No Happy Endings

by Nora McInerny

  So your parents don’t think you should marry a guy with a brain tumor. Well, they’re not marrying him. You are. And let me be clear, it will be like any of your friends’ marriages: You will still watch Netflix and get irritated when he doesn’t unload the dishwasher properly. You will disagree about money, about getting a dog, about whatever fits the bill of your particular partnership. His tumor won’t change that, and neither will a ring on your finger. It will also be unlike any of your friends’ marriages (unless you and I are friends). Your small disagreements will be just that: small disagreements. The Big Things in your marriage will be bigger than the worries of all your family and friends, all added up. Because you knew that when you promised “ ’til death do we part” that death was coming before your retirement. You will watch an incurable disease eat him alive. You will live every vow you take, and it will be more sickness than health, and death will most certainly part you, probably sooner than later.

  That is what you sign up for when you marry a man with a cancerous brain tumor.

  Your boyfriend’s brain tumor isn’t cancerous, but still.

  It is hard.

  Life is, no matter what. Love is, no matter what. Even those friends of yours whose husbands and wives are currently strong and healthy whose lives are just perfect . . . will suffer. Even a perfectly curated Instagram feed cannot inoculate us from tragedy.

  There is no choice we can make that will help us avoid heartache or suffering or loss, in some measure. Any person we love has a one hundred percent chance of dying, even the men parents think of as “safe choices” for their daughters.

  I understand your parents’ concerns because at twenty-two you are actually pretty much a zygote, all things considered. Twenty-two is so young! You are twenty-two chronologically, but situations such as ours have a way of aging us, of packing the wisdom of many more decades into us very quickly. You are certainly free to stay with your man and stand by him, as a girlfriend or as a friend. You are just as free to walk away, to find someone with no obvious health defects to build a life with. And you can hope nothing happens to either of you, but you just as certainly cannot guarantee it.

  Your parents want to keep you from suffering, the same way they always have. When you were little, they placed special locks on the kitchen cabinets to protect your little fingers. They plugged up the electrical outlets to keep you from zapping yourself. They placed protective edges on the corners of the coffee table so you wouldn’t crack your head open. That is why they are trying so hard to keep you from the great abyss of loss that might be ahead for you. But somehow, you still fell down. You still got bumps and bruises and maybe even stitches. And you kept going. Because as much as they’d like to, it isn’t possible to bubble wrap a human from the dangers of the entire world.

  You cannot bubble wrap and protect your heart from life, and why should you? It is meant to be used, and sometimes broken. Use it up, wear it out, leave nothing left undone or unsaid to the people you love. Let it get banged up and busted if it needs to.

  That’s what your heart is there for.

  P.S. I am an ordained wedding officiant and am available most days because I don’t have a social life.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Feeling Myself

  If I’m ever famous enough to have my phone hacked, be prepared for a lot of partial nudes. Also, be prepared for many postpartum “does this look infected” full nudes. Basically, look at your own risk. Since Aaron died, I have been really into myself. I mean, really, really into myself. I have a hard time finding anything I don’t like about my body. I like my big nose, and that my boobs are basically just nipples on a rib cage. I like my knock knees and my long feet. I like being taller than the average man.

  I like myself so much that I have to document it. I have to have photographic evidence of how cute my butt is in the right underwear, and the way the light hits my collarbone when I’m waking up in the morning.

  I like myself so much that it’s a problem. This feeling is not socially acceptable. The socially acceptable rite of bonding among women is to share our self-criticisms, to relish in them. I’ve been a part of this sacred ritual for years. Put me in any living room in America with a group of women and a cheese tray, and in thirty seconds I’ll know what every one of these strangers would change about their body. I’ll assure them that their self-assessment is horribly inaccurate, that they have lustrous hair and ageless skin, that I’d gladly take their boobs if there were any such thing as a boob transplant. And then I’ll offer up my own shortcomings to the group, so they can do the same for me. They’ll tell me that my nose is enviable, and my acne is a figment of my imagination. Maybe for a second we’ll be momentarily distracted by the cheese tray and can move on to deep debate about why we shouldn’t be eating from it, followed by a list of the ways in which we are currently restricting our diets.

  Sounds like a blast, right?

  My friend Nicole is a talented photographer, and started to do boudoir shoots, which is a fancy way of saying “sexy photos of women in their underpants.” Her photos are much better than the blurry photos I’ve taken in the mirror, which is why I found myself stripped down to my underwear, standing in front of Nicole and her camera in a sunny studio in Lowertown Saint Paul. Outside, it was cold and wintry. Inside, things were hot. Sorry, I can’t help myself.

  “You know,” Nicole told me while I cupped my little boobs and pretended like something interesting was happening just outside the floor-to-ceiling windows, “you’re the only woman who signed up to take these for herself.” What she meant was that this sexy photo shoot wasn’t a gift for a boyfriend or a girlfriend or a spouse or for luring in some internet dates. These photos were just for me.

  “Have you done this before?” she asked, which yeah, is me bragging about what a good model I was. I said no, but I should have said yes, because I do this all the time. Not with a makeup artist and a light-soaked loft, but in my living room and bedroom and bathroom, with my phone and my mirrors.

