I've Still Got It...I Just Can't Remember Where I Put It: Awkwardly True Tales from the Far Side of Forty

by Jenna McCarthy

  I Will Remember That Money Isn’t Everything. Sure, it can buy you cars and boobs and fabulous European vacations and, subsequently, some measure of happiness. But it can’t buy true love or robust health or a sparkling personality or an ounce of class or a legitimate spot on any bestseller list*—all things I’d trade for a seven-digit bank balance any day of the year.

  CHAPTER 12

  My Boss Is a Bitch: A Self-Employment Story

  Women my age are in a unique position. Unlike our moms just a generation before us—who mostly didn’t pursue careers and if they did, their choices were basically teacher or nurse—we were told that we could be anything we wanted to be when we grew up. (Except strippers or circus performers, which was confusing since our dads were such huge fans of both.) Nothing could stop us! Fulfilling careers, doting husbands, darling children, showcase homes, gourmet meals, exotic vacations: We could have it all. All we had to do was go to school, get good grades, and work really hard, and the gods of success and fortune and happiness would follow us around everywhere we went, pissing all over our heads.

  Forty-some-odd years later, I’m going to have to call bullshit.

  I realize this probably isn’t a newsflash to you—the sad reality that we can’t in fact have it all, at least not simultaneously—especially if you’re a working mom. Having it all would mean our very young children would be welcome at work with us, all day every day, where we’d be encouraged to take frequent block-building and baby-yoga breaks. Oh, and naps. Lots of naps. Never, ever would a tiny person we pushed out of our vaginas (or had removed surgically through a man-made gash in our abdomens or flew to China to adopt) cling crying to our legs, begging us between snotty, heaving sighs, Please don’t go to work, please, Mommy, please, and ripping a hole in our hearts and our last pair of decent stockings in the process. When our spawn got older, we wouldn’t even have to ask permission to slip out of the office to attend one of their class plays or shuttle them to various doctor’s appointments; the world would know and respect the fact that our first job, always and forever, was being someone’s mother, and everyone would bow at our feet whenever we donned our Mom hats. When our beneficiaries got older still, our bosses would hand out hefty bonuses to help us cover our newly outrageous auto-insurance tabs and the cost of adding another cell phone to our family plans. Our husbands would do the bulk of the grocery shopping and housekeeping duties, of course, even though they would have fabulously satisfying jobs, too, because the universal understanding would be that our work was more important. We’d be paid the handsome salaries that we deserve—in addition to a generous clothing allowance—and we’d never, ever have to choose between getting a pedicure and getting a promotion.

  What’s that saying again? Oh yeah. If ifs and buts were candy and nuts, we’d all have a merry Christmas.

  I love being a mom. As often as not, it’s also truly, spectacularly, overwhelmingly hard. My paying job is a petal-strewn cakewalk compared to the duties of motherhood. I’m not saying that I choose to work so I can get away from my kids (although believe me, there have been days I’ve locked myself in the office under the guise of “work” and played Scramble with Friends just to get a bloody break from it all), because not working isn’t a financial option for me or my family. I’m just saying it’s a really good thing I love what I do.

  My dad used to say it all the time: “Find a job you love, and you’ll never work a day in your life.” He was right, of course. I cherish everything about writing and feel beyond blessed to be able to make a living by pecking out words on a keyboard all day, sipping homemade lattes, and rarely being forced to change out of my furry leopard-print robe. I’m also privileged in the sense that the career I accidentally fell into produces something—books I can hide from my children (well, honestly) and magazine articles and online posts I can rip out or print and also hide from my children save for posterity. I regret nothing at all about my vocational choice, and yet lately, thanks to the shitty economy and that whole “spending more than we make” business and maybe a tiny bit of the is-this-all-there-is that accompanies perimenopause, I find myself wondering what I would do if I were forced to support myself in some other way.

  Think about all of the possibilities. You can build bridges, dig ditches, lay bricks, train dogs, and save lives. You can teach, serve, speak, sell, create, lobby, haul, design, decorate, embalm, and engineer; you can pull rotten teeth, fix broken bones, crunch endless numbers, and market your own cocktail brand.* You can shake, bake, and sauté all manner of things, and if you’re modestly skilled and reasonably good-looking enough, you might even get a TV show out of it. Unfortunately, I would be miserable at all of these jobs, not to mention countless others.

  It turns out I am spectacularly not good at more things than I can count. I cannot catch a ball from even a few feet away to save my life. I am wretched at remembering names, faces, and where I parked my car at the grocery store. Apparently, I was born without the voice-volume-control thing other people seem to have, as I am frequently told that I am an exceptionally loud talker. I USE CAPS LOCK A LOT TO MAKE A POINT (See? I’m even a loud typer), even though I know it’s collectively frowned upon. I vocabulize, which is a word I made up for the act of making up words (my kids refer to their earballs as if they are legit things). My eyes glaze over when I have to read directions, so I usually just throw them away and wing it. I cannot do that breathe-to-the-side move you need to master in order to swim laps, which sucks because swimming is the one exercise you can do when you are otherwise injured—and I am otherwise injured ALL THE TIME. I have the patience of a kid waiting in line to get into Disneyland, I curse like a drunken sailor prone to stubbing his toe every few minutes, and my husband calls me Grace . . . because I don’t have any. Oh, and trust me when I tell you that you’ve never seen an uglier cookie, pie, or cake than one that I’ve attempted to bake. This isn’t everything I suck at, of course, but it gives you an idea of how hard switching careers would be for me.

