This actually happened to me: One day I was in the local grocery store with my newborn baby, and I found myself in the checkout line behind a lady who was struggling to wrangle her three young children and unload her cart at the same time. At the time, I was pretty pleased with myself for making it out with a single unwieldy person in my care, and I watched her in awe. When the cashier had everything bagged up and gave the lady her total, she began fishing in her bag for her wallet.
She fished and she fished.
Her kids were starting to get antsy, and the lady was beginning to get embarrassed. After an eternity, she finally had to admit that she didn’t have her wallet and would have to come back another time.
“But . . . but . . . your stuff !” I said to her.
She shrugged, looking utterly hopeless.
“But you got dressed, and you made it out of your house and got three kids in and out of their car seats, and you found everything you needed, and now you’ll have to do it all over again!” I cried, visibly more upset than she was about the whole situation. (I blame postpartum hormones.)
The wallet-less lady began herding her kids toward the exit.
“I’ll pay for it and you can pay me back,” I called after her.
She turned around, surprised, hopeful, and slightly mortified all at the same time.
“Oh, I couldn’t do that,” she said with a little hesitation.
“Sure you could!” I insisted. “And you really should.”
“How do you know I’m good for it?” she asked, inching back toward the register.
“I don’t,” I told her. “But it’s sixty bucks. It won’t kill me if you’re not. But I sort of think you are.”
Her grateful smile was worth three figures at least.
“I’m good for it,” she said. “I promise.”
I paid for her things, and I gave her my mailing address. I had no intention of telling my husband that I had done this, because I knew he’d call me a complete moron or at least think it.
Two days later, I got a check from her in the mail. With a gift card to a local smoothie shop, which apparently she owned. “You have no idea how much I appreciated that,” she wrote on a sticky note, which I promptly and smugly showed to my husband, who didn’t call me a moron but probably still thought it. I hope you don’t think I’m blowing smoke up my own ass by telling you this story; I’m sharing it because the experience was a major high, not to mention a win-win, and I am grateful for having had that opportunity.
Eat some chocolate. Blah, blah, blah, something about antioxidants or serotonin or some other physiological phenomenon. Who cares? Chocolate is one of life’s great pleasures.* It’s sensuous and decadent and impossibly satisfying, at least if you get the good kind and especially if you mix it with something salty. I’m not saying that inhaling a pound of Godiva is going to bring you bliss; in fact, it might even bring you to your knees in front of the nearest throne, and even if it doesn’t, it may paralyze you with guilt and self-loathing. But I think we can all agree that it’s impossible to feel happy and deprived at the same time. Seriously. Eat some fucking chocolate.
Celebrate your resiliency. As the popular and impossibly eloquent saying goes, shit happens. The fantastic news is that when seriously sucky events transpire, human beings possess a remarkable ability to bounce back, and with alarming speed. I’m not talking about relatively minor miseries like breaking an arm or losing out on a job promotion; according to resiliency research, had my home actually burned to the ground during one of our many “evacucations,” I would have made peace with that fact and completely moved on with my life in a matter of weeks. Sounds like a lot of horseshit, right? Consider a now-famous study that found that after devastating accidents that confine people to wheelchairs for life, paraplegics return to their pre-catastrophe levels of happiness within a year.
Think about that for a second. People who lose the ability to walk get over it. I don’t know about you, but I spend a great deal of time worrying about things. This is insanely unproductive to begin with, because I tend to fret mostly about things that are beyond my control. But I really like the idea that should one of my worst-case scenarios actually happen, it more than likely won’t throw me into an irreversible, lifelong depression.
Get yourself a black angel. Recently I was interviewing a renowned “happiness expert” for one of those “be happier” stories I write for women’s magazines. The expert and I were discussing the very common midlife pursuit of the pinnacle of Maslow’s pyramid when she threw me for a pretty major loop.
“The basic understanding of happiness is that it’s outside of us,” Dr. Aymee told me. “We promote ‘go get happiness through these things or experiences,’* but that’s actually very unhealthy. If you tell yourself you’ll be happy when you leave work and go home, what happens when you get there and your husband is in a shitty mood and the kids are screaming and the toilet is overflowing? Your day is totally fucked.* The truth is that happiness is a choice that anyone can make, any time they want to, regardless of the circumstances.”
“Oh really?” I said, probably a little more snidely than I’d intended. (Actually I say that thing about happiness being a choice to my kids all the time. But I wasn’t sure if I necessarily believed my own BS or if it was just a handy tool for deflecting and confusing my whiny children.) “This morning I woke up, poured my coffee, and then added rotten, curdled half-and-half to it,” I added. “I had to throw the whole thing away. Trust me, I was not happy.”
