Fifty Things That Aren't My Fault

by Cathy Guisewite

  * * *

  I’m standing, stunned, in the private enrollment office at the gym in my brand-new $320 workout outfit. I feel like a bride left at the altar. A bride in overpriced, unreturnable spandex. A bride in equally unreturnable custom-insole support sneakers and pristine new wedding-white socks. I came here to commit to a future with the fabulous hot body I finally believe I deserve. I did not come here to commit to a future with bone health. My officiant, dressed in a mini magenta fitness onesie with TRAINER across the chest—the person I just let weigh and measure me—makes a little checkmark, hands me the Goals page from her clipboard, and bops out of the room.

  I clutch the paper like a bridal bouquet. Silently repeat the words, just as any crushed bride standing at the altar would repeat any two-word relationship ender: “It’s over.” “Another woman.” “I’m sorry.”

  “Bone health.”

  This is not what I came here for today.

  I came to the gym ready to say “I do!” to the sexy, sleek-muscled, flat-stomached, tight-reared, shapely armed, lean-legged body the universe has been telling me was out there for me my whole life. I want that! I’m finally ready to do everything it takes to get that! I did not spend $320 on wedding spandex and matching orthopedic sneakers for bone health!

  The trainer bops back in.

  “Bone health is a fine goal,” I say as politely as possible, “but what about . . .”

  “Cardiovascular integrity! Of course!” she interrupts, plucks the Goals page from my hand, snaps it back on her clipboard, and checks another little box.

  “Well, yes, but what about . . .” I continue.

  “Joint mobility!” she proclaims and makes another checkmark.

  “Well, yes. But . . .”

  That other thing! I think to myself. The sexy, sleek-muscled, flat-stomached, tight-reared, shapely armed, lean-legged body thing that you promise everyone else! THAT thing!”

  “Of course!” She nods knowingly as if she heard every word. “Goes without saying!”

  I smile, straighten, pull my wedding spandex down over my rear, and wait to hear the words I came hear.

  “You’ll also gain improved digestive function!” she pronounces.

  Joining a new gym at my age is the exact equivalent of joining a dating site at my age and realizing my “ideal life mate” is eighty-nine years old. I can’t look at my twenty-two-year-old trainer and argue that I’m ready to commit to a hot, lean, sexy new body any more than I could walk into a juice bar and announce that I’m ready to commit to a hot, handsome thirty-five-year-old hunk. I’m too old. Too old to ever look like the babe in the poster on the wall of the gym, no matter how many hours in a row I work out. Finally old enough to have the confidence and willpower to commit to the body I want and deserve, and am too old to achieve it.

  Of course I’ll get stronger by joining a gym again. Of course it’s all good for me. But it’s demoralizing when all the improvements for my age bracket are for the interior, not the exterior. No one talks about the radiant young skin I could have anymore. They offer to “repair skin damage at the subepidermal level.” The woman in the commercial doesn’t pat her tummy to flash the killer abs that I too could have. She pats to tell me that I too could increase the probiotic culture count in my intestines. All those 10,000 steps I’m supposed to take every day? Not for slimmer hips, just “increased blood flow to the brain to help slow memory loss.” And now not a peep about the sexy, svelte muscles I could get by joining this gym. Only that weight training will increase my bone health and do all those other inner things that will help me stay an old lady longer.

  I’m tired of spending all my time and money on the inner me! I silently protest. I want results on the outside! Visible young-person outer results, not old-lady inner results!!

  My trainer either doesn’t notice my angst or is dismissing it as commitment jitters. Or she’s simply been too busy getting the vows and an extremely one-sided prenup ready for me to sign. Pages of waivers saying the gym isn’t responsible for any amount of pain or unhappiness I might experience in the relationship. Clauses declaring I agree to keep paying every month, even if I want out. Gym alimony. I take one more good look at my Goals page. It’s like a bad arranged marriage. Was there something better out there for me?

  Standing at the altar in wedding spandex.

