Fifty Things That Aren't My Fault

by Cathy Guisewite

  Our first weeks together, before I had to go back to work, were surreal. This topped all previous obsessive relationships in my life by such a massive degree, I could barely breathe. This was way, way better than Mr. Desk and Mr. File Cabinet. This made me lose my mind. I couldn’t think one coherent non-baby thought if I was anywhere near my baby, even if she was sound asleep. If I was in the room with her, I just stared, transfixed. If I was in the house, but in a different room, every cell of me was listening for sounds of her stirring.

  If I was in the house and my baby was awake, it was still insane love, but also pandemonium. That sleep-deprived, nonstop frenzy of diapers, bottles, rocking, walking, onesie changes, and first-time-mom freak-outs that no one who hasn’t had an infant can comprehend. When she finally took a nap, it meant I had one hour flat to do everything I couldn’t do when she was awake, except when she finally took a nap, all I wanted to do was stand over her crib and gaze at her some more.

  Getting back to writing and drawing a comic strip wasn’t even in the top five thousand things to do on the list. My great big career of expressing the challenges of being a woman, suddenly outweighed by a six-pound, four-ounce girl. I couldn’t believe that anyone ever did anything else after a baby was born. Couldn’t believe anyone could go back to a job. Couldn’t believe I had to.

  Couldn’t believe how simple it had seemed to work from home with a baby before I tried doing it. My leave ended and I was back on deadline much too soon. After five frantic days of trying my beautiful new “napping-cooing-snuggling” work schedule, I hired a babysitter and moved my work supplies back to an office space in a different zip code.

  My mother was right that it felt as if the comic strip was her first grandchild and my first child. Cathy was “born” when I was twenty-six years old, and had been the total focus of my life ever since. I had a new child to support now, but I was also definitely not finished raising the first one. Besides the fact that I was under contract to keep doing it, I couldn’t pretend the comic strip didn’t still need me or that I didn’t still need it. It had been part of every minute of my life for sixteen years before my daughter was born. “A teenager.” Mom glowed. “Now you have an infant and a teenager!”

  I also had a licensing company, which I’d set up a few years earlier, that I couldn’t simply close. A separate office of several people making all sorts of deals for character merchandise and advertising endorsements, requiring all sorts of other jokes, art, meetings, trips, and appearances. Right in the middle of everything, one friend gently asked if adopting a baby as a single person, with no family members living within 3,000 miles—when I already had the full-time job of running a licensing company on top of the full-time job of doing a daily comic strip, when I was already completely overwhelmed by deadlines and obligations—if becoming a mom on my own just then wasn’t a teensy bit overreaching. Even now, when I think back on how 100 percent right my friend was, it’s irritating to remember the question.

  It was exactly what women had just spent the previous century fighting so hard for—the right to go as far and high as we possibly could in our careers and have a family at the same time. It’s what we’d finally won—what, for men, had always been a birthright. Of course I could do it all.

  And I did do it all . . . just like a man. Since I became a mother through adoption, someone who wasn’t me went through nine months of pregnancy and gave birth to my child. Since I was the breadwinner, I went to the office every day while a woman I supported—ultimately, a live-in nanny—stayed at home with the baby. It’s more than a little uncomfortable to think of it this way, but as close to doing it all as I got was doing it all just like an old-fashioned dad would have.

  I flip to the “working mom” section of the next magazine.

  Page 96: “Make an Animal Magnet Parade on Your File Cabinet to Teach the Alphabet While You Work!”

  Page 102: “Peekaboo Tents Keep Little Ones Happy in Mom’s Office!”