“Because you chose not to be happy,” Dr. Aymee insisted. “Even if you’d gotten to drink that coffee, the cup would have been gone in ten minutes and so would the happiness. Then you’d be thinking about the next cup of coffee. We call it the hedonic treadmill—always searching for the next little happiness fix.”
“What if somebody is holding a gun to my head?” I demanded, because this whole just-be-happy-dammit thing sounded a lot too Bobby McFerrin for a cynic like me.
“You don’t have to be happy that the gun is there,” Dr. Aymee conceded. “But you can feel compassion toward the person who is holding the gun, or you can think about how happy you will be when the gun is no longer there. Those choices are always available to you.”
I thought about my current situation. I had a loving husband, healthy children, a beautiful house, a job I very much enjoyed, and enough money to take an occasional vacation. I was pretty damned happy. I tried to remember the last time I was sad or felt hopeless or even cried.
Oh yeah.
“Okay, my dad died nine years ago, and I miss him every day,” I heard myself telling her. “I suppose I could choose to focus on the fact that I had him at all, but I still can’t think about him without getting angry and sad. Can you do anything about that?”
I actually started crying at this point. During an interview. You can imagine how professional I felt.
“Well,” Dr. Aymee said with a little hesitation. Ha! I thought. I’ve stumped her. She can’t do it. “I don’t typically offer this,” she continued, “but would you like to talk to your dad? Because I can do that.”
“Shut the fuck up,” I said, my whimpers turning to sobs. (Yes, I said shut the fuck up to a PhD during an interview in which I was sobbing. It really is too bad I work at home alone and can never be nominated for an employee of the month award.)
“I think you need to do this to be healed,” Dr. Aymee said softly.
So I lit a candle and got a glass of water like she told me to do while she worked on getting my dad on the phone. The wait was interminable.
“Your dad wants you to talk to him more,” she said finally. Which totally freaked me out because shortly after he died I had this crazy-real dream where he said to me, “I hear you talking about me, but I want you to talk to me,” so I proceeded to drive around and talk to him where nobody could see or hear me, and if they did, they might think
I just had an especially discreet wireless earpiece and wasn’t in fact a whack job driving aimlessly around town talking to her dead dad.
“He wants you to get an angel statue to put on your desk and talk to him through that,” she added. “A male angel.”
Now I was sobbing and chatting with my dead dad through a doctor-cum-medium I’d never met and also Googling for angel statues. It’s worth pointing out that my dad was the least religious person I have ever met, so I was definitely skeptical about his alleged request, but I figured maybe everyone gets a little holier after they die, so I kept scrolling.
“Did you find one yet?” Dr. Aymee wanted to know after a long silence occasionally punctuated by sniffles.
It turned out there were a shit-ton of male angel statues to choose from, but most of them were just . . . wrong. They were either too girly or garden-y or naked or holy-looking (Dad also liked the word fuck even more than I do). At one point, I stumbled across a shirtless black angel wearing what looked like white satiny genie pants, a gold belt, and wings twice the size of his lean but muscular body. There was a tiny black baby with Gary Coleman’s exact face curled up at his feet. I couldn’t help it; I laughed out loud when I saw it.
Now, Dr. Aymee couldn’t see what I was looking at (shit, maybe she could!), and she couldn’t have known how funny my dad was (or maybe she did!), but my cackle was all she needed to hear. “Your dad says you just found your angel,” she told me.
$14.99 (plus shipping and handling) for a winged Batphone that goes exclusively to my dad? Of course I ordered it.
Black Angel (that’s what my kids call him) now stands proudly on my desk, and I probably shouldn’t admit this, but I talk to him every day.* My daughters occasionally fight for the privilege of having him “sleep” by their beds, and the fact that they have never once questioned his presence or even suggested that a black baby-daddy statue was an odd thing to have on your desk cheers me up every time I think about it. I genuinely and honestly can talk about my dad now without feeling sad, which makes me believe that Dr. Aymee was right. We all can choose to be happier, even if we never win the lottery or get a raise or fit back into the jeans we wore in college. And if we decide not to be happier, statistics say it’s going to happen anyway.
I’ll drink to that.*
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Jenna McCarthy is an internationally published writer, former radio personality, and the author of a bunch of books for kids and adults. (Don’t worry; her kids books are funny and sweet and don’t have any swear words. She swears.) When she’s not busy oversharing on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram, she likes to troll Pinterest for crafts she’ll never attempt and recipes she’ll never make. She lives in ridiculously beautiful Santa Barbara, California, with her husband and two daughters, who sometimes even admit they are related to her. Visit her at jennamccarthy.com.
