Fifty Things That Aren't My Fault

by Cathy Guisewite

  Mom also got this: her kitchen, where she fed our bodies, hopes, and the possibility that we could grow up to do anything. She’s never once expressed resentment or regret; has only always told my sisters and me that we were her most important job. She channeled all her love of working into us and her home; the pots and pans in this room.

  I try to imagine what it must be like to be Mom now, with all that behind her and almost out of birthdays. For all the time I spend being upset that things are changing around me, what could it possibly feel like to be the one who’s on the edge of leaving? I try to comprehend how it must feel to have a spoiled daughter examining the expiration dates of the ingredients she’s using with such care.

  I vow to never, ever bring up the expiration date discussion again.

  But Mom knows all this. She knows my generation carries our grand sense of entitlement right next to where we carry our profound sense of gratitude for our parents and helplessness that we can’t protect them from what’s ahead. She knows what this kitchen will be like for me when she isn’t in it. She knows that the ways we make each other crazy are part of the ways we keep each other sane. She forgives me for being young and for forgetting she isn’t. Forgives me for being an overindulged child of America and forgetting how close I am to a tiny house in a remote village in Slovakia where no one ever threw out a crumb.

  Mom sees me looking at a juice carton she pulled from the back of the refrigerator. She puts it down, raises a neurotoxin-leaching plastic cup full of the mystery liquid she just poured out of it, and flashes her beautiful, defiant, ninety-year-old smile: “Here’s to 1972!”

  If I don’t die eating this lunch, I will remember it as one of the best meals of my life.

  38.

  ATE O’CLOCK

  Eight o’clock. I stand in the bathroom tonight, too disgusted with myself to floss.

  Sometimes it all just swells up in me. Such great intentions to be everything to everyone, including myself. So little done. My one and only accomplishment today was to snap off a public radio show I started listening to about trailblazing women before it made me feel even worse. I didn’t need to hear any more inspiring stories. I already have enough examples of incredible women who aren’t me in my mind . . .

  I imagine dynamic, driven women in their offices tonight, grabbing bites of takeout vegan spring rolls while brainstorming corporate overhauls. I imagine brilliant women in their labs, too absorbed in lifesaving research to notice that the sun went down.

  I stare at the dental floss in the drawer. Next to it are steps 1, 2, 3, 5, and 6 of a six-step skin care system, which I also do not care enough about myself to use.

  I imagine women rushing to the 24-hour gym for a FlyBarre class before diving into their online master’s courses. I imagine women across the world, bent down in fields, babies strapped to their backs, harvesting the grain they’ll pound into flour and bake into the bread that will keep their families alive.

  The bread image makes me think of the half-eaten bag of Wetzel’s Pretzels Bitz in the kitchen. It takes every shred of my nonexistent personal power to not run down the hall and eat some. I repulse myself.

  I stare back at the untouched six-step skin care system. Step 4 isn’t there because I tossed it in the bottom of my purse to use as hand lotion a while back, its top promptly popped off, and my wallet, keys, and a month of loose receipts and coupons got treated with $15-per-ounce cell-regenerating bio-peptides.

  I imagine women in space, women in uniform; women editing films, performing brain surgery, teaching, composing, inventing, discovering, giving, building. Women “just like me” who are raising their own children while launching programs to empower and uplift girls in underprivileged communities.

  Every incredible woman I imagine makes me feel worse about myself.

  Every reminder that I’m part of the most dynamic group of females in the history of the world—that there are billions of women supporting, encouraging, and cheering other women on—makes me feel more alone.

  I tell myself I have to dig deep, but at 8:00 p.m., the deepest I can dig is to the next drawer down in the bathroom cabinet. Twelve varieties of mind-and-body-calming bath soaks, salts, beads, and bubbles greet me with a sick blast of lavender mixed with the aroma of unwritten thank-you notes for the gift baskets in which they arrived.