  I asked Joe what other jobs he could see me doing. He thought about it for sixteen years.

  “What about, like, somebody who teaches parrots to talk?” he suggested finally. “Is that a thing?”

  “Are you serious?” I asked. “Training parrots is the only thing you can think of that I might be good at doing?”

  “Well, you know, you do talk a lot . . .”

  “Women in general talk a lot, dear,” I explained. “Should we all be parrot trainers?”

  “Maybe,” he said seriously.

  “How many talking parrots do you suppose we need in this world?” I demanded.

  “Probably not that many,” he agreed.

  I asked my friend Tanya the same question. Thankfully, she didn’t have to think about it for an eternity, and she didn’t say a fucking parrot trainer.

  “You could work at one of those high-end furniture stores telling them where to put the stuff!” she yelled, all excited.

  “Is that a job?” I asked.

  “Totally,” she insisted. “I think they’re called stagers. You’d be the person telling the other people, like, put the carpet at this angle and these knickknacks would look fantastic over here. You’d be awesome at that!”

  “So I’d be awesome at bossing people around?” I asked.

  “Yes!” she said. “But you know, in a really thoughtful and creative way.”

  I put a query out to my Facebook friends and was only slightly depressed by the responses: Drill sergeant. (Ouch.) Baptist minister. (I’m pretty sure they aren’t allowed to drink. Next.) Stand-up comedian. (Is “sit-down comedian” a thing? Because anything with “stand-up” in the title sounds exhausting.) Sex-toy boutique owner. (Because I have a porn-star name, obviously.) Counselor. But only for people who can take the truth. (Professional jerk. Perfect!) Product tester at Trader Joe’s. (What does this mean, exactly? Like, I could sample the lemon scones and curry simmer sauces and wasab
i peas, and then tell people if they’re good or not? What if I hated everything? What if I loved everything and nobody else did? I couldn’t handle the pressure.)

  After much soul-searching, I have determined that the only other career that I think I might have any degree of success at is being a professional organizer. Because not to brag or anything, but I can organize the shit out of pretty much anything. Doing it wouldn’t feel like work to me; in fact, I’ve been known to beg friends to let me sort through their closets and tidy up their files. But I know from experience—and by experience I mean the time I took home the entire second grade Math Tiles system and organized it within an inch of its life, only to watch the thing go right to hell in a handbasket within a matter of days—that my painstaking services would almost certainly go to waste. You can lead a horse to a nice, clean watering trough, but that filthy SOB will turn it into a slobbery mess before you can say, “Secretariat takes the crown.”

  I remember reading an article years ago that featured a group of women who had all begun entirely new careers after fifty. One woman, who’d finally realized her dream of graduating from medical school, told of the pivotal moment in her life that had launched her journey. Her adult son had asked her what she would be doing if she could do anything in the world. She told him without question she’d be a doctor. When he scoffed and asked why she wasn’t doing it now, she reminded him that she’d be fifty-two when she graduated from med school. “You’re going to be fifty-two anyway,” he’d reminded her gently.

  Sort of makes you think, huh?

  If all of the career limitations in the world—time and money and TV-star good looks and competing against a younger, smarter, skinnier field of applicants—went away, what on earth would I want to do with my time all day long? Open an Etsy shop? Be somebody’s personal shopper? Nurse motherless lion cubs to robust health? Why was this so fucking hard?

  “I’m going to go to beauty school,” my pal Ellie announced recently. Ellie is a spectacularly talented painter, musician, and photographer who has traveled and worked around the world. A classic starving artist, Ellie has decided that she would very much enjoy the luxury of continuing to eat and having a roof over her head, so she’s been searching for a new career. She toyed with the ideas of becoming a psychotherapist, a high school French teacher, or a scuba instructor, finally settling on becoming a hairstylist. At our age.

  “You don’t have the wet-hair-in-the-drain thing?” I asked. I have a pretty touchy gag reflex to begin with, but when I have to scoop hair out of a sink or shower drain, it is absolutely all I can do not to puke. Even if it’s my own hair I’m retrieving. I am pretty sure that would make me a lousy hairdresser. That and if I had to stand on my feet all damned day long—in seven-inch stilettos, which seem to be required hairdresser footwear, at least at my hair salon—I’d be in one of those Sixteen Candles back braces within a month. And also, because I have a hard time not being really blunt, I can see a whole lot of this happening:

  CLIENT: [Holding up a picture of Reese Witherspoon] I’d like my hair to look like this.

