Fifty Things That Aren't My Fault

by Cathy Guisewite

  “I don’t need the light, Mom.”

  “You can’t see what you’re doing without the light.”

  “Yes, I can. I don’t need the light on.”

  “I like to have the light on when I chop things.”

  “I don’t! I like to chop in the complete dark!”

  What is wrong with me? Why couldn’t “Thanks, Mom. That really helps!” be the first thing I say? Do I really need to win the moment by turning off the light my ninety-year-old mother wants me to use??

  No time to figure that out. Mom has expressed her frustration by snapping the kitchen fan on right over my head, which makes me insane. I pick up the parsley my daughter’s cutting all wrong and demonstrate how to do it, which makes her insane. Mom picks up the parsley I’m cutting wrong and demonstrates her way of doing it, which makes me insane. The circle of life played out on a cutting board in a tiny kitchen in Florida.

  Not now, I think. Not when our time left is so short. Not when these days are so precious. This is my big chance to not only have this special time with the two of them but model for my daughter how to lovingly receive guidance from Mom, be an example of the respect I hope my child will have for me when I’m older. It’s all right here for me to give and take. But I do it anyway. Stay stuck in the middle. I am the worst of both—I’m the bad daughter and the bad mother. I overreact to what Mom says to me and turn around and say the exact same things to my child. I revert to being five years old. Stubborn, defiant, reactionary. So irritated with myself I could scream.

  The soup has to simmer for a long time. While it’s cooking, my daughter and I go to different rooms to regroup. She needs time with her phone. I need a time-out. The smell of the soup fills the entire house. After a while, I hear some of the family return, descend on the refrigerator, and start pulling out ingredients for their microwaved vegan burgers, fried sausages, kale smoothies, and low-carb hummus tortillas. Their happy chatter in the middle of such disparate food plans makes me feel even worse. I go over and over what happened between Mom, my daughter, and me, trying to think how to redeem this day, when I hear Mom’s voice coming from the kitchen . . .

  “No, honey, this is the bowl for salads,” she’s saying to one of my sisters.

  “Here, this is a better potholder for that pan,” Mom says to my other sister.

  “Here, let’s turn on the light. You can’t see what you’re doing without the light on.”

  I stop searching within and pay attention to what’s happening in the other room. Mom’s saying the same things she said to me, but her words now don’t sound judgmental at all. I hear my sisters start to tense up, even get a little on edge with their own daughters just like I did. I happily note how immaturely they respond. I move to the kitchen doorway so I can enjoy the chain reaction of bad attitude.

  “What, Mom? What now?!!” . . .

  “I like cooking in complete darkness!!” . . .

  The scent of Mom’s soup is overpowering. It fills all the spaces between the people, connects everyone. It’s impossible to breathe it in and not be a little bit intoxicated. Impossible to remember what seemed so annoying a short while ago. Impossible to witness all the irritations flying around the room right now and not think of them as spices tossed in the air—literally, the spices of our family’s life. I take a deep breath of all of it. It smells like Grandma’s house in here. Smells like Mom’s house. It smells like a place where everything is forgiven, everyone belongs. It smells like home.

  I watch Mom graciously ride out the family chaos, watch her help everyone put away their alien ingredients and clean up their low-carb messes. Even in the cleanup, I see how all the little gestures and glances that make me so defensive when I’m the recipient are infused with Mom’s love.

  Finally, everyone’s dishes are washed, everything’s tucked back into its proper home, and the family heads back outside to the beach. The kitchen is quiet again. I find my daughter and wrench her away from her phone. She and I sit back down at the kitchen table. Mom lifts the lid on the big pot on the stove. A giant waft of comfort, reconnection, and reconciliation fills the air. She ladles out a steaming bowl for each of us. I feel happy and grateful and at peace. I get some spoons from the drawer.

  “No, use these spoons!” Mom corrects, getting out some other ones.

  Three generations sit back down at the table. Mom smiles. We smile back.