  Another tear plops down. These women aren’t stay-at-home moms who made the hard choice of giving up or putting off career dreams to be with their children full-time. They’re executives with changing tables next to their printers! Architects with pint-size easels and crayons by their drawing boards! Accountants with playpens in the corner! Working women who look like I thought I would look! Women who figured out how to do what I couldn’t do for ten minutes in a row. What kind of concentration superpowers do these modern Wonder Women have?? How is this new generation of moms, who still face all the impossible pressures and choices mine did—who still live in a country where pay isn’t equal, flextime rarely exists, on-site day care is rare, parental leave is still a battle—how are they finding the energy and ingenuity to mesh all the parts of their lives in such incredible, inventive ways? How do they even have time to have their pictures taken for the articles?

  When I tried bringing my daughter to the office when she was a little older, it was still impossible. “Mom, up!” . . . “Mom, watch!” . . . “Mom, potty!” . . . “Mom, play!” . . . Each “Mom!” would set me back another half hour. I’d have to start all over . . . try to get back into a quiet, creative brain . . . and then she’d be there, my sticky sweetie, climbing up my leg squealing “MOM!” while I tried to write jokes about a childless cartoon character. If I’d ever thought to make a play tent in my office, I would have crawled into it and hid. I always wound up giving up on any work and just playing on the floor with her on our “office” days, shoving everything I was going to do to the next day’s list.

  I know that if I’d been with my daughter twenty-four hours a day, I’d still be right here feeling as though I hadn’t been there enough. I know that every mom does exactly the best she can. That we all have days full of compromise and impossible choices. Every one of us looks back and longs for another chance. Even the very best moms must feel inadequate compared with the perfect moms in the magazines. Still . . . I flip through the pages faster . . . woman after woman finding ways to make a little more time . . . sweet project after project reminding me what I could still do . . .

  I’m becoming frantic to make up for lost glue stick time when the hygienist opens the waiting room door and tells me it’s my turn. As if having my teeth cleaned is anywhere on the list of things that are important right now. If this were a movie, the heroine would charge out of the dentist’s office, race home, scoop up her daughter, and reconnect with what really matters. But I’m the Heroine of My Own Life, and charging out of the office to race home and reconnect with what really matters will incur a $50 cancellation fee, which would make me feel even worse than I already do.

  I force myself to follow the hygienist to the Chair. I numb my emotions enough to endure the tooth cleaning by thinking up farm animals my daughter and I could create out of the little vacuum sweeper tube the hygienist sticks in my mouth. I imagine how her scrapy tools would be perfect for modeling Play-Doh.

  “How’s your daughter?” my hygienist—mother of four—asks, as she always does, right when my mouth is too full of equipment to defend myself. She adds with a little sigh, as she always does, “It must be so wonderful to have a job where you can work out of your house!”

  What feels like a lifetime later, I’m finally released, jump into my car, and hurl home.

  “Mom’s home!” I call, running in the front door. “Wake up, sweetie! We’re going to make things! We can paint paper cups and plant carrot seeds! Create egg carton caterpillars! Laminate flower petals onto place mats!”

  I see rustling under her fuzzy pink blankie on the couch. My heart rustles in response. There’s still time. I didn’t miss all my chances!

  A foot sticks out and wiggles.

  A giant, size 7 foot.

  I pull the blankie back. When I left two hours ago, she was three years old and getting tucked in for her nap by a babysitter. Now there’s an nineteen-year-old sprawled on the couch covered in potato chip crumbs and e
lectronic devices.

  “WHERE’S MY BABY?!,” I scream. “WHERE’S THE BABYSITTER?!!”

  My daughter yawns, squints, and laughs.

  “Hey, Mom. What’s for dinner?”

  The only thing about her that still resembles my baby is the fact that she’s back on a once-every-two-hour feeding schedule. I plop down on the couch and wrap my arms around the sixteen years that went by on the way home from the dentist. I take a deep breath of her: Victoria’s Secret body mist and Pringles. Eau de Nineteen-Year-Old.

  I squeeze her to me and announce, “For dinner we’re having Silly Sausage Pasta and Smiley Face Squash, and after dinner we’re going to make a big, sparkly Summer Reading Goal Prize Box!”

