. It was as though I’d disappeared completely overnight. Like looking at the world after someone dies, I thought. The shock that life just rolls on, with other people to fill up the spaces.

  The cashier glanced at the paper with a patient cashier smile, then continued to make change for the carton of milk I’d come in to buy. The end-of-life decisions that had taken up my entire last year and a half roared through me in seconds:

  How I agonized over the decision for months without telling anyone . . .

  How I finally called the editor who took a chance on my work thirty-four years ago and told him I couldn’t do it anymore . . .

  How I was racked with guilt that I was abandoning everyone—the incredible company full of people who’d supported my work, the wonderful newspaper editors who’d bought my work, the cherished readers who depended on my work . . .

  How I could have made another choice, could have let the newspapers run reruns . . . could have kept my work alive and in print for years . . .

  How I didn’t. I chose to pull the plug. Cut off life support on a perfectly healthy creation. This was no accidental death. This was . . .

  Another customer had approached the counter and was asking about canned tomatoes. I had to quickly, surreally, rally past grief and the concept that I’d needlessly murdered my namesake—rally and deliver my own obituary to the cashier before she lost interest in me. Make sure that on this first day the strip wasn’t in the paper, that at least this woman who’d asked about my life, at least she’d know I’d had a good one.

  “I had a big life,” I began from my pulpit right there in front of the checkout counter, “internationally beloved, iconic charac—”

  But the cashier had already finished my sale and was walking away from the counter to help the tomato lady find what she needed.

  That’s how my retirement started. It’s gone downhill from there.

  The questions are relentless and ruthless:

  “What are you up to these days?” friends ask.

  “I’m helping my daughter and parents!” I answer. Selfless and honorable.

  “But what are you doing?” they persist. Selfless and honorable are never enough.

  “That’s what I’m doing! I’m a full-time mom and daughter!”

  “Your daughter’s in school all day and your parents live three thousand miles away. What do you do?”

  The questions are tough. The competition’s brutal.

  My generation ruined retirement. All those dynamic, driven innovators and superachievers who did so many universe-changing, society-transforming, consciousness-elevating, expectation-smashing things. They ruined retirement. Nobody gets to get old anymore. Nobody gets to quit. My peer group is producing absolutely no plump, elderly ladies in floral housedresses and tidy poufs of white hair. No sweet, sleepy husbands in suspenders and slippers napping under the sports page in the hammock. No one’s sitting in a La-Z-Boy in the afternoon with a basket of mending and The Price Is Right.

  The oldies in my generation are hotter than the youngies. Full heads of super-conditioned, tousled layers of black, blond, brunette, or chestnut hair . . . bright, beaming, line-free faces . . . flat abs and awesome rears in fluorescent workout spandex. Grandpas zooming past on cyclocross bikes, grandmas rocking aviator shades. A lust for adventure flashing from dazzling smiles—smiles full of the perfect white teeth of the perfect young people formerly seen only in toothpaste ads.

  No one retires. They reinvent. Repurpose. Rediscover passions and pursue an even more meaningful chapter two. The exuberant magazine articles full of testimonials make me sick. The commercials full of old people acting like young people make me sicker. The real-life humans are even worse.

  What Susan did in that first October of my retirement: reenrolled in college at age sixty-eight to pursue her long-lost dream of becoming a pediatric nurse.

  What I did that first October: looked for my glasses and yelled at my child for handing a history paper in late and not rinsing out her cereal bowl.

  What Ruth did in November: bought a set of power tools, restored an empty warehouse space, and opened an art studio for underprivileged teens.

  What I did in November: tried to remember why I walked into the kitchen. Argued long distance with Mom about how long thawed chicken lasts in the refrigerator.

  Even my exhausted peers wh
o say, “When our jobs are over, we just want to travel!” don’t mean they just want to travel. Members of my generation don’t fly anywhere to lie down on a beach. They go on spiritual quests to thatched-roof bungalows in remote islands . . . language-immersion cooking schools . . . survival treks . . . healing, plein air painting retreats. Travel has purpose—to explore, educate, challenge, give back, grow. Even people who want to “just let go” let go on chakra-balancing, mindfulness-training, restorative yoga, and core-crunching cruises. No one ever just goes someplace and lies down.