  Do I really want to go home and start all over? Do I want to take a chance that the next experience could be even worse? That the next trainer at the next gym might assess me and declare my fitness goal to be “increased bladder control”?

  And so I sign the vows. As a symbol of my commitment, I get a little plastic bar code to wear on my key ring that will be scanned to identify me when I come in. I slip it on the ring, right next to the little plastic bar code from the grocery store loyalty club. A perfect wedding set: grocery store and gym.

  I leave with my vows and prenup stuffed in my purse. I hold the key ring up as I walk toward my car, hoping someone will notice my new bar code sparkle in the sun.

  Is the need to belong to something so strong that I’m proud of pledging myself to a future with anything? . . . Or is part of me actually still young enough to secretly believe I’ll turn this relationship into what I came here dreaming it could be, in spite of what everyone says? Do I really think I can trample all logic, science, and reality? Resemble anything close to the hot, toned babe in the poster one day?

  Yes, I do.

  I DO!

  Standing on the sidewalk in wedding spandex, I feel a flush of endorphins create blushing bride cheeks. Now, this is a commitment I want to own. I will sprint past the limits! Lift all those expectations! Stomp all over what others believe is possible.

  Good thing, I think, unlocking the car with another flash of my bar-code wedding set . . . Good thing I’m going to have nice strong bones.

  34.

  SEDUCTION 101

  Can I send a text or is it better to wait so I seem mysterious and aloof?”

  “How soon can I answer a text without appearing too eager?”

  “If I text and don’t get a text back, can I text again or will that ruin everything?”

  “Are emojis out of the question at my age?”

  Three hundred years of relationship experience between us, and my friends and I are clueless. We huddle together on Joan’s back porch, exactly how we used to huddle with our girlfriends in the corners of the gyms at all our middle school and high school dances. Full of questions and fruit punch. Except these days, since contact is now possible 24/7, there’s no relief. Not one second in which there isn’t the chance that a special someone might want to connect with us. Not one moment when there isn’t some clever, crazy way of reaching out that we think of in the middle of the night but should not consider doing.

  “I could fly there and show up at his door bringing breakfast for a surprise visit!”

  “I could write a love song, film myself singing it, and post it on YouTube!”

  “I could bribe someone to get me access to her Facebook page!”

  Three hundred years of experience between us and we’re not ready for this. We’re not delusional single women. Not searching for love. Not trying to date. We’re much more desperate than that:

  We’re Mothers of College Freshmen.

  One nervous, clueless mom after another, trying to tutor each other through the required mom course—Seduction 101: How to Entice Your Kid to Make Contact. Late nights spent trading notes on how to lure our children back to us before we explode with worry. Comparing frantic mom quizzes, hoping someone will know the answers: Where is she? What could he be doing? Who’s she with? Why haven’t I heard from him? We live with phones strapped to our waists, stuffed in pockets, bras, and purses. Ready for the miracle of any little tweet, text, bing, peep—anything—coming from any of them that would reassure us our child is okay.

  The
y will never call home just to chat. We learned how futile a dream that one is during heartbreaking College Freshman Mom Month Number One. They won’t call at all, won’t answer if we call, won’t listen to or respond to voice mails. Voice is over. The spoken word is out. It wouldn’t matter anyway. We’re apparently not supposed to reach out at all. We liberated their generation from the archaic “boys have to make the first move” law only to have them turn the new freedom against us. Now “children away at college have to make the first move.” Moms can only make little flirty gestures from the sidelines and hope we intrigue our children enough that they’ll text back and tell us they’re still alive.

  What I wanted to say to my daughter this morning:

  Are you okay? Are your classes okay? Are you safe? Are you scared? Are you stressed? Are you lost? Are you eating? Is that special TempurPedic pillow that cost more than my first mattress helping you fall asleep? I miss you, my precious baby! I love you more than life itself!!

