Year of Yes

by Shonda Rhimes

  They are Team Badassery.

  All I have to do every day is believe them.

  And be on time for my applause.

  That fills me up more than having a nation full of imaginary Cristinas at my back.

  Yes to the real people. Yes to the true friends. Yes to not needing to lay a single piece of track.

  Ride or Die.

  Every single time.

  Ride or Die.

  yesyesyes

  Finally, the dance is over. Meredith and Cristina smile at each other. Cristina turns to go and then at the door, she turns back. She delivers her very last words. Her final piece of advice to the women of America.

  “Don’t let what he wants eclipse what you need. He is very dreamy,” she says. “But he is not the sun. You are.”

  Her final piece of advice is not just for the women of America, I am now realizing, but also for me.

  14

  Yes to Who I Am

  It’s sometime in the late 1970s. I’m six years old, heading down an aisle, holding up the train of my big sister’s gown. It’s Delorse’s wedding day. It’s a beautiful day, an outdoor garden wedding. The entire way down the aisle, over the music of the wedding march, I can hear my sister whispering, “I’m not going to make it, I’m not going to make it.”

  She’s walking on grass, you see, her heels are sinking into the earth, her dress weighs more than I do and she’s nervous. Getting her down the aisle has become a Herculean task.

  “I’m not going to make it, I’m not going to make it.”

  Beside her, his hand on hers, his voice calm, his steps steady, my father helps her take each step forward. “One foot in front of the other,” he says.

  Every single time she whispers “I’m not going to make it,” he whispers back “One foot in front of the other.”

  “I’m not going to make it.”

  “One foot in front of the other.”

  “I’m not going to make it.”

  “One foot in front of the other . . .”

  I carried my sister’s train when I was just a little kid about thirty-five years ago. Before that, at four years old, I was a flower girl at my aunt Carolyn’s wedding. I’ve been maid of honor twice. I’ve been best man once. In the many seasons of Grey’s Anatomy and Private Practice, I have worked with our production teams to plan more than fourteen weddings and counting—I still pick every gown and choose every engagement ring and discuss every reception theme.

  Back in 2009, when Betsy Beers got married in Venice, Italy, overlooking the Grand Canal, I had no designated role. But because I chose to basically tackle her, cuff her and drag her to a studio dressing room filled with wedding gowns in an effort to keep her from “just throwing on something navy,” as had been her plan, I considered my role the most important one of all. Betsy has the willowy figure of a runway model; as Vera Wang was my witness, I would get her to use it. There could be no higher calling. The only woman to be married in Peggy Guggenheim’s museum under her favorite painting as the sun set on Venice’s Grand Canal would be wearing couture or I would die trying. You are welcome, Italy.

  As I forced her to try on dress after dress hand-selected by the stylish hands of Mimi Melgaard, Betsy kept giving me the eye, equal parts amused and horrified at the dreamlike joy on my face.

  Betsy and I have worked together for almost fifteen years. We think the secret to our ability to spend so many hours together without a single homicide is the fact that we are exact opposites. She’s tall and thin and white and Waspy. I am short and curvy and black and Catholic. The angrier I get, the calmer I become. The angrier she gets, the louder she becomes. She has an encyclopedic memory for TV, films, literature, pop culture, music, you name it. I often do not remember where my watch is until someone points out that it is on my wrist. We are opposites. Still, she seems flummoxed by my giddiness over fluffy white dresses. She finds the concept of a white dress atrocious. That I could be giddy about a fluffy white dress—that I could have such a different feeling about weddings than she does—flummoxes her.

  After I come very close to spontaneously combusting from excitement one time too many, she can’t take it.

  “How can you be this pee-your-pants excited?” she asks, yanking off a frilly confection that would look ridiculous on any human.

  “Because I love weddings!” I shriek. The proximity to all these wedding gowns is giving me some kind of weird contact high. It’s the same feeling I get when I am about to crush someone at Scrabble. Or badminton. Or knitting.

  I mean, I love weddings.

  I love weddings.

  Of course I do. They’re parties. And I love parties.

  But I really love weddings.

  LOVE them. ADORE them.

  The flowers, the candles, the vows, the themes, the dresses.

  I can’t get enough of them.

  I can tell you exactly what my wedding would be like, what my dress would look like, the food I’d serve . . . oh, I have planned enough weddings to know just what kind of wedding I’d want.

  There is just one problem. And that day, as Betsy steps out of the dressing room, flawlessly working the perfect wedding gown, she says it.

  “I do not see how you can love weddings this much and not want to get married.”

  Oh yeah. That.

  In 2009, I don’t want to get married.

  That’s kind of the problem. Well . . . actually, no. That’s not the problem.

  The problem is that it is now 2014. The problem is that I am supposed to be getting married in the summer. About eight months from the time I start the Year of Yes.

  And I still do not want to get married.

  I do not think I’m ever going to want to get married.

  THAT is the problem.

  yesyesyes

  I have always known that I wanted to be a mother. I have always known that I wanted to adopt. I have known these things with one hundred percent certainty. Like you know about the sunrise. Like you know about the seasons. These were facts. The way I have known I will age beautifully. The way I know I’m a writer. Motherhood felt so true inside me that it never occurred to me to question it.