  “And that,” my sweet, wise mother says, “is how you make chicken soup.”

  47.

  SUPERMAN VERSUS THE MEATLOAF

  Just in case leaving isn’t difficult enough . . .

  DAD: Let’s get that suitcase out to the driveway!

  ME: My plane doesn’t take off for six hours, Dad.

  DAD: You should be on your way! What if the cab gets a flat tire?

  ME: The airport’s only a ten-minute drive!

  DAD: What if there’s an accident? What if you run out of gas?

  ME: The cab isn’t coming for another four hours!

  DAD: What?? That’s cutting it way too close! I’ll drive you myself! Let’s get your bags in the car!

  With that, I call the cab company and reschedule my pickup for two and a half hours from now. That will put me at the small local airport—which never has more than four people in line—three full hours early. Dad checks his watch . . . checks out the window to see if the cab might have arrived early . . . checks The Weather Channel . . . checks with the airline to see if the plane’s on time . . . checks with the cab company to make sure they have my new pickup time . . . checks back to make sure they wrote the address down correctly . . . checks the kitchen clock in case his watch is broken . . . checks the bedroom clock in case the kitchen clock is broken . . .

  ME: The cab won’t be here for another couple hours, Dad. Let’s just sit and relax until it comes.

  DAD: What if the cabdriver’s watch is broken??

  I don’t know why I even mentioned the word relax. We’ve replayed this scene every time anyone’s gone anywhere my whole life. We replayed it just yesterday and the day before when the rest of the family, including my daughter, all had flights to catch to other places. Dads don’t relax. Not this one. Especially not when there’s a plane coming or going. Not until everyone in the family is where they’re supposed to be with the front porch light on and the doors bolted.

  Mom, who’s lived through almost seven decades of this, has ensconced herself in their little home office with the door shut. (“Airplane worry is Dad’s department.”) I would be irritated by the obsessive triple and quintuple checking if it weren’t for the meal we had last night. Instead, I watch Dad go from the kitchen clock to the bedroom clock to the window to the phone to the front door to the kitchen clock to the bedroom clock to the window and feel a little bit of relief. It’s as if his superpowers have kicked in and he suddenly has unlimited strength and energy. Nothing will stop this man, I think with a smile. Nothing can stop Superman.

  Nothing but a bite of meatloaf . . .

  While Dad heads for another front door check, my mind goes to yesterday—to dinner last night . . .

  “Did you call a cab for the morning yet?” Dad asks for the fifth time since we sat down to eat.

  “Yes, Dad,” I say with as much patience as possible considering that he’s been asking about my return cab since ten minutes after my plane landed a week ago.

  But I’m not concerned with that tonight. It’s my last meal of the visit. With the rest of the family gone, I get Mom and Dad for one evening all to myself. So many of my friends have lost their parents or are caring for sick parents in places that are nothing like home. I’m unbelievably grateful to be here with Mom and Dad, at their table in the dining room of their house. I want to freeze this moment in time. I finish the last bite of my dinner and look across the table at my dear parents.

  No need to freeze the moment
, it turns out. I’ve finished my meal, but Dad still has his first bite of meatloaf poised in the air, halfway between his plate and his mouth. Mom’s taken a few bites, but has gotten up for the third time to go back to the kitchen for something she forgot.

  Time has stopped on its own without one bit of assistance from me.

  “Um . . . Can I help with something?” I ask lightly, knowing how sensitive they both are to any suggestion that there’s something they can’t do on their own.

  “NO!” they answer together in their super-competent, Mom-Dad Twin voices.

  Time hasn’t merely stopped; now it’s gone backward. When Dad said “NO!” he put his fork down on the plate, so he has to start all over with bite number one. Mom’s “NO!” made her forget why she went to the kitchen, so she’s come back to the table empty handed and can’t start eating again until she re-creates the train of thought that got her up last time.

