Fifty Things That Aren't My Fault

by Cathy Guisewite

  I gave up on the lightbulb and lit a candle. Less risk of fire with a live flame than a grounded lamp, it seems. But maybe it’s better this way. For a lot of reasons, maybe the candle’s more appropriate tonight.

  In front of me is the spirit-soothing candle and the laptop full of all those unfinished sentences. Behind me is my life. To my left is my iPhone, in case someone wants to rescue me from an evening of solitary reflection, even though I told everyone I know that I’m busy tonight. To my right is a small cup containing fifty-seven frozen M&M’s. Fifty-two is the “serving size,” but three M&M’s were slightly chipped, so I put five extra ones in the cup to make sure I had the proper amount and also to reward myself for being so conscientious. I banned M&M’s from my house years ago, but they used to have such power over me, I thought they might be a portal to the truth, so I invited them back in for the evening. I spent so many years hiding them from myself in the freezer that I came to prefer M&M’s frozen solid. Ditto donuts. Ditto Girl Scout cookies. Ditto . . . never mind. Those aren’t the truths I’m interested in at the moment.

  I would be in my pajamas except I live in Los Angeles and 8:30 p.m. is way too early to be found under rubble in pj’s in case the Big One happens tonight. It would appear I had no life. I would be crushed, so I wouldn’t have a life, but it would appear that I had no life before I had no life. In this town, you need to either fall asleep fully dressed or stay conscious until 10:00 p.m., when you can confidently change into pajamas without worrying that anyone will whisper at your funeral that you went to bed too early. Even all those young, creative TV and film people in town who go to meetings in what appear to be pajamas change into actual clothes in the evening, before changing back into pajamas for bed. Those are the rules.

  When I was twenty-five I sat at a kitchen table like this with paper and a pen. Computers and serving sizes hadn’t been invented yet, so I wrote my frustrations out in M&M’s and ate them one paragraph at a time. I scrawled the first drawing that would turn into my first comic strip on a night just like this, when I was full of chaos and had run out of chocolate.

  Tonight’s a lot like that except a great big chunk of “What am I going to do with my life?” already got answered. The things filling my mind are different and the chocolate’s being rationed . . . but sitting here at a kitchen table—where I’ve always come to try to make peace with what is and was—feels almost exactly the same. I understand my dad now when he tells me that on the inside he feels just like he did when he was a boy. “I can hardly believe it,” Dad says, way too wistfully for me to be able to stand it. “I can hardly believe it when I look in a mirror and I see that I’m ninety years old.”

  I squint a little to block out the room around me so I can try to imagine I really am twenty-five again. I try to call up exactly who I was and how I felt that depressing night that launched the unbelievably wonderful life I’ve been so blessed to have. I squint a little more so I can block out how old my hands look now, which is ruining the whole poignant experience. I pull my sleeves down so I won’t be distracted by the sight of aging arms.

  I think of the sad song I used to listen to over and over back then when I sat at a table just like this, searching for answers and then searching for jokes that would save me from the search for answers. I want to click on YouTube so I can see and hear the soundtrack of that time in my life . . . but I’m way too experienced to fall for that trick tonight. There’s no coming back to anything productive after clicking on YouTube at 8:30 p.m. A 30% OFF EVERYTHING! offer pops up in the upper right corner of my laptop screen, but I delete it without even peeking. I am a rock.

  As for the M&M’s, they’ve already proven to be a portal to nothing tonight except how much I want more M&M’s. I anticipated that trick too, and destroyed the rest of the bag before I sat down at the table. The only thing left to eat in the freezer is a bag of frozen lima beans, and hungry as I am for distraction, I’m not remotely tempted to leap up and refill my treat cup with a serving of those.

  I watch the candle and let the song I used to listen to play in my mind.

  I remember exactly who I was and how I felt that night when I was twenty-five, when I did that first frantic drawing: I was a success in the advertising business and a failure in relationships. I was proud to be on my own and miserable that I wasn’t with someone. I was confident, competent, and unbelievably insecure. Strong and submissive. Brave and terrified. Focused and confused. I sought guidance from the vending machine. Refuge in the refrigerator. I gained everything but clarity.

  I was thrilled to be part of a dynamic new generation of career women, but I couldn’t stand to look at myself. I grew up with the most loving, supportive parents on earth and was ashamed to tell them how bad I felt about myself. I had wonderful sisters and good friends and was embarrassed to let them know I was having a hard time. I couldn’t admit to anyone how complicated everything was. I don’t think I knew how complicated it was. I was too tangled up in the middle of a great big cultural shift to have any perspective at all. At the exact time in history when women were demanding respect, equality, and independence, I let my sad love life define my existence and ate my way into solitary confinement. I felt completely alone.

  Mom taught me to express my feelings by writing them down. Dad taught me there’s humor in almost every situation; that when things seem their worst, there’s almost always a different way to look at them that can rescue you from feeling horrible. The misery of that night wound up as a journal entry because of my inner Mom . . . and then turned into a scribbled self-portrait that was so pitiful, it made me laugh out loud because of Dad. The combination made me feel so much better, I spent the next thirty-four years doing pretty much the exact same thing every single day.