  I assume some people feel that way about marriage. I think they do.

  I don’t.

  Never have.

  While I didn’t do a lot of playing as a kid, Sandie did play. As the only small kids growing up in a house full of teenagers, my sister Sandie found herself forced to turn to me as a playmate. Older than me by two years, she’d wrangle me out of the pantry or take the book from my hands. And she’d make me play with her. But she didn’t play in the way other kids seemed to want to play. Sandie did not want to play kickball or ride her bike really fast or dig in the dirt or squeal in a group of girls chasing boys around. No. Sandie was interested in elaborate games of pretend.

  Well . . .

  Elaborate games of pretending she was my mother.

  She used construction paper and crayons to craft her own little kitchen, and then we played Making Dinner and Washing the Dishes. When my mother saw how intent Sandie was, Sandie received a tiny apron, a tiny china tea set and a real tiny Bundt pan that my mom allowed her to use to bake real tiny cakes in the actual stove. Once a week, Sandie would carefully lay out our large collection of doll clothes on the kitchen table, handmade price tags taped to each one. Then we’d stand outside the screen door staring at the clock until one of my older sisters obligingly yelled, “The store is open!” That was our signal to hurry inside and be the first to get to the sale merchandise. At some point, a pretend salesclerk would pretend-say something snobby to Sandie, something with slightly racist undertones. And Sandie would tell off the pretend salesclerk so fiercely and smartly and with such dignity that the clerk, reduced to tears, would end up chasing Sandie through the store offering to sell her the dress for cheaper. That always led to Sandie’s demanding to speak to the pretend manager. This game was called Mom Shopping at the Department Store.

  Sandie was
given a tiny pink and white Singer sewing machine one Christmas that I think was supposed to be a toy but in Sandie’s hands became like her own mini Project Runway kit. She sewed clothes for our dolls—truly impressive, fashionable, well-made clothes. She explained to me the importance of a quality product and why the cheap stuff at the mall was not worth it. This was called Mom Sewing.

  For a long time I played with her obediently, following her lead. But as I got older, all bets were off . . .

  My Cara doll—because in the seventies if you had a black Barbie, her name was Cara and she had short hair, and then in the eighties her name was Christie and she had long hair with gold highlights—anyway, my Cara doll spent most of her time hanging out at college with her friend Cara II, who coincidentally looked exactly like Cara, discussing her plans for skiing in Gstaad (Gstaad always sounded cool to me) and trying to decide between becoming a governess and traveling with her rich aunt as a companion (Little Women was big for me then). At some point, Ken would inevitably show up to ask her out. Cara never giggled and put on the tiny bridal gown that my sister had painstakingly sewn for her. And she never went out with Ken.

  When I first got Ken, I had examined him carefully. I was weirded out by his strange smooth square pelvis and his painted-on hair. And his head . . . that was Ken’s downfall.

  Cara never dated that Ken. Instead, she popped Ken’s head off and stored her many pairs of shoes inside his hollow skull for safekeeping. Then she’d pop his head back on and make him drive her to the spy organization she was secretly running with her archenemy, Nancy Drew. Ken’s hollow head was functional and ornamental.

  I did not want to make tiny Bundt cakes or sew dresses. Or wear aprons or shop. I was not interested in playing reality. I wanted to spend my time, well . . . making stuff up. Telling stories. Living in my imagination. And nowhere in there was marriage part of it.

  Oh, but the brides . . .

  Brides became my everything the first time I saw Maria in The Sound of Music. She left the convent, she had a billion children, that captain dude was hot and her wedding dress was fierce.

  I love romance. I love love.

  I love dating the non-Kens of the world, the men with something more inside their heads than air. I love being in a relationship. I love interesting men.

  I love my client having meetings. Mmmkay?

  But.

  Married?

  Who cared?

  “But, Shonda, what if he’s The One? What if you are MFEO? What if he’s your soul mate?”

  Sigh.

  yesyesyes

  This is how well matched my parents are.

  In 1994, I am graduating with an MFA from the University of Southern California film school, and so my parents fly down for the ceremony.

  I insist that they stay with me in my little apartment in not one of the nicest sections of Los Angeles. They gamely agree. That night, I give them my bed and I lie down on the floor to sleep.

  It’s quiet, it’s dark, we’ve all been lying there for maybe thirty or forty minutes. I’m thinking they are asleep. I’m almost asleep. Then from the darkness my mother’s voice floats up.

  “You know, I was thinking,” she says.

  Not a question. A statement.

  And my dad responds immediately. I was wrong about them being asleep.

  “About what?”

  And my mom says—

  Wait. Let’s be clear that I’m going to get this completely wrong because I don’t know ANYTHING about this topic, okay? Anyway . . .

  —my mom says something like, “I was thinking about Maslov’s theory of psychosexual representation and how it relates to Stockholm syndrome.”

  I am lying on the floor thinking, “WHAT?”

  Because I was thinking about maybe . . . candy.

  Did I mention my mom is a brainiac PhD?