  If I weren’t already basically immobile, the bath stuff would stop me in my tracks. I’ve never understood. The whole bath industry is based on the premise that it’s soothing and healing to take off one’s clothes and hop into a scented tub. But absolutely no mention of how unsoothing and unhealing it is to get a glimpse of one’s unclothed self on the way into and out of the tub, even by candlelight. No mention of how much worse it would be to blow the candles out, navigate the relaxation process in the kindness of the dark, slip, be knocked unconscious, and be discovered in that state by another human being.

  Everything in my bathroom—my girl cave, the sacred retreat for pampering and celebrating me—is only making me wish I had all the money back for all these abandoned girlie systems, reminding me how long it’s been since I cleaned the drawers, and how very unproductive it is for me to have “me time.”

  I decide I’ll not only not floss, but I won’t wash my face, either. Won’t brush my hair. Won’t sterilize my contacts. The choices come slowly at first, then start flying in: Won’t remove my makeup, exfoliate, breathe deeply, or reflect. Won’t stretch! Won’t read! Won’t pick anything up off the floor! The opposite of proactive. I have become pro-passive. Succeeding only in choosing not to do things. Except . . .

  My mind goes back to the Wetzel’s Pretzels Bitz.

  “If I eat some, maybe I’ll be inspired to stay awake and accomplish something!”

  The convoluted logic of this hour: Eight o’clock. Ate o’clock. When the healthy choices of the day are so easily wiped out, and so much damage can be done.

  I can’t lift a small string of floss to my mouth, but could sprint across the house to the kitchen for a cold, stale chunk of mall dough. It’s way too early to go to bed. But also too late to start anything that I could finish except that which I can swallow.

  I imagine my foremothers sewing by the fire. I imagine women singing French lullabies to their bilingual triplets. I imagine women working into the night, starting charities, writing Broadway shows, reading poetry to elderly relatives.

  Finally . . . I imagine that somewhere in the universe, there’s another woman standing in her bathroom at 8:00 p.m., too disgusted with herself to floss. After all the amazing women I’ve imagined tonight, that’s the one who gives me strength. That’s the one who makes me smile and inspires me to go on. The one who will wake up tomorrow with a pretzel hangover and periodontal disease.

  Tonight, that’s the wonderful, wonderful woman who makes me feel okay.

  39.

  MOTHER’S DAY TEXT MESSAGE

  Fairy princesses. A crumbly prom corsage. Flip-flops with six summers ground into them. Boots that barely made it out of the box. Sometimes I open the door to my daughter’s bedroom and just stand here, taking it in: the still life of my child. Diploma tassel. Kindergarten tiara. Sleeping Beauty pencil cup. High school yearbook. Tiny plastic golden retriever holding a pumpkin. A faint whiff of the cologne she used to wear for a boy she used to love.

  I remember the day she left for college last September when I crawled into that bed and cried myself to sleep curled up with a stuffed Dalmatian named Shaka and the agony of knowing this part was over.

  I press my hands to my chest to comfort myself, trying to hold in my heart, pounding so hard it . . .

  It isn’t my heart pounding.

  It’s my phone vibrating, announcing a text message. THE message no devoted mother on earth should have to see the first week of May:

  my exams got moved so i can com home early 4 the hole sumer. 4 hole munths of tv and video gams! can u
book me a flite and put $900 in my acount so i can ship all my stuf?

  40.

  NOVOCAINE IN THE WAITING ROOM

  I’m sitting in the dentist’s office weeping, long before anyone comes near me with a drill. Just sitting in the waiting room, big mom tears plopping down on the pages of the parenting magazine in my hands.

  Complicated tears, like mom tears often are. Joy and longing. Hanging on and letting go. Memories. Dreams. Blisses. Regrets. I stare at the article I’ve been trying to read. How is it possible that my little girl and I never made caterpillars out of egg cartons and pipe cleaners like the giggly mother and daughter in the picture? I flip ahead. What have I been doing that’s so much more important than showing my child how to plant carrot seeds in hand-painted paper cups to make a kitchen window garden like the good mom on page 26?