  Is it possible Dad’s waiting to start eating until Mom finally gets settled at the table? Is Mom stalling on purpose so Dad will have company when he finally begins to eat? Is their capacity to care for each other still so great after sixty-five years of marriage that dinners go on like this for an hour before anyone—except me—has a bite of food? Each one waiting for the other to be ready to start?

  Or were things different on this visit—and it was so busy with the whole family here that I either didn’t or wasn’t willing to notice? Especially with Dad? Are there changes in him that I’m nowhere near ready to accept?

  “How about if I warm your meatloaf up for you, Dad?” I ask, reaching for his plate. I can’t stand where my questions are leading. Even more, I can’t stand that Superman, who used to sweep me over his head and onto his shoulders, is taking so long to raise a bite of food to his mouth, and that when he finally does, it will be cold and taste terrible.

  “No, it’s fine!” he answers, gesturing with the midair fork in one hand and reaching for his water with his other hand, which, if I’m completely honest, seems more than a little unsteady.

  Not those hands, I think, trying to dismiss what might be the truth—that I’m watching hands that could always do everything struggle to do even the simple things. Not Superman’s hands.

  Dad was never like the other fathers who came home from the office and sat in the den with a martini. Our dad came home, pulled off his necktie, and jumped into our world. His strong hands taught my sisters and me how to catch a ball, build a snowman, and turn sheets and sticks into backyard tents. They held us while we wobbled on our first bikes and roller skates and hurled down huge toboggan runs.

  Dad’s hands carried bugs and spiders outside to be reunited with their bug and spider families while my sisters and I screamed. They made huge milkshakes that got all over the kitchen, which made my mother scream. They scraped snow and ice off the car for a thousand early-morning and late-night trips to a barn where, while the family stayed warm at home, his frozen hands hauled buckets of food and water to care for my sisters’ horse, pony, and two cows named Huntley and Brinkley.

  His hands held the newspaper while he read the funny pages to me at the kitchen table every Sunday morning when I was little, introducing me to what would be my life’s work. They wrote letters to my sisters and me almost every week until recently, when I tried not to hear him tell me it was getting hard for him to use a pen. They squeezed bravery into my hands all the way across the Atlantic Ocean not that long ago, protecting me from a few bumps in the air, when we went to visit the field in France where he, at age twenty, spent nights freezing and rain-soaked in the World War II trenches, with gunfire blasting over his head.

  I send an encouraging smile to Dad across the table while I struggle a little to swallow my own sip of water.

  It’s impossible to watch Dad’s hands and not think about everything they built, including some of the best memories of my life. “Do we need anything today, Dad?” the seven-year-old me would ask hopefully over Saturday-morning cereal.

  His eyes would twinkle. “Oh . . . we might be running low on electrical tape. We’d better go to the hardware store and poke around.”

  An hour later, we’d drive home with enough rope, pulleys, hooks, wood, and nails to build a tree house. Saturday after Saturday, we spread hardware store treasures out on Dad’s workbench and went to work. He taught my sisters and me how to make and fix things just like he did, using the beautiful worn wooden tools he inherited from his father, who taught woodworking to high school boys in Youngstown, Ohio. We fixed faucets and lamps . . . reassembled bicycles . . . made a tiny hospital for the field mice our cat kept bringing home.

  I think of the go-kart he and my sister made out of wooden crates and metal roller skates and painted bright pink for my eighth birthday with the same hands that are now trying to maneuver his water glass and fork. I think of the village he and I built together for my electric train, both of us oblivious to the fact that in those years, dads weren’t supposed to give trains to girls for Christmas, and even if they did, dads never spent their weekends building things with their daughters. I think of the fortress he turned every apartment and house my sisters and I ever lived into, by installing dead bolts on every window and door.

  Not those hands . . .

  I look at them now, paused midair. Nothing Dad ever taught any of us can fix this.

  “Please let me warm that up, Dad!”

  “No! It’s fine! I just started working on it!” Dad smiles the reassuring smile of someone who clearly doesn’t know he’s already been working on it for forty minutes.