  Selfies have gotten a bad rap. We love to rip on them, and how vain and vapid it is to document one’s own human existence.

  But why? The urge to document ourselves and our lives is primal and old as dirt. Even your beautiful grandmother, the one who looked exactly like a pin-up? She’d have posted a billion selfies, too, if time and money and technology hadn’t meant that her youth would be tragically relegated to a few black-and-white snapshots in a dusty shoebox somewhere.

  Let’s all stop pretending that selfies are an aberration of the high art we’re creating with our smart phones or that posting a photo of yourself is somehow an interruption of the high-level discourse we are used to sharing on social media. You know what selfies can show you? Yourself. And you are worth looking at. You are worth marveling at.

  Every day your body performs a series of complete and total miracles to keep you alive, and then your body does amazing things like creating another human, or running a mile, or getting to work on time, and to pretend like that isn’t noteworthy is absurd. You are worth staring at in the mirror and capturing with whatever medium you have at your fingertips. You are worth paying a few hundred dollars to have someone else do it for you, if you can.

  My body today is the same body that I used to hate, with the aftereffects of carrying and birthing two children. The thing that has changed, aside from the perpetual cycle of growing out and then cutting my bangs again, is my heart. Love changes us, and so does loss. There’s something about having your husband die that really does a number on your confidence. Maybe it’s just like getting an extra shot of YOLO, but after three years of watching the man I loved more than nachos and Buffy the Vampire Slayer combined die of a cancer that was hell-bent on destroying him, the many, many fricks I used to give about my body have disappeared, poof!

  I would like to take the time here to acknowledge how many of you may have dislocated your eyeballs reading about how a blond white woman who has never been larger than a size ten has le
arned to accept a body that fits nicely and neatly into the white beauty standard. If it helps at all, I have always been ashamed of my body shame, which is . . . not healthy. But it should at least show you how absurd the whole notion is, that we were all sold and all bought the same lie, that the best thing our bodies could do was to conform, and be as good and as small as possible. The best thing that our bodies do is just exist. They show up and carry us through this world.

  Aaron was sick for three years. I memorized the beat of his heart. I watched him be wheeled out of two brain surgeries and I sat with him while he had poison pumped into his body that we hoped would kill the cancer but spare the rest of him. We spent days in the hospital among people trying to do the same thing, and bodies started to look different to me. I had no choice but to reframe my view.

  They started to look beautiful. All of them. Even mine. How could I hate these long feet, when they could still carry me through this world? How could I hate this skin that Aaron touched and now my children touch so lovingly? How could this skin house where my soul lives be anything less than a miracle?

  Aaron’s sickness took and took from his body and pushed me into an appreciation of my own. I ran a half marathon. Three of them! Slow as hell, but I did it. And every time my feet hit the pavement, I felt grateful for everything my body could do. I also felt like “Why am I doing this? Thirteen point one miles is way too many. I could be sleeping right now.”

  This isn’t a constant state of being for me. I am still susceptible to the pull of the magnifying mirror in a hotel bathroom, inviting me to inspect my face for wrinkles, blackheads, or a persistent black chin hair that decides to pop up every few months. But often I worship myself the same way that Matthew does. He looks at me like a heart-eyed emoji even when I’m on the third day of stomach flu. He is physically incapable of seeing me and not paying me a compliment. The woman I was in my early twenties would have deflected every compliment he lobbed my way, but the woman I am now says “Thank you.” Because I agree with him.

  These are things, by the way, I could have always been doing if I weren’t so dedicated to trying to trick my body into being a different one. All of those years, when I was definitely not as terribly ugly and deformed as I was sure that I was, I could have instead been happy to be alive and healthy and strong, and out in the world sucking everything I could out of every day. But like my father always told me as I rolled my eyes, youth is wasted on the young.

  I’m not wasting any more of my life, or yours, talking about the ways our bodies could be better. The only thing I’m interested in wasting is my Google Photos storage and a few minutes a day, documenting this body I’m so grateful is healthy and is mine.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Options

  Alternatives to the word Stepmom that we should try to make happen:

  Bonus Mom—makes it sound like you were won at the State Fair

  m(other)—works only in print

  Other Mother

  Alternate Adult

  Maternal Companion —actually, that sounds like a paid position

  Mother Figure

  Second-Tier Parent

  Quasi-Mom—sounds like a deformity. Nope.

  Not Mom—too obvious, and something they could weaponize in angry moments where you don’t want to let them play video games or whatever

  Kinda Mom

  Alterna-Mom—nah, makes it sound like I listen to cooler bands than I actually do

  Adjacent Adult

  Substitute Parent

  Ancillary Adult

  Additional Parent

  Extra Mom

  Supplementary Guardian

  Additional Parental Figure—not bad!

  Parental Cohort—no.

  I’m not saying that Stepmom is the worst thing you can call a woman who has opted into parenting some children she never planned on parenting. I’m just saying that maybe we could use an update? Something that doesn’t teach our children to give and receive varying degrees of love based on bloodlines? Doesn’t it feel just a smidge outdated, considering that women can now vote and own land and even keep our own last names if we’d like to?