  I do not want to look or act old, but I would like to be expected to look and act old so I can look and act young by comparison. There’s none of that now.

  When I was doing the comic strip, my daughter used to say I had fifteen good minutes a week: one tiny, relaxed chunk of time that started right after I drove the week of finished art for the strips to FedEx and ended fifteen minutes later when I began panicking about the next week’s strips. I was never totally present for anything or anyone if I had a strip deadline looming. When I quit, it was because I suddenly had three even worse deadlines looming. Each one felt a lot more urgent than the ones for the comic strip. Together they made me insane with panic that I was running out of time for everything all at once.

  My daughter was starting her last year of high school.

  My parents were getting close to age ninety.

  I was hitting a “milestone” birthday.

  If I didn’t stop the strip then, I thought . . . when? I’d never have another chance to be a full-time mom while my child was living at home and in school. I’d never get these last years with my parents back. Never create anything else if I didn’t liberate myself from the weekly FedEx hurls.

  I thought retirement would offer a little relief, but every year since, the deadlines have closed in more. My “milestone” age graced me with perspective, but also the wrenching self-awareness that I’m almost next in line to not be here anymore. I’m right in the middle of this precious place between my child and my parents—grateful for every second I have with them—but acutely aware that everyone’s time is running out, including mine, for anything else.

  They call it the “sandwich generation,” but it seems much more squashed than that. More like the “panini generation.” I feel absolutely flattened some days by the pressure to be everything to everyone, including myself. And the people around me don’t relent.

  “What are you up to these days?” friends ask.

  “I’m pursuing various creative projects!” I decide to answer. Arty and mysterious.

  “What projects?” they persist. Arty and mysterious are never enough.

  “Um. Well . . . I can’t discuss them yet,” I reply slyly.

  “How are all the projects you can’t discuss going?” they ask the next fifteen times I talk to them, and then I have to quit returning their calls because they know too much. Know I probably haven’t started anything yet.

  “What are you up to these days?” a brand-new friend asks.

  “I’m organizing my entire house so I can have a nice clear space in which to launch the next fabulous phase of my life!” I answer. Optimistic and respectable.

  “How far have you gotten?” she persists. Optimistic and respectable are never enough.

  We don’t speak again.

  “What are you up to these days?” a different new friend asks.

  “I spend my days wandering around trying to remember passwords, arguing with myself about exercising, feeding myself, and printing return labels to Amazon,” I answer. Honest and brave.

  “Oh,” she answers. And that’s that. No time, anyway, for new friends right now.

  Even if people didn’t keep asking what I’m doing, my generation’s expectations and impatience are embedded in my DNA. Untapped potential hangs over me like a giant pair of unused running shoes. It feels as if everything leading up to right now was just getting me ready for what I could really do . . . and that now, when I finally have the life experience and confidence to start, I’m almost out of time. I’m out of time and I didn’t even start yet!

  That’s how retirement feels. I’m out of time and I didn’t even start yet.

  I can’t stand all those efficient members of my peer group who are managing to care for children and parents and reinvent themselves while I end so many days with nothing crossed out except things like “take vitamins.”

  I can’t look at the brilliant, articulate, inspiring woman on TV who’s promoting the third bestseller she wrote in the five years it took me to write the first two sentences of this book. I hate that if I ever even finish this one thing, it will have old-lady-ness attached to it, like “She finally got that book she talked about done by her hundredth birthday!”

  I hate that my generation ruined retirement. Why can’t we just sit in nice plastic lawn chairs in the backyard like Grandma used to? I shut my eyes and picture my un-stressed-out grandma. I see young me, full of dreams, twirling around in the yard in front of her. I see the great big glorious jumble of everything I wanted to do and be, which, until recently, I THOUGHT I STILL HAD PLENTY OF TIME TO FIGURE OUT! Dreams too big to even speak of now, I think, opening my eyes. Too embarrassing to admit I still hold such great big young dreams at such an old age.