  Maybe she’s just sleepy enough from her midday, beginning-of-the-summer teen coma to not protest. Or maybe part of her longs for a little of what we missed along the way like I do . . . In any case, instead of the automatic recoil, she hugs me back and rests her head on my shoulder.

  I’m grateful for it all. Grateful for her almost-grown-up arms that can hold a laptop, smartphone, iPad, TV remote, and her mother at the same time. Grateful for the million ways that being her mom has made my life fuller and better. Grateful that I had a chance to try. Grateful for how much she loves me even though we never made a fairy tea set out of bakeable oven clay.

  Really, really grateful I only need to get my teeth cleaned every six months.

  41.

  COOL WHIPPED

  Where’s the Cool Whip, Mom?”

  “I had to destroy it.”

  “Destroy it, as in you threw it out? Or destroy it, you ate it?”

  “It was your fault that it was open,” I say, defending myself.

  “I didn’t even know we had Cool Whip until you asked if I wanted some on the strawberries you were trying to get me to eat,” she answers in her best self-righteous teen voice.

  “Exactly. I opened the Cool Whip so you’d eat some fruit!” I reply with my best self-righteous mom shot.

  “I had one blob on a strawberry. Where’s the rest of it, Mom?”

  “I told you. I had to destroy it.”

  “And you say I have no self-control!” she huffs.

  “I have LOTS of self-control!” I huff back. “I let some of it thaw naturally instead of chipping it out frozen solid! I . . .”

  I spent nineteen years trying to expose my daughter to art, music, dance, theater, literature, and the wonders of nature. All those conversations in the botanical gardens, she’ll forget. All those concerts, gone. This, she’ll remember. The big takeaway from childhood: Mother can’t be in the house with an open container of Cool Whip.

  She stares at me with critical college student eyes. I search them for a flicker of her five-year-old eyes—the ones that saw me as perfect, back when she wanted to be just like me. All I can find are the teen ones, recalculating my standing and reaffirming her superiority.

  She shakes her head. “Wow.”

  I’m not sure if it’s because of shame or surrender or just because this scene is so ridiculous, but her “Wow” makes me start laughing, which makes her start laughing. And then we’re laughing together, doubled over each other in the kitchen. I’m so far from being perfect, and she’s so close to needing me not to be perfect. There’s relief, I think, that the guard can finally be let down. If she can remember this moment—where her old vision of me and her new vision of me blur into some loving acceptance of Mom as an Actual Human—it’s surely more precious than anything they tried to teach her through the self-guided tour headset I forced her to wear at the Natural History Museum.

  Still laughing, she turns away from me and scans the pantry. “Where are all the chocolate chip cookie dough granola bars, Mom?”

  Then again, it’s going to be a long evening.

  42.

  NEVER, EVER DO WHAT I SAY

  Top of the fifth with no outs, a man on first and the pitch is wide and outside . . .” Baseball. Soundtrack of my dad. I’m sitting on the couch in Florida with him, watching a game. The happy, homey whir of the KitchenAid mixer starts up in the background. My ninety-year-old mom is baking, something she hasn’t done in years!

  This is exactly what I should be doing, I know that now. Just being here with them. Not meddling in my parents’ life for once. Not micromanaging like I did on earlier visits. No TiVo. No trying to convince them they wouldn’t feel “so overwhelmed with stuff” if they’d just let me help them get rid of some stuff.

  There’s comfort in their stuff, I appreciate that now. There’s security in the basket of Christmas cards that’s still in their living room every June, waiting for addresses to be double-checked in the address book, in the pile of magazines “we might still need to clip something out of to send to someone” on their kitchen counter. In their tidy stacks of scrap paper made from the unwritten-upon parts of stationery they cut off and saved. They were raised in a time and a culture that taught them not to waste, so they use the backs of every piece of paper, keep little stashes of “perfectly good” used rubber bands, twist ties, and rinsed-out Baggies. The care they take to “save things for later” implies there will be a “later,” and it’s deeply, sweetly reassuring.