  I flip through more pages, searching for all the things parenting magazines always hold: cute ideas, wonderful tips, and confirmation of how completely I’ve blown it.

  Page 34: “Turn Off the TV and Turn On Your Toddler’s Imagination!”

  I’m a horrible mother.

  Page 52: “Make Cleanup Time a Counting Game!”

  I taught her nothing.

  Page 65: “Boost Self-Confidence at Every Age—Infant, Toddler, Preschooler, Preteen.”

  My utter failure broken down into life stages.

  This is a toxic combination if there ever were one. An overachiever working mom with a stack of parenting magazines and ten “free” minutes in a waiting room. I flip through another magazine, then another . . . compare perfect mother after perfect mother to imperfect me. I clutch the magazines to my chest, hold them way too close to the growing cavity I feel inside. It’s as if the hygienist’s pointy little metal tool is stabbing me in my decaying sense of well-being. I feel the almost intolerable pain of everything I missed doing with my child.

  “NOVOCAINE!” I scream. “I NEED NOVOCAINE IN THE WAITING ROOM!!”

  My inner scream is so loud I can’t believe the staff hasn’t rushed in to sedate me. They shouldn’t leave parenting magazines like these out where parents might pick them up and get hurt.

  Parenting seemed so doable before I tried to do it.

  I almost didn’t try at all. When I graduated from college, the women’s movement was cheering women on to put off marriage and children until we pursued our careers—to become everything we could be before, if ever, becoming wives and mothers. In the beginning, what I lacked in personal conviction, I made up for in obedience. The other women’s voices were powerful, and the instructions were nice and clear. Also, it was easier to fling myself into my job than to find someone to date.

  I fell crazy in love with work. Mr. Desk. Mr. File Cabinet. Mr. To-Do List. Those relationships were 100 percent thrilling and fulfilling. I loved the freedom of working late into the night and all weekend. I loved making my own money and decisions. I loved writing about men and dating, but in my real life, I loved living alone with a dog who thought I could do no wrong.

  On my thirty-fifth birthday, I announced to my parents that I was so happy on my own I’d decided to never get married and have children. The mom in the comic strip would have gone insane. My real-life mom has a capacity for graciousness I’ll never comprehend. She paused for the briefest moment, exchanged a look with Dad, then smiled at me and said, “Your father and I think of Cathy in the newspaper as our grandchild. We love her dearly, and couldn’t be more proud of the life you’ve built for yourself.” Later that day, Mom presented me with the set of wedding silver she’d been collecting for me, one beautiful spoon, fork, and knife at a time, since the day I was born. Gift-wrapped in wedding paper, in a lovely fabric-lined box.

  “You shouldn’t have to be married to eat with a nice fork,” Mom said with a little wink, handing my wedding silver to me. She said it with so much love, so much incredible, nonjudgmental support, so much respect, and even a little wistfulness, I think, for the different kind of life the women of my generation could have, that she ruined everything. Poked a hole in my whole life plan and in it replanted possibility. How could I not give a real grandchild to that woman? How could I not experience raising a child of my own? The dream of becoming a mom that I’d had before it got pushed down and away by other dreams started growing in me again and didn’t go away.

  I gave myself a deadline that I had to be in a relationship heading for marriage and children by age thirty-nine. When that didn’t happen, I gave myself an extension to age forty. When that didn’t happen, I gave myself an extension to age forty-one. When that didn’t happen, I began suspecting my lack of success in relationships might have something to do with me, and I gave up on the marriage part of the plan.

  A few years earlier, I’d been at an event in Los Angeles and overheard a woman talking about her vision for her future. She was riveting—confident, cosmopolitan, and unbound by any conventions of the world in general, not to mention the cozy 1950s conventions of Midland, Michigan, where I’d grown up. “If I don’t have a baby with someone,” I heard her declare jubilantly, “I’ll just adopt one on my own!” This was a shocking concept at the time. Women were expressing independence in all sorts of new ways, but not that. I’d never heard of a single person adopting a child before, and neither had the other infinitely more hip L.A. guests in the room. “You can do that?” I heard another woman ask. “Why not?!” the first woman answered.

