Furiously Happy

by Jenny Lawson

  VICTOR: Huh.

  ME: I mean, except the government. They’ll probably be concerned when three cats suddenly disappear off the grid. It’s gonna be like The Matrix. But for cats.

  VICTOR: Right. I’m going to sell you to a carnival.

  ME: Someone bring me some tinfoil and duct tape.

  Winner: The government, I guess, because the cats stubbornly refuse to keep the tinfoil hats on. It’s like they want the government to read their minds. Which they actually might, now that I’m thinking about it, because they might be sending messages to the government asking to be removed from this house before they get laminated. I can see their point.

  That Baby Was Delicious

  I don’t even remember the first time I did meth in front of my child.

  This is mostly because I’ve never actually done meth. But it’s a good way to start out a chapter about how you fear you’re failing as a parent because it sets the bar of child-rearing very, very low and everything you do that isn’t meth in front of your children seems incredibly impressive by comparison.

  My daughter, Hailey, is now nine and so far she shows none of the anxiety and crippling shyness that I’d already begun perfecting at her age. When people who know me spend time with her they are always shocked at how well adjusted and happy she is. This is an incredibly insulting compliment, but one I have a hard time arguing with, so I usually just say, “Thank you?”

  Frankly, I think parents have very little input in creating the positive aspects of their children’s personalities. My sister and I were raised in the exact same way and we could not be more different. This is not to say that you can’t fuck up a kid by being an asshole, because children are small sponges and will mimic all of your worst behaviors at the least opportune time. But I believe that usually your kids’ positive qualities come less from your making them awesome and more from just not intentionally squashing the random things they’re inherently born with that make them awesome.

  Some people think this is a cop-out that people like me use in order to justify the fact that I don’t have my child enrolled in 287 different extracurricular activities and lessons, and those people are right. I’m sorry. You were probably expecting something defensive and brave right there but the truth is that I’m terrible at being one of those moms who can sit in the bleachers or dance studios and make forced small talk with parents who all seem to know (and secretly hate) each other and who never seem to show up in pajamas or mismatched shoes. I’m continually saying something awkward and inappropriate, like “I thought this was just for fun” or “No, actually I don’t think that toddler is too fat for ballet.”

  I believe it was Sartre who said, “Hell is other people,” and I suspect he wrote that after spending an hour with overinvolved parents who won’t stop yelling at coaches, instructors, or crying four-year-olds who really just want a snow cone.

  Even if you do enroll your kid in one or two lessons or clubs you’re always hearing about some other, better, and more exclusive club where they learn to twirl batons while reciting Mandarin poetry. You immediately worry that if you don’t enroll your child there they will end up homeless or legless or be turned into carpet or something. Whatever it is, it must be awful, because almost all of the parents I know seem to be competing to see how much shit they can pack into their child’s life.

  I’m not judging those people though, because it’s not like I haven’t tried that route myself. Hailey’s done gymnastics, piano, jazz, hip-hop, ballet, tumbling, choir, but none of them held her attention for more than a year. She rather enjoyed dance classes but seemed to be setting a record for how many times she could fall. Honestly, she is smart and beautiful and kind but she could manage to fall while duct-taped flat on her back on the floor.

  When she was five she took ballet lessons at one of those classes where the parents aren’t allowed inside the studio (because some parents are yelly assholes and most studios recognize this) but the lesson played on a closed-circuit television in the lobby so we could all watch an hour of kindergartners not following instructions in French. Victor and I watched while the small children leaped across the floor until it was Hailey’s turn and she did really well except that she was so busy watching herself in the mirror that she ran right into the wall and then bounced off the wall and fell headfirst into a large, rubber trash can. Her tiny, flailing legs were the only things we could see and we were panicked, but Hailey thought it was hilarious (after she was pulled out of the trash can). The people who did not find it hilarious were the other parents in the lobby, who were not happy about the distraction. I tried to lighten the mood by saying, “Wow. I love that kid, but she cannot hold her alcohol, am I right?” No one laughed.