  Instead, I texted a photo of our dog chewing a hole in the sofa cushion with the caption “thx 2 u, this tastes like choclt!” that took me forty-five minutes to carefully compose. Must pretend I’m not desperate to hear from her. Must not seem needy. Must not appear that I like her too much or she’ll run the other way.

  It would be one thing if my daughter were a carefree spirit who had operated on her own throughout high school and gradually prepared me for the big post-graduation Mom Dump. But until several months ago, she couldn’t sustain life for fifteen minutes without asking for help.

  “MOM! There’s a spider!”

  “MOM! My ponytail’s lumpy!”

  “MOM! I can only find one flip-flop!”

  “MOM! The clicker doesn’t work!”

  I’d heard “MOM!” every six seconds since she learned to speak. I was panic-stricken that I was sending her to college with a complete lack of life skills. And now not a word. Worse than not a word. When she graduated from high school, I graduated from Beloved Creator and Keeper of Life to Wrong Person. If she sees my name on the caller ID, I’m the Wrong Person calling. Should she ever answer the phone, it will be with her “Hello Wrong Person” voice.

  She even clicked the little button on her phone so it no longer shows on my phone whether or not she’s read my text message. It says my message was delivered, but doesn’t say read, so now I can’t tell if she’s standing there looking at my Wrong Person text and rolling her eyes or if she’s too busy doing something I don’t want to think about her doing and hasn’t even read it. I’ve shared everything in her life since the day she came home from the hospital and now I’m suddenly, completely, left out of everything.

  My back-porch girlfriends and I promised to be there for one another as our children went off in all directions this fall, to share the agonizing process of launching and letting go. The giant tangle of pride, panic, and a hundred other things we never imagined. We trade tips, confessions, worst moments, best guesses. We never thought we’d be having conversations like this. When we sent them off with our hopes, dreams, and $700 smartphones that instantaneously link them to the entire universe, we never dreamed it would be quite so tricky to stay in touch.

  “Does ‘luv u 2’ mean my son loves me or needs me to pay his Hulu bill?”

  “Does ‘k talk latr’ mean later today? This week? She’ll call? I can call??”

  “Has anyone else stooped to scrutinizing the cell phone bill to see who she IS talking to for all those minutes??”

  I try to imagine how my parents survived when my older sister and I left for college, long before cell phones. There was one pay phone per floor in my dorm, and a lineup every Sunday night to make a three-minute call home. Sometimes I didn’t even bother getting in line, and I know my sister didn’t either. I’ll just call next week, I’d think, and go do whatever I thought was more fun. I never once thought what I now know with every cell in my being—that Mom and Dad planted themselves on kitchen stools in front of the wall phone immediately after church every single Sunday morning and stayed there until midnight, hoping the phone would ring. Dad probably brought a pillow to the kitchen some nights and rested his head on it on the counter right under the phone, just in case one of our calls still came.

  I remember their anxious, eager voices when we finally talked. It was long distance and expensive, but three minutes every week or so was all they had. By the end of my freshman year, the cute, wide-eyed, preppy students who arrived at the University of Michigan in September turned into long-haired, ratty-jeaned, authority-rejecting, society-overthrowing, war-protesting rebels. Still, Mom and Dad had no way to call and see if my sister or I were okay, or even if we still resembled ourselves. All they could do was grip each other’s hand, squint at the film footage on the nightly news, and pray they didn’t recognize either of their girls in front of any burning administration buildings.

  My daughter and I have unlimited talk and text on our cell phones. Our phones are always with us. We could talk twenty-four hours a day. We could be on FaceTime—talk and see each other twenty-four hours a day—and it wouldn’t cost one penny more. We could, but we don’t. Somehow the fact that constant communication is possible makes us be in touch even less.