  “Can I warm up your meal, Mom?” I call loudly because she’s suddenly nowhere to be seen again.

  “I’ll warm up Mom’s meal!” Superman has been startled into action by the call of duty and pushes his chair back from the table to stand. “I’ll take care of Mom. You should eat your dinner.”

  “I already ate, Dad!”

  “You ate? We didn’t start yet!”

  “Don’t get up, Dad! Seriously! I already ate!”

  Mom has reappeared from nowhere.

  “You ate?” she asks. “When did you eat? We didn’t start dinner yet!”

  Now they’re both up. Dad’s trying to take care of Mom. Mom’s trying to take care of me. I’m trying to take care of both of them. Everyone’s trying to prove to everyone else that he or she is the one who should be helping the other. Everyone finally gets a warm plate of food and gets situated back at the table.

  And we’re right back where we started. Dinner with Mom and Dad. I’m so grateful to be here with them at their table in the dining room of their house. I lift my eyes from the second serving of everything Mom just put on my plate and look across the table at my dear parents and . . .

  I’m snapped back to right now by the sound of a cab honking in the driveway.

  We hurry outside. Dad, incredibly, grabs my suitcase with the same hand that struggled so hard with the meatloaf last night and tries to show the twenty-five-year-old driver the best way to get it in the trunk of the cab. Dad’s superpowers rise to the occasion again, charging him with strength and energy, somehow overcoming any weakness, so he can make sure his girl gets off safely—and quickly! I wrap my arms around both parents. I’d hug them for an hour, but I feel Dad triple-checking his watch over my shoulder.

  It’s impossible to see them waving and blowing kisses from the driveway as my cab pulls away and not wonder if . . .

  I’ve had the same horrible thought each time I’ve left their house for the last thirty-five years, but today is worse. They’ve both seemed so invincible until now.

  I bawl all the way to the airport like I often do, but this time is more wrenching. I sit at the gate crying to one of my sisters on the phone, like I also often do, but it’s harder today. I blow a kiss out the airplane window when we’re airborne and imagine that Superman and his bride are still standing in the driveway, looking up at
the sky and blowing kisses back, as I imagine they do every single time one of us leaves. I spend half the flight to Los Angeles asking myself what on earth is so important at home that I have to rush there to do. I rehash the decision I made a lifetime ago to move across the country.

  Two days ago I was frustrated by how long the family visit to my parents’ house seemed. I couldn’t wait to get back to my life. Now I can’t wait to come back to theirs. I check my watch. I check how many more hours until I land. I check how long after that until the cab will get me through L.A. traffic to my home and I can call Dad to let him know the porch light’s on and the doors are bolted. I check the clock on the seat-back monitor in front of me in case my watch is broken. I check my seatmate’s watch in case my seat-back monitor clock is broken. I dig my phone out of my carry-on and check the clock on it in case my seatmate’s watch is broken. I check my watch again in case the clock on my phone doesn’t work when it’s in airplane mode. I check my seatmate’s watch again . . . check my watch again . . .

  Even though I’m heading in the opposite direction, it suddenly starts to feel as if Mom and Dad aren’t all that far away. I almost feel Dad’s hand on mine.

  48.

  MY CUP WOULD RUNNETH OVER EXCEPT IT WAS FULL OF M&M’S AND NOW THEY’RE ALL GONE

  It’s 8:30 p.m.

  In front of me is a spirit-soothing, sage-scented aromatherapy candle and a laptop full of the starts of ten thousand sentences I haven’t figured out how to finish. I’m writing by candlelight because I’m no longer capable of buying a lightbulb. My $1,200 computer came with no instructions, but my $12 desk lamp came with a six-fold pamphlet, with warnings printed in five languages about the fire hazards of using the wrong type of bulb. The new shapes and numbers of all the new energy-efficient bulbs in the store’s giant display correlated with nothing on my lamp’s pamphlet. The sales associate I finally located peered at the wall of lightbulbs and pointed at one with a shrug. “That one should probably be okay.”