  Soon afterward we moved to the one thing she really excelled at, drama classes. She’s a natural on the stage and loves performing in front of hundreds of strangers. I suspect she was switched at birth.

  When I was a kid in rural Texas none of this stuff seemed to exist. I didn’t know anyone who took dance classes. No one knew martial arts. You could take band classes in school, but only if you could afford to buy or rent an instrument, and my family couldn’t, so instead when the other kids went to band I stayed with the poorer kids and we had a class called Music Memory. It was basically a room filled with old records and a teacher who was usually asleep, and we’d listen to scratchy Mozart pieces while showing each other how switchblades worked and learning how to pick locks. This sounds like comedic exaggeration, but it’s not. I felt a little sorry for myself at the time because all the cool kids had their shiny boxes of spit valves and flutes, but I learned a lot in Music Memory and I’ve had more occasions to pick a lock than I’ve ever had to play a bassoon, so I suppose it all worked out in the end.

  Still, you feel shitty as a parent if your kids aren’t doing what all the other kids are doing. My mom could not have been a more perfect mother, but she never took me to lessons or dedicated entire days to forced quality time with me. So, I guess sometimes the example you set is the lesson, and the lesson I took was learning that the world didn’t center on me and that I was responsible for making the most of my time. But my mom read. Lots. To me, and (more importantly) in front of me. And that made all the difference. So I guess I also learned that my mom’s time was important too, and that’s a lesson I’m still trying to learn now when the guilt about Hailey’s not having a perfectly scheduled life creeps in.

  Occasionally Hailey complains of being bored, but boredom is good. It makes up most of your life and if you don’t figure out how to conquer it when you’re a kid then you’re sort of fucked as an adult. Learning to combat boredom is a lesson in and of itself and it’s one you don’t have to drive your kid anywhere for them to learn. The downside though is that your kid is probably just like you, in that boredom sometimes drives them to do incredibly stupid things. Necessity is the mother of invention but boredom is the mother of doing bafflingly stupid shit. Setting things on fire, taking apart the TV, riding goats, accidentally eating foot powder, letting twenty-five tadpoles hatch into frogs in my bedroom because I forgot I hid them under my bed, exploring abandoned buildings, burning my eyebrows off with a lighter … these were all things that happened to me during periods of boredom and they were also all things to which I honestly answered “I don’t know” when my baffled mother would see the evidence of wrongdoing and ask me what in the hell I was thinking. Frankly, I still don’t know what I’m doing or why I’m doing it most of the time, but at least I learned early on that this is a normal state of mind (and also that I shouldn’t be trusted with fire).

  Boredom makes you rely on your own imagination, or makes you realize how little you have. My sister, Lisa, and I spent a great deal of our childhood digging holes on our surrounding land for no reason at all. Perhaps when we started we were making caves or looking for bodies, but in the end it just became a matter of digging holes deep enough that we could easily drop into them and disappear completely because it freaked out people d
riving by to see a child waving furiously in an empty field and then suddenly vanishing completely as if being sucked into some sort of parallel dimension. Or at least, that’s what we imagined it looked like. It probably just looked like little girls jumping into holes, which is just as baffling to watch. Later, Lisa pointed out that the place where we were often aggressively digging was directly on top of the rusty propane tank buried in the yard, which was probably not the safest thing ever.

  Luckily the god of How-Did-Children-Survive-in-the-Seventies was looking out for us and we never ended up in a giant fireball, although we once lost a series of holes in the tall grass and forgot about them completely until several months later when we looked up just in time to see our mother drive the riding lawn mower into what looked like a sinkhole. And then she was like, “WHY ARE THERE SO MANY HOLES?” We considered claiming it was the mole people who’d created some sort of Scooby-Doo trap but we didn’t have time to go over all the details so instead we just calmly explained that there were holes because we’d dug them and then she asked why and we honestly stared at each other and said, “I don’t know,” and that was the truth. We were baffled by it ourselves. And maybe that’s why people overschedule their kids now. Maybe it’s to avoid driving your lawn mower over a small cliff made by gopherlike children.