  I take a long, spirit-soothing breath of sage-scented air. I try to imagine how I would have felt that night if I’d known what would unfold from that first miserable scribble. How the drawing that saved me from feeling bad would start something that would connect me so deeply to women who felt exactly as alone as I did. Women I’ve never met to whom I will feel bonded like best friends for the rest of my life. Soul sisters. Anonymous confidantes, lots of times, because it was hard to admit weakness at a time when our generation was fighting so hard for women to be perceived as strong, equal, and able. The comic strip syndicate urged me to give the main character my name so the words would seem more authentic. Many, many, many days, I wished she was called anything else so I could at least pretend it wasn’t as authentic as it was.

  I try to imagine how I would have felt back then if I’d known how many women will open diaries, drawers, or scrapbooks sometime in the future, find faded comic strips they’ve tucked away, and smile, as I do, at everything we went through together:

  All those now-unimaginable early battles over whether women should be allowed to work and girls should be allowed to play sports . . .

  All that money spent to look professional only to be criticized if we wore men-style suits or ogled if we wore skirts. And no matter what we wore, still having to spend part of our workdays explaining why it wasn’t our job to wash the cups in the coffee room . . .

  All that fighting to be as successful as a man only to have to act less successful than men if we wanted one of them to be interested in us . . .

  All those traditions we were suddenly free to break that emboldened us to walk through so many new doors, but kept some of us from even peeking in some of the old doors—not getting married, not having children, not living near family . . .

  All those dreams of having it all that deteriorated into having all of a Sara Lee cheesecake, with all the doors locked and the blinds pulled down . . .

  All those insane miracle diets and all the ways we continued to blame ourselves when they didn’t perform miracles . . .

  All those paychecks surrendered to the shoe department, all those magnificent muscle-cramping, toe-crushing pedestals upon which we m
ade our stands—to be respected, noticed, loved—the glorious confidence we had from the ankle down . . .

  All our brave, devoted dads, who had to learn to juggle being their daughters’ protectors while helping launch us into a world that felt so new and unsafe.

  And all our beloved, mortified mothers, who were so excited for us to do all those things they hadn’t been able to, but were afraid for what it all meant. Who worried like our dads, exactly like we do now with our children, about all the new ways they were powerless to protect us.

  It was humbling to get to be a voice for a little bit of what a lot of us shared, and unbelievably reassuring when I heard from readers. Letters were like full body hugs. Lots of them made me cry. “Thank heavens,” I’d think reading them, “thank heavens there’s someone else in the world who did that . . . or thought that . . . or felt just like that . . .” It made everything infinitely more bearable to know I wasn’t the only one. It made it possible for me to keep doing my job for as long as I did because so many other women let me know we were in it together.

  My eyes move to my empty treat cup. These emotions are too much for a sage candle to handle. I need comfort food. I get up and pour some frozen lima beans into the cup. Utterly unsatisfying. I try the refrigerator: leftover stir-fry, fat-free yogurt, mini carrots. The pantry: low-sodium garbanzo beans, high-fiber bran flakes, organic quinoa. I remember that in a recent life-affirming, protein-boosted, power-smoothie rush, I recommitted to healthier habits and did a full kitchen cleanse, getting rid of everything that might lead me to do what I want to do right now. The kind of take-charge act that’s so exhilarating at 9:00 a.m. and so irritating to revisit at 9:00 p.m., when the day settles down and there’s nothing left to eat.

  I return to my chair with a glass of natural berry-flavored spring water and take an uncomforting sip. I add Go to the grocery store and restock everything to my list. We’re not quite done, I think. Not quite done at all.

  This time of life is beyond unnerving and unsettling. I’m having conversations with friends that include words that used to refer only to people my parents’ age. Old people words. Knee replacement. Hearing loss. Osteoporosis. And much, much worse. I’ve lost dear friends decades before I thought I’d have to say goodbye to anyone my age. Attended funerals before I even had time to send a get-well card. Just like that. My whole generation is reeling from the stunning truth—that we, who are way too young and hip to ever look or act old, are not too young to pass away.

  I had a six-month period last year in which so much started failing and changing in such a short amount of time, it got scary to get out of bed. Rattled to the core. As if the earth were actually moving, as if I—along with most of the people I know—was and am in a great big life shift, a rearrangement of all that’s familiar. Many mornings still make me want to grab the trash bag and just start throwing things out, to take charge in any way I can of anything I can.

  If it weren’t enough to have cherished people, places, and things disappearing, other things keep not disappearing. Things that are still on the to-do list a lifetime later. All kinds of problems my generation thought we’d solved for the next generation that aren’t solved at all.