  A thousand reasons, I remember thinking to myself at the time. There are at least a thousand reasons to not do that. I will never know how that concept, which seemed so bizarre and wrong to me at the time, resurfaced in my mind as something to consider.

  Only that it did. Shortly after I turned forty-one, late at night, when the mind wanders and the defenses are asleep, I looked up the names of adoption attorneys in the Yellow Pages. I had all the lights in the house off except the one on the kitchen counter, almost so I couldn’t even see myself thinking about it. I quickly wrote down three names, slammed the Yellow Pages shut, buried the piece of paper on the kitchen counter under a pile of bills and newspapers, and went to bed. Did nothing for two months except feel relief that I hadn’t done anything. I tested the concept on myself and rejected it dozens of times. I tested it once on my sisters and rejected their enthusiasm and support.

  It’s never the perfect moment to make a decision that will alter the rest of your life. Especially not when you’re all by yourself. I’m not brave and I’m not impulsive. I can’t even switch brands of toothpaste without a whole life review. Nothing ever would have changed for me . . . Except . . . a few months after that midnight encounter with the Yellow Pages, I had one really good day at the office. One really productive day, at the end of one unusually productive week . . . and I had one of those exhilarating inner power surges, suddenly believing I could take on anything in the world.

  That’s why I finally dug out the list and called an adoption attorney. Not because I was suddenly ready to be a mom, not because I had some sign from above that it was time. I called an adoption attorney because, for the first time in months, my desk was clean, my purse was organized, my jeans zipped, and I was really happy with the work I’d sent in that week. “When people have a good week, they go get a pedicure, not sign up to adopt a baby!” a friend mentioned to me later. “Oh, right . . .” I answered. But then I’d had a really, really good week.

  The first two adoption attorneys I called told me no. “We don’t accept single-parent applicants.” If I hadn’t felt so great about myself, I wouldn’t have called the third number, but I did. The adoption facilitator who answered told me to come to her office the next day.

  Today, sitting in this waiting room with all these magazines, I can’t help but wonder about the chain of unlikely miracles that got me to motherhood. How it is that I, of all people, champion of single, childless career women, would be sitting here crying over articles like “Roberta Made a Puppet Show Booth i
n Her Home Office.”

  In spite of all my fears, I knew I had the ideal career to be able to work from home and raise a child at the same time: writing and drawing a comic strip. As I got the house ready, I imagined I could be a model mom for parenting magazine articles myself: arty, maternal, and professional all at once. After all the things I’d already learned to juggle, how complicated could it be to bring an infant into the mix? The plan was that I would take several weeks off from deadlines after my baby was born and then . . .

  My baby will nap in the bassinet, I’ll write a joke.

  Baby will coo in the bouncy chair. I’ll draw the art.

  Baby will snuggle on my shoulder. I’ll color the Sunday comic with the other hand.

  I set up a workspace at home for the two of us prepped with everything for our sweet new life.

  And then my daughter was born. My life ended and began in the same second, 8:38 a.m., May 6. The doctor laid this beautiful, perfect, tiny girl in the arms of her birth mother, and after some moments, her birth mother turned and laid her in my arms. I fell completely, insanely in love.

  I fed her in the hospital nursery until she was ready to come home. I drove her home by myself, so terrified that she’d wake up and I wouldn’t know what to do that I drove twelve miles per hour. Irritated Los Angeles drivers blared their horns. I silently screamed words I never thought I’d ever even think: “SHHHHH!!! THE BABY IS SLEEPING!!” At a stoplight on the corner of Sunset Boulevard and Laurel Canyon, I whispered to my sleeping forty-eight-hour-old infant that she was adopted, so it would be less awkward to bring it up later.