  But still, it seems like it’s overkill to schedule away any chance of boredom. It’s like when your cat brings you dead mice and you want to yell at her but you can’t because she’s just doing it because she thinks you’re a really shitty cat who won’t survive on your own. We’re sort of like that with our children, bringing them private lessons and participation medals and beauty pageant tiaras as if we suspect they don’t have the ability to succeed at stuff without our forcing them into repetitive drills and buying expensive costumes and spending long weekends at competitions and pageants. Plus, now we’ve set up our kids to expect to win at everything and they feel shitty if they don’t because they can see how unaccountably emotionally invested we are in their ability to beat other children.

  When I was a kid I never won anything and when I mentioned it to my mom she looked up from her book and pointed out that I had once been the youngest person in the entire world. Sure, it was only for a millisecond, but it was a record I’d set without even trying. Then I went back to my own book and forgot all about competitions until my own child was born. Then she took the title. Excellence runs in our family, I guess.

  No one ever warns you about the complicated and political decisions regarding lessons and classes and sports you’ll have to make when you become a parent. When I was in eighth grade everyone in Home Economics had to care for flour-sack babies for two weeks to teach us about parenting and no one ever mentioned enrolling your flour baby in sports. Basically, everyone got a sealed paper sack of flour that puffed out flour dust whenever you moved it. You were forced to carry it around everywhere because I guess it was supposed to teach you that babies are fragile and also that they leave stains on all of your shirts. At the end of the two weeks your baby was weighed and if it lost too much weight that meant you were too haphazard with it and were not ready to be a parent. It was a fairly unrealistic child-rearing lesson. Basically all we learned about babies in that class was that you could use superglue to seal your baby’s head after you dropped it. And that eighth-grade boys will play keep-away with your baby if they see it so it’s really safer in the trunk of your car. And that you should just wrap your baby up in plastic cling wrap so that its insides don’t explode when it’s rolling around in the trunk on your way home. And also that if you don’t properly store your baby in the freezer your baby will get weevils and then you have to throw your baby in the garbage instead of later making it into a cake that you’ll be graded on. (The next two weeks of class focused on cooking and I used my flour baby to make a pineapple upside-down cake. My baby was delicious. These are the things you never realize are weird until you start writing them down.)

  Recently Hailey decided she wanted to be in Girl Scouts. I told her I thought it was a cookie pyramid scheme, but she loves it. I go to her troop meetings and hide in the back and try not to look like I’m uncomfortable around the other parents.

  Last week I sat in my usual corner and as another mom sat down next to me and struck up a light conversation I silently congratulated myself on being a normal person. A few seconds later Hailey looked up from across the room with the other Girl Scouts and, smiling widely, exclaimed, “MOMMY! You made a friend! Good for you!” And then I fell through the floor because being embarrassed by your child when you’re an adult is much like being embarrassed by your parents when you’re a teenager, but worse, because you can’t roll your eyes at them and pretend that they just don’t understand you. Kids totally understand you. So much more than you want them to.

  And maybe that’s why they’re sent off to so many lessons and camps. Maybe it’s so their parents can stay home during that time and secretly watch bad TV and cry and eat a bucket of mashed potatoes and put clothes on the cats without getting harshly but accurately judged by their own children.

  Now it all makes a little more sense.

  These Cookies Know Nothing of My Work

  “BUT I DON’T WANT TO BE A GROWN-UP,” I screamed from a vaguely fetal position in the corner of the office. “I’M JUST NOT READY FOR THIS YET.”

  It was a major psychological breakthrough and one I felt certain my shrink would have been very proud of, had she actually been there. Instead, my husband and our CPA stared at me as if this were the first time something like this had ever happened during an initial financial-planning meeting.