  There are superstar role model women in every walk of life now, who will help our daughters and granddaughters believe anything is possible. There are wonderful enlightened men who are 100 percent equal partners in everything, who are redefining what it is to be a man for our sons and grandsons. A whole new generation of girls and boys who are being raised with a whole different set of expectations for themselves and one another.

  But there are also still great big inequalities that prevent a lot of women from being all they can be or even feeling sort of good about who they already are. Very few women have time or energy at the end of the day to take care of themselves as lovingly as they take care of everyone else. There are still thousands of things that chip away at women’s sense of competence and confidence. Things that use up our days and will use up our daughters’ and granddaughters’ days, things that subconsciously erode feelings of self-worth and achievement.

  There are still impossible choices that most women have to face, which most men don’t have to face, when they want to start families and careers at the same time. Still huge differences in what men can earn, how much time they have, and how they feel about themselves—like how men can expect man-size pay and promotions . . . how a successful man is usually revered and a successful woman is still often suspect . . . how men can be confident that the pants they’re wearing when they board an airplane for a cross-country flight will still fit by the time the plane lands. Great big imbalances still, in many families, over who does what.

  There are still unthinkable inequalities between races, cultures, and lifestyles that we thought we were stomping out in all our marches on the U of M Diag, way back in those heady days of promise, back in those first pairs of liberating jeans.

  There’s the profound grief that the planet we thought everyone was surely on board to protect feels so utterly unprotected, the helpless feeling that my little donations, recycling bins, and vegan lunches aren’t going to save the world.

  And hovering over the frustration of everything we can’t fix, the awareness my generation has of the big looming deadlines—that we’re all in some version of being on the brink of Something Else. Even though we all surely know we’re in this together, there will be many, many days and nights to come in which we feel completely alone all over again. We’re way more aware that every second of these days should be treasured, even as so many of them speed past and seem out of our control.

  Days so full of being the guardians of others.

  Days with so many, many dreams still on the list.

  Days wasted feeling bad about what we didn’t do in the previous 20,000 days.

  Days in which, on top of everything else, we should be “reimagining and reinventing ourselves for chapter two.”

  I blow out my spirit-soothing, sage-scented candle and shut my laptop full of unfinished sentences. I sit in the dark, wrapped in gratitude for the wonderful life I’ve gotten to have. Thankful beyond comprehension for my parents—Superman and Supermom—who raised me with such devotion and embedded a sense of humor so deeply, it will help me experience everything the rest of my life brings—even all the things I just said—with hope and optimism.

  I’m thankful to the bottom of my heart for my daughter and stepson, who expanded my world with love and joy a billion times over.

  And for my sisters—the wonderful ones in my family and the universe of women who feel like my sisters. All those dear women I’ve never met—and all their beautiful mothers—who helped me feel so relieved that I wasn’t the only one during all those years I sat in a room by myself drawing a comic strip. Who helped me keep my sense of humor and sense of purpose, helped me know I’m connected to something way bigger than myself.

  We all have stories of our past boxed up in garages, storage rooms, and cupboards. It’s liberating to unload what’s there. But we also all have stories of our past boxed up in our hearts, and those are even more difficult to sort. Stories based on crumpled-up moments we’ve collected since childhood: the mean thing someone said . . . the dances where no one asked us to dance. Moments we translated into “facts”: I’m too ugly, too weird, too awkward. “Facts” verified by just enough as we got older that they grew into stories about ourselves that had a stronger grip on us than our DNA. Stories we’ve repeated for so long they can still work on us, holding us back at a time of life we should feel most free. Stories enhanced by women’s beautiful impulse to take responsibility for anything, which can leave us blaming ourselves for everything.

  I’m deeply thankful for all the ways other women continue to lift me out of all that and let me know I’m not alone. For women’s bravery, compassion and inspiring examples of how to rise above, persevere, and create new life from tiny specks of poss
ibility. For the support that will help all of us let go of what was and take on what’s ahead.

  That’s the truth I needed to revisit tonight, when so much is changing and there’s still so much to do. How important all those connections have been to get us this far, and how much we need them now. The love of family and friends . . . a smile between strangers at the mall . . . the gift of seeing another woman do the impossible . . . the shared grief of all those lines and non-functioning sinks in all those ladies’ rooms . . . the way we can look across a room of women and recognize a little bit of ourselves in a hundred different faces . . . the powerful bonds between us.

  That’s the beautiful truth to carry right now, when we feel crushed for time and squashed in the middle of everything—that all those hearts are wide open to help one another through what’s next. We can give one another strength to raise the trash bags and empty all the storage boxes of what holds us back. The perspective and permission to declare the many, many things that aren’t our fault.

  I remember that other truth, too . . . that thing all those especially great women—our moms—told us. “Just do the next thing,” Mom always said. “You don’t have to figure it all out right now. Just do the next thing.”

  I stand up, walk to the sink in the dark, dump out the rest of my uncomforting berry-flavored spring water, and smile. It’s 10:00 p.m. in Los Angeles. It’s safe to put on pajamas.

  In Loving Memory of Superman