  I have no agenda left except to completely surrender to their system and honor the rules of their home. It’s been unbelievably peaceful here so far, which is probably what inspired Mom to bake today after all these years. Nothing, not even the future of one old paper clip, is being threatened by me on this visit.

  “Two strikes, one ball, with a man on second and one out . . .” comes the announcer from the TV set. The whir of the KitchenAid . . . Happy, homey, relaxed, perfect.

  Dad’s loving this too, I can tell. He turns his head toward the sound of the mixer. “Mother’s at it again!” he proclaims with a grin.

  “What do you suppose she’s making for us?” I ask, feeling as giddy as a five-year-old, pretty sure it will be those fudge bars Mom knows I love so much. I snuggle into my childhood. Smooth my hand on the familiar fabric next to me. Along with all the used envelopes, old catalogs, and twist ties, they never got rid of their couch. I’m sitting on the same couch next to the same table next to the same lamp that’s been in their living room my whole life. The paintings my sister did in high school are still on the wall. The coasters Mom and Dad brought home from their honeymoon in Niagara Falls sixty-five years ago are still on the coffee table. By hanging on to everything forever, my careful, frugal parents have kept our family’s sweet, safe nest perfectly intact.

  “Oh, Mom’s not baking.” Dad laughs. “She’s shredding!”

  Chocolate? Coconut? “I didn’t know you could shred with a mixer!” I laugh happily.

  “That’s not the mixer.” Dad beams. “That’s our new document shredder!”

  It takes more than a moment to register, but when it does, my happy laugh is over.

  “Document shredder??” I repeat.

  “Yes!” Dad says proudly. “We finally picked one up last week and have been going to town!”

  My happy laugh is definitely over. My surrender’s over. My micromanaging moratorium is over.

  “Stop her!” I yell, jumping to my feet. “Stop her before it’s too late!” I charge down the hall into Mom and Dad’s home office and throw my body between my mother and the nice new piece of equipment she and Dad bought without my permission.

  “Surprise!” Mom exclaims, trying to reach past me with a handful of papers. “I’m doing what you’ve been telling us to do for months!”

  “Stop, Mom!! What’s—in—your—hand??” I stammer, reaching for the papers, trying to not sound as panicked as I sound.

  “Oh, these are just some old college things,” Mom says, dodging my reach and aiming for the slot in the top of the shredder. “Out they go!”

  “NO!” I say, snatching the papers before the shredder does. “You can’t
throw these out!”

  “Ancient history!” Mom proclaims. “Who needs them?”

  “I do! It’s your history!” I look at the yellowed page on top, a college newspaper article with my mother’s maiden name in the byline. “You wrote these!” I say, clutching the papers to me.

  “For heaven’s sake,” Mom says, reaching toward a tall stack on her desk, “you were right! It’s time to unload all this stuff!”

  “What stuff??” I ask, horrified. My eyes do a speed scan of the room, searching for familiar piles. I drop to the floor and peer through the little plastic window on the front of the shredder. The shredder is half full. “What have you already shredded??”

  “Just some old bills, bank statements, calendars . . .” Mom shakes her head with a laugh.

  “Family calendars??” I choke. “You shredded family calendars??”

  “Oh, I’ve barely gotten started on those!” Mom says.

  I yank the top off the shredder, reach in and pull out a handful of shreds.

  “We had them going back to 1955!” she adds.

  I spread the shreds on the floor, try to match any minuscule scrap with any other. “Nineteen . . . no . . . here’s . . . no . . . These pieces are so tiny! I’ll never get them stuck back together!”

  “You most certainly won’t!” Mom says proudly. “Your father was afraid someone would go through our recycling bin and try to piece together our old electric bills, so we got the micro cross cut shredder! Burglar proof!”

  “What else have you been shredding??” I ask helplessly, the teensy pieces of our beloved family history running through my fingers like confetti.

  “All kinds of things! Old medical records! Letters! Pictures of people we don’t recognize!”