  I wait for my dad to answer. I wait, wondering how is he going to kindly tell my mom no one knows what she is talking about and to please go to sleep.

  But that is not what happens.

  Listen to this. Just listen.

  “I was thinking about Maslov’s theory of psychosexual representation and how it relates to Stockholm syndrome,” my mom says.

  And my dad responds:

  “I was thinking about that too!!”

  Like that. With two exclamation points in his voice. And then my parents proceed to have a long, enthusiastic conversation about whatever the hell this topic is about.

  That’s how well matched they are.

  Because my dad was thinking about that too.

  My mom was thinking about it. And my dad was thinking about it too. And they both found it interesting.

  They are always thinking about the same things and finishing each other’s sentences. They consistently follow each other around their house from room to room. Like ducks who have imprinted on each other.

  They met on a blind date. It must have been an incredible blind date. It seems to have never ended.

  They are partners, travel companions, best friends, an intellectual society of two, fellow sports fans, perfectly complementary, and after fifty-whatever years, they are still sweethearts, madly in love. People think I’m exaggerating about my parents’ marriage until they meet them. Once you meet them, you’ll see it too. My parents are the perfect example of what marriage should be. They understand the work of marriage and seem to believe in its constancy. To them, it is a journey that has twists, turns, bumps and possibly detours, but no end. There are no exit ramps. And they don’t care. They are too busy having fun.

  I grew up with a front-row seat to what a happy, healthy marriage looks like. Never perfect, constantly evolving, always united.

  My parents are the marriage jackpot.

  My parents make marriage look like the most delightful fifty-plus-year-long date. My parents make you think raising six kids and growing old together will be some kind of dance party. I worship their marriage. I revere and respect it. I am smug about it to all of my friends.

  They are MFEO: Made For Each Other.

  They are soul mates.

  I still do not want to get married.

  I tell myself that this is because they have the perfect marriage. That their example is too perfect. That if I just meet someone who makes me think I can have a marriage that great . . .

  I told myself I had an open mind. Until I hit forty, the fact that I didn’t want to get married was just this thing that floated through my mind from time to time. It wasn’t even real. It was just a theory. I never even said it out loud. Not to anyone. Why would I? Judging by some of the reactions I’ve gotten to stories I’ve written for my characters on TV, a woman not wanting to marry or not wanting to have children is cause for a good old-fashioned witch trial.

  People really do not like it when you decide to step off the road and climb the mountain instead. It seems to make even the people who mean well nervous.

  “We just want you to be happy,” confused friends would say to me anxiously whenever I seemed completely content to be single.

  I kept my feelings to myself. I didn’t mention it to friends or family. I didn’t mention it to men I was dating. I thought, “Who knows, what do I know? I’ll change my mind. Maybe I am wrong. Maybe marriage is something I want and I don’t know I want it. Be open.”

  So I was open. As open as I could be while building a life, career and family that didn’t require a husband.

  And then . . .

  yesyesyes

  I am going to talk about this without talking about this. As much as I can. Be kind about that. I let you all up in my business. But this? Not just my business. And here? I do change more than a few details. I change all kinds of details. I toss in some glitter and take out some of the sparkles. I want to get the point across—I do not want to get across any actual facts that involve another person.

  Are we clear?

  Anyway, it was my fault, really.

  The whole marriage thing. I started it. I nev
er meant to. I didn’t plan it. I just . . .

  He’s a great guy. He’s funny and smart and really cute.

  I was enthusiastic about him. I’d known him for years. He loved my kids. My family adored him. My friends liked him. We had fun, we laughed, we talked. He loved me. I loved him. The whole thing was great.

  I was enthusiastic.

  I was really enthusiastic.

  Do you feel what’s about to happen?

  I didn’t. I do now. I can see it clearly now. But then . . . I didn’t see it coming.

  There’s a point in every relationship where the question is, where is this going? How serious is this? What’s next?

  I never ask those questions. Which I hear is rare for a woman. But I don’t. Because I don’t care about the answers. I’m all about, where are we now? What’s happening now?

  But someone in the relationship always ends up asking these questions. Where is this going? How serious is this? What’s next?

  He wants to know.

  I’m enthusiastic.

  But I don’t want to talk about what’s next.

  But he wants to know.

  And I’m pretty sure the reason he wants to know is because I’m enthusiastic. My enthusiasm has allowed him to wonder.

  Talk about a difficult conversation. And before the Year of Yes, I don’t know what to do about difficult conversations.

  I’m nervous, I’m stressed. But I don’t want to be ambivalent. I want to have some answers. I care about the answers because HE cares about the answers.

  Maybe I do want to get married. Maybe marriage is awesome.

  Yes. Clearly. Marriage is awesome.

  I tell Linda Lowy all about how awesome marriage is. She’s been married forever. But still, I lecture her. I give her a high-pitched Scandal-paced monologue on how fabulous marriage is for people. She stares at me. Later, she will tell me I had the craziest, swirliest eyes she has ever seen on a human person. But I feel satisfied. I think I have it all together.

  Before I started the Year of Yes, I thought a lot of crazy, swirly things about myself. But clearly, I need a little help. Clearly, I’ve got a problem.