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  All My Children

  (I mean this literally, not in reference to the long-running soap opera, so please don’t sue me)

  My parents were married for over forty years and none of my friends growing up had divorced parents, so I took all my references about this topic from popular culture and fairy tales, and all of those sources will tell you that stepparents are either:

  Evil or

  Totally clueless, but well-meaning.

  Stepchildren typically are:

  Evil or

  Hateful, resentful little creatures who just want Mom and Dad to get back together.

  On my list of Things to Do, “be a stepmom” was nowhere on the list. I could see myself having kids, of course. I could see myself adopting kids. But being a derided quasi-parental figure to children who already had two parents? Not super appealing. Becoming a mother is sudden. You don’t have a child, and then you do. It’s instantaneous. Your child, by birth or otherwise, is yours. You’re a mother.

  But you don’t go from zero to stepmom just by meeting a child, or marrying their parent. It’s a process, an evolution. And oh my gosh, what a responsibility. Parenting of any kind, yes, is a huge responsibility. Every time I’ve left the hospital with a baby (twice), I’ve walked out thinking, “Are you sure I should be taking this kid?” But people expect you to screw up your own kids. The pressure for raising my own babies was high, but not as high as being trusted with someone else’s children, particularly because any kid who is getting a stepparent is already coming from a place of loss. The family they knew is gone, and another one is being erected around them. Small things—remembering the right water bottle for soccer practice, getting them signed up for the right camps, getting their doughnut preferences correct—felt huge. These kids had been through enough disappointment in life, I couldn’t possibly show up with a chocolate doughnut when the request had been for a chocolate sprinkle doughnut!

  Matthew felt a similar pressure, but the difference between us—besides that I am at least one inch taller than him—is that my first husband is dead and Matthew’s first wife is not. It’s their job to co-parent together, and my job to . . . what? Fill in the cracks? We are a somewhat dysfunctional triumvirate of parenthood. I drive carpools and show up to rehearsal, I make dinner and write checks to the soccer club and arrange sleepovers and buy school supplies, but I do not have an official vote in the lives of two children who are the siblings of the children who came out of my body. I can communicate my thoughts and ideas to the two primary parents, but the choices that get made are between the two of them. I am Washington, D.C.—influential, but without official representation.

  Often, I think about what I’d be like if my children had a stepmother. In my best fantasies, I would be open and gracious to this other woman. We would forge a fast friendship and work together in perfect harmony to create the best conditions and a happy life for all of us. When people asked about her, I’d say, “Oh, it’s just so wonderful that the kids have another loving adult in their lives. You can never have too much love, can you?” The asker would be almost embarrassed to have asked her question. Of course, you can’t have too much love. Of course, the best thing to do is to create an unbreakable alliance with your children’s stepmother.

  I’ve seen examples of this kind of relationship in a few of my divorced friends, and in viral “open letters” shared on Facebook: people do it! Moms and stepmoms pose for photos with one another and proclaim their love and appreciation for this woman they never expected to love or appreciate.

  In reality? I know that my own heart has two modes: boundlessly loving, and shriveled Grinchiness. So the fact is that I know that I wouldn’t always love it if my kids had a stepmom—having someone else there when I was not, tucking them in and shaping their little souls. And I think
most of us would probably feel the same way, at least a little bit, at least part of the time. Not because we don’t want our children to be loved, but because . . . we want our kids to love us the most. It’s small and petty and something we’d rather not admit, but there it is.

  I am very well aware that I am not Ian or Sophie’s mother. I’m aware that while their mother may have chosen not to stay married to Matthew, she also didn’t choose to have me enter their lives. My brain knows that they came from a different uterus, but my heart does not. I love these kids. As deeply as I love the two that came out of me.

  “Is it really as easy as you make it look on Instagram?” someone asked me once about living in our blended family, and I was confused. Do I make it look easy on Instagram? Do I make it look easy in real life? It’s as easy as any kind of parenting. Which is to say, there are some days when the entire process of raising a young person is so irritating that I fantasize about getting in my Honda Odyssey alone, turning on a podcast . . . and driving south until I hit the Gulf of Mexico. There are days when I can only handle fifty percent of the kids in any combination, and days when I lock the bathroom door even though I don’t have to pee, just so I can have five minutes alone. Far more frequently are the moments where I’m amazed by what we’ve created as a family, and I want to freeze time and live in the moment forever. Sophie joining Ralph for a game of memory, Baby screaming in delight when Ian walks into his room at daycare, all of them snuggled up in our bed with bowls of popcorn, watching a movie on a Friday night. These are the moments when what we have is so beautiful that I can’t believe it can possibly be real.

  Parenting is not generally described as easy. Parenting is work. It is an endless checklist of things to do and places to go, and if you can tick off about seventy percent of them by the time the kid is eighteen, you’ll have hopefully created a functional adult who will contribute to society. Parenting is work, and so is love. I used to think of that as a negative aspect of love, but it’s anything but negative. Love is work. It’s work that is worth doing. Telling our kids that love is easy and effortless is a disservice to them. Because love challenges us and stretches us. It will help us grow, and if you remember being an adolescent, you know that it hurts to grow.