  My back-porch friends and I are mourning it all—the unthinkable grief we caused our parents, the unbelievable grief our children are causing us, the unimaginable challenge of trying to get through Seduction 101. We’re passing another round of tissues when one woman raises the cheerful concept that our children’s lack of communication is a sign of healthy, age-appropriate individuation and boundary setting, and that we should celebrate how magnificently our kids are coping on their own. We wrap the woman’s cookie in a napkin, put her fruit punch in a to-go cup, and ask her to leave. The rest of us resume commiserating . . .

  And then it happens. A phone rings. All five remaining friends—none of whom ever changed our identical default iPhone ringtones for fear we might miss a call while we were messing with the settings—lunge for pockets, bras, and purses. Six frantic seconds and then . . . It’s mine! I run inside to finally have the moment I’ve been dreaming of with my beautiful little freshman.

  “Hello??!!” I answer.

  “Hi, sweetie!” I hear.

  It isn’t my beautiful freshman. It’s my mom. The mom I haven’t called in more than a week. The one who’s been sitting in her kitchen across the country wondering how to call me in a way that wouldn’t be intrusive.

  “I found a great recipe for using up extra fruit!” Mom says.

  Mom, who still rehearses things to say that won’t make her sound clingy. Who knew I needed to hear her voice, even if she also knew she would probably be the Wrong Person today.

  “Should I pop it in the mail for you?” she adds warmly.

  Mom’s nonthreatening verbal “tweet.” A lifetime of love in under 280 characters.

  “Thanks, Mom. That would be great,” I answer. I feel her knowing smile through the phone, warming and reassuring me from the inside out. She and Dad made it through my college years and still always find ways to stay connected when I don’t. I don’t feel quite as clueless as I did before. I’m part of the circle—parent, child, parent, child. I feel Mom connect the ends and wrap it around me like a hug.

  And now I know with all my heart that if I just wait another twenty or thirty years, I’ll hear my girl say exactly what I say next:

  “I’m glad you called, Mom. You’re exactly who I want to talk to right now.”

  35.

  THE LAST CHAMPIONS OF PHOTO ALBUM GUILT

  Photos. I need to discuss this situation before I explode.

  My parents’ generation doesn’t think about it anymore. Their boxes of unorganized pictures will simply be bequeathed to the next in line.

  My daughter’s generation doesn’t need to think about it. Their pictures are shared or deleted instantly or stored for them automatically in t
he cloud.

  My generation doesn’t want to think about it. It’s too huge and hopeless. My friends leave the room when I bring it up. Nobody wants to be my photo-problem friend. The thought of our billions of beloved pictures—unorganized, un-albumed, unprinted, unedited, unlabeled, un-downloaded, and unbacked up in various abandoned systems, stranded on various devices all over the house—makes everyone a little bit sick. The images that mean the most make us a lot sick. We know they’re there . . . someplace. Waiting . . .

  I would leave the room myself when I bring it up, except I can’t find the door to get away from myself. Especially not in the middle of the night, which is when my brain always wants to start the conversation.

  3:00 a.m. Photo album agony hour. Eyes wide open.

  My days are full of all sorts of other goals at this transitional time of life—a healthy, normal urge to get perspective on the past, throw out what doesn’t matter, and treasure what does. Cleaning closets and bathroom cabinets. Nice, satisfying jobs I could theoretically begin and complete in a matter of hours.

  At 3:00 a.m., when absolutely nothing can be done, I think of all those pictures.

  No generation before or after will have the photo problem that people of my generation have. Another burden we silently carry because no one can stand to think about it, let alone discuss it. When our mothers raised children, one roll of twelve- or twenty-four-exposure film lasted a year. They had only two dozen prints per year to manage. When our children raise children, every moment of their little lives will be automatically archived on multiple smart devices. They’ll have even less to manage.

  My generation? So much to manage. We were the last generation of the film years, when it was suddenly possible to shoot hundreds of pictures per event, not per lifetime. Thirty-six-exposure rolls of film, thirty-minute photo processors on every corner. Hundreds and hundreds of prints and negatives, with no way to keep track of them all. My photo situation was completely out of control by the time my daughter was six hours old.