  “I’m not really with her,” Victor mumbled.

  He said it out of habit but it seemed a bit of a weak argument considering that he was holding a giant folder of papers proving that we’d bought a lot of shit together in the last seventeen years. Or perhaps it was the folder of evidence he was compiling to have me committed. If it was the latter, I was fairly sure that this incident was going to end up in there.

  “Whoa there. No judgments here,” said our CPA (Maury) as he held up his hands with caution, like you might to someone about to jump off the edge of a building, or to a rabid dog that you hoped understood English. Then he said something about how he was “just here to help people get their finances in order” but what I heard was, “We’re here to discuss how terrible you are at being a responsible, normal person. There are hidden cameras everywhere and this is all going on YouTube. I’m going to be super rich.”

  Honestly, I consider myself to be fairly good at finances if you don’t compare me to normal people. I make more money than I deserve and then I give away a lot because it makes me nervous to have it around. I pay bills when the paper they’re printed on turns pink or gets threatening, and if my debit card is still accepted then I feel like I’m winning. At the end of the year I go to the tax office and throw a box of receipts marked “EVIDENCE” at the tax lady (there’s a proper word for her job but I’ve never learned it) and then run away before she can tell me that I’m fired from being her client. She’ll usually scream something like “QUICKBOOKS!” and then I scream back: “I’m totally going to do that starting today, pinkie promise!” and then I duck into the bushes before she can realize that most of the receipts are actually just napkins with scribbles on them, like “I needed to buy a kangaroo outfit for work but the flea market doesn’t give out receipts. It was $15 but it was worth like $100. I can’t confirm this but the blond guy at the flea market who doesn’t use deodorant said he can be a witness if we need him.”

  This seems like it’s a terrible way of keeping records, but I can assure you that it’s much better than the year I meticulously attempted to keep all of my receipts in a box under my desk until the cat mistook it for a litter box, or the year I kept a bunch of receipts in a clear plastic envelope and then when I went to pull them all out half of them were just blank pieces of paper. Turns out that if you expose receipts to sunlight they eventually just fad
e away, much like my intentions to keep receipts. Instead I just wrote what I thought should be on the now-blank pieces of paper. Things like “I bought a dead weasel for $40 but then I dressed her up and made her into Christmas cards for clients,” or “I think this was a receipt for a haunted Kewpie doll that I wrote about and then sold on eBay. But then eBay cancelled the auction because I mentioned that the doll possibly contained the souls of eaten children, and eBay said it was against the rules to sell souls. This is all on my blog if you need proof.”

  In my defense, I suspect that my tax accountant probably enjoys doing my returns. I’d enjoy them too if math weren’t involved, because looking through them is a glimpse into a life well lived. Or a life that needs massive sorting out.

  A few of my business expenses:

  • Taxidermied wolf I wore to watch Twilight at the local theater. His name is Wolf Blitzer and he died of natural causes. (GO TEAM JACOB.)

  • Full-body kangaroo costume worn to impress and infiltrate a band of wild kangaroos while on writing assignment in Australia. (See “Koalas Are Full of Chlamydia.”)

  • Tetanus shot needed immediately after trip to Australia.

  • Postage to ship home a brain that someone gave me while I was on a book tour.

  • A taxidermied Pegasus for the cats to ride on.

  • A box of cobra.

  • A rented live sloth.

  • Stylish outfits for cats.

  • Two super-ecstatic taxidermied raccoon corpses for late-night cat rodeos.

  Then the tax lady would call and say, “But what about your server costs and your office supplies and your real operating expenses?” And I would explain that I don’t really know them because I only keep up with interesting receipts. Then she’d call Victor to get his help and he would scream at me: “You’re paying too much in taxes because you’re not being responsible with deductions!” And I’d scream back, “Well, maybe the government needs the money more than I do!” Then Victor would question why he’d ever married anyone who wasn’t Republican and I’d question why anyone would ever trust me to do taxes to begin with.