* To be clear, I’m talking about my decrepit body parts here, not Nora’s.
* You know when I say that, I mean a quick Google search, right?
* Well, if I were guaranteed not to die and to get a fabulous, natural result. And probably never a full face-lift because I saw a really disturbing Dateline on it, and try as I might, I can never unsee those images of unconscious women with pen marks all over their faces lying there looking dead while a doctor sliced right through their skin and tissues and muscles like a Harvard-trained Hannibal Lecter.
* Or you were born Italian, in which case you just got lucky.
* But I’d argue that it looked as much like a live gerbil as a dead one.
* Hell YEAH, I do this. It takes them forever to find me, too.
* I am pretty sure that’s a golf expression. I generally try to avoid sports references as I know nothing at all about any of them (except tennis, where I’m almost positive the goal is to get the ball over the net), but a friend used this recently, and I liked it, so I stole it.
* I don’t know if you buy it, but I certainly do. It’s sort of a sore subject in my house, so maybe don’t bring it up if you come over for dinner.
* We both know I will never, ever cook, buy, or send any of them.
* Yeah, right.
* Goddamn it, I save my kids’ teeth, too. And I can’t throw them away. I’ve tried. This may be a cry for help.
* Yes, I kept a couple of sticks that I peed on. Wait. You didn’t save these?
* I quit the first one because I landed the second one; I didn’t get fired for smelling like tequila or plastering my ass cheeks to the office copy machine at the Christmas party and then forgetting about it, just so you know.
* We almost always cooked the pizzas, by the way.
* Not the kind who have sex even occasionally, not that there’s anything wrong with that.
* Meaning: We take cabs, stay together, and don’t let anybody do anything irreversibly stupid.
* Obviously, she’s a rookie.
* That’s what you call a thong poking up and out of the back of your jeans. I did not know that term until now. This is probably because I’m old.
* Unless you work for the magazine in question, in which case obviously you are immune to rules of any kind.
* Notice I didn’t say “as I’ve gotten more mature.”
* Her constantly updated Facebook page may suggest otherwise, but you’d be wise to let this go.
* I was minoring in French, a degree that it turns out comes in extremely handy for nobody, ever.
* Newborn babies, in my opinion, ought to be about six pounds, seven max. Nine pounds is creeping into Thanksgiving turkey territory.
* Not the smoking part. You definitely shouldn’t smoke. But for the love of garlicky dipping oil, life is short even if you don’t smoke. Have a fucking piece of bread every once in a while.
* Even though things ending in -oma generally aren’t good, if you have to get a cyst, this is the kind I’d recommend.
* I know. You’re not supposed to say cancer in a funny book. I promise I won’t do it again.
* I am not even making that shit up. It scares the crap out of me to think we are beyond anything they could have imagined when they produced The Jetsons.
* I was five, okay? It’s not like I knew better.
* Fine, I was forty-two that time. I agree, I should have known better. My then six-year-old put it this way: “But why didn’t you just use the finger-protector thingy? It’s not that complicated.”
* Naturally, my insurance did not cover the $250 cost, because obviously, they hoped I wouldn’t buy it and subsequently die, as I’d become quite a liability of late.
* Apparently I was now one of them. Yippee!
* In case you hadn’t picked up on this fact, I might have a tiny tendency to overreact on occasion, especially where medicine is involved.
* And unfortunately, I wasn’t able to create amazing paintings with it like Daniel Day-Lewis could in the movie of the same name.
* Unless you care to spring for one of the totally optional extras. Like if you want the guy who jumps around in a chicken suit to make chicken noises or hold up a sign at the same time, you’re going to have to pony up a little more. Totally worth it.
* [Adds to cart]
* This is a great investment if you want your seats to look perfect when you eventually have the thing towed to a junkyard.
* Read: has gotten so beaten down by me bitching about it that he’s willing to spend tens of thousands of dollars to make it stop.
* Electric windows and a tape deck no longer count as “bells and whistles,” dear.
* Seriously! How awesome is that?
* Yes, that is her real name. Starshine Roshell; Google her. And then subscribe to her newsletter and buy her books because she is wickedly funny.
* Yes, I know there’s no such thing as 100 percen
t certainty, but damn it I want my car to come close.
* Okay fine, it was about those things, too.
I've Still Got It...I Just Can't Remember Where I Put It: Awkwardly True Tales from the Far Side of Forty Page 22