  I hear the front door slam and the sound of my daughter, who just arrived home from visiting friends, tromping toward her room.

  “I can’t take the pressure!” comes the oh-so-familiar college freshman wail.

  “Everyone keeps asking what I’m doing with my life and I don’t know, okay?? I thought I had plenty of time to figure it out! Why can’t everyone quit asking about my future plans??!”

  I sigh, walk down the hall, and tap on her bedroom door.

  “YOU DON’T KNOW WHAT IT’S LIKE, MOM!” she cries from inside her room. “YOU DON’T KNOW WHAT IT’S LIKE TO BE UNDER SO MUCH PRESSURE TO DO SOMETHING WITH YOUR LIFE!”

  “Yes I do, baby,” I whisper from the other side of everything. “Honestly, I do.”

  18.

  THIS IS YOUR BRAIN ON SWEET POTATO CHIPS

  The first twenty-six beta-carotene-rich chips are because that’s the serving size.

  The second twenty-six chips are a reward for being attentive to serving size.

  The next twenty-six chips are because I cheated on the last twenty-six and ate fourteen broken pieces while I was counting out the twenty-six chips and I did not try to piece them together to make them count as any of the twenty-six allowed chips.

  The next fifty-seven chips are punishment.

  The next ten are to knock myself unconscious so I’ll quit eating chips.

  The next time I’m in a store and buy a bag of sweet potato chips, it will be to prove to myself that I’ve grown and changed since the last bag of chips and that I’m mature enough to restrain myself.

  We crave snacks.

  We hunger for victory.

  19.

  DON’T TELL A WOMAN TO JUST WEAR JEANS

  You’d have more room in the closet if you got rid of some of those jeans,” my husband at the time casually noted long ago. One of the many loving, insightful observations he made that sealed his doom.

  “I can’t get rid of any of the jeans! They don’t fit!” I remember answering, giving him a chance to redeem himself. Inviting the hug of compassion that any female friend would know was appropriate.

  He only stared. Stared and asked, “You can’t get rid of jeans that don’t fit?” as if I were the one not making any sense.

  At that point in our marriage, I knew it was pointless to try defending my position. It wouldn’t make him understand or like me one speck more. It might even make him view me as a doomed spouse and put him in the emotionally self-righteous lead.

  “There are only ex-husbands. There are never ex-jeans!” That’s what I’d say if he were here today. Hah.
<
br />   But he’s not here. I am standing alone in front of the same closet. A closet that’s all mine now. I take a good look and sigh.

  I’d have more room in the closet if I got rid of some of these jeans, I think.

  The e-vite that made me face the closet this morning arrived one hour ago. A classic example of the deterioration of social graces for which the twenty-first century will surely be known. Invitations used to be delivered by the U.S. Post Office at least two weeks before an event. The pretty You’re Invited! card could be stuck on the refrigerator door—right between us and the food—a tangible reminder of the good choices we hoped to make if we wanted to get into what we hoped to get into on party day.

  Today’s invitation popped up on my iPhone email while I was brushing my teeth after my second heart-healthy, 310-calorie bowl of breakfast granola this morning. The party’s in two days. The perky, unbelievably cruel directive reads: “Just wear jeans!” Which is why I’m standing here at 9:00 a.m., in fiber-filled pj’s, facing what was nowhere on the list to deal with for the foreseeable future: the jeans section of my closet.

  There it is. My denim diary. My great big blue stack of heartache and hope. Fat jeans, medium jeans, skinny jeans, really skinny jeans, jeans that fit for fifteen seconds before breakfast after the stomach flu on a low-humidity day in 1987—the ones I still think of as my “real size.” Jeans I saved to remind myself how big I used to be. Jeans I saved to remind myself how little I used to be. Jeans I could never, ever get rid of because of the victories they represent, the defeats I need to remember, the pain I’d feel if I ever had to spend money buying some of those sizes again. Jeans covering the entire span of human potential.

  I try on just enough pairs to confirm what I already suspect: I have jeans covering the entire span of everything but me. Twelve pairs of jeans. Not one pair that has anything to do with the version of myself that needs to “just wear jeans” in forty-eight hours.