  ME: Hahahahaha, wouldn’t we all!

  CLIENT: [Storming out of the salon in tears]

  ME: Anybody have a parrot that needs training?

  The idea of teaching appeals to me in a way—you know, you get to talk a lot when you’re a teacher—so maybe I could teach writing. Or organizing. Or sarcasm. Then I remembered that I learned in college that just because you’re proficient at something doesn’t mean you’re good at showing other people how to do it. I was sailing through my math classes, and my professor suggested I sign up as a tutor in the math lab. It would be an easy three credit hours, he promised. It might even be fun.

  It was not fun.

  ME: If X plus Y equals Z, and X equals 10 and Z equals 15, what is Y?

  SUICIDAL STUDENT: A letter in the alphabet?

  ME: I can’t help you.

  Another friend, Amy, was thrust back into the workplace after an unexpected and particularly ugly divorce left her broke and desperate. Despite the fact that Amy has multiple degrees and a resume so impressive you half want to ask her to prove it’s real, she was passed over for a parade of jobs that were given to younger, less-experienced candidates. After months of searching and being told repeatedly that she was overqualified for every position she applied for (overqualified is the politically correct term for “we can get someone way younger to do it for much less”), Amy finally landed a job as a personal assistant. Her boss is ten years younger than she is, has more money than an oil baron (he’s vague on where his money comes from, so maybe he is an oil baron), and likes her to wear really short skirts to work.

  I told her he was a pig.

  “If he wanted me to prance around in crotchless chaps and was willing to give me health benefits, I’d consider it,” Amy insisted. Apparently, the pickings are that slim.

  It’s not always outright necessity that causes people to have midlife career crises. Sometimes you just wake up and realize you’ve been doing the same miserable, mirthless, unfulfilling thing for the last twenty years, and if you don’t do something about it now, you’ll be doing it for the next twenty years. My friend Winn, who’d fallen into the family financial planning business right after college, had this very epiphany recently and immediately enrolled in nursing school. She’ll be knocking on fifty’s door when she puts on that sassy white uniform for the very first time. Is she daunted at all by this?

  “Hell no!” she shouted when I asked her. In fact, Winn insists that at least thirty of the forty students in her program are our age or older. “The coolest thing about going back to school at our age is that you actually give a shit about learning this time,” she added. “It’s not just about which guys in your class you want to have sex with. Although there is that, too.”

  “Do you ever think about quitting?” I asked her.

  “Once you’re committed to something at this point in your life, it’s like you’re pregnant with it,” she told me. “I can’t uncommit now. I’ve taken ten thousand dollars’ worth of classes! Besides, I don’t think it matters how old you are when you get there. Sam Walton was forty-four when he opened the first Walmart. Frank McCourt wrote Angela’s Ashes in his late sixties. Look, it’s not like any of us are ever going to see any money from Social Security, so it’s stupid to think we’re going to be able to retire or anything. I’m thinking if I’m going to be working for another thirty or forty years, it damn well better be something I like doing.”

  Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard said, “Life must be lived forwards, but can only be understood backwards.” What he means by this, I’ll take the liberty of translating, is that you can’t possibly know what you want to do for the rest of your life until you’ve already done it. When you’re young and naïve and career-hunting for the first time, the entire world is like one huge menu. Lots of the options sound deliciously enticing, but many of them don’t live up to the hype. (Let’s face it: Parisian-style steak tartare could also be called raw cow flesh topped with pickled shrub parts.) My husband, for instance, who loves everything sporty and adventurous,* many years ago decided to build his own outdoor adventure company from scratch. He devoted ten years of his life to this endeavor, and it became quite successful. And do you know what he realized after an entire decade of grueling, ground-up work? That there wasn’t anything at all sporty or adventurous about sitting behind a desk designing fabulous excursions for other people to enjoy.

  It was a bittersweet day when he finally shuttered that business. He was happy not to be a full-time paper-pusher anymore, but he also spent several months mourning the death of the dream, the one where he’d spend his days leading eager clients to the top of breathtaking mountain peaks in Pakistan and racing sled dogs in Alaska and whitewater rafting with crocodiles in Africa (which incidentally kills an average of thirty people a year, according to AskMen, “mostly from crocodiles,” so
I was slightly less morose about burying this dream than he was).

  Some people, like me, get lucky in those early days and quite by accident pick something they turn out to love doing; others, like Joe, get sort of screwed. They suffer through years of schooling or decades of corporate-ladder scaling and then finally land their “dream job” only to realize it’s more of a nightmare. The choices then are to suck it up or get the hell out and start over. Sure, starting from scratch—and being the low (wo)man on the totem pole again and possibly answering to a boss you are old enough to have birthed—might be a bitch. But I have to agree with the brilliant businesswoman and pioneering comedienne Lucille Ball who said, “I’d rather regret the things I’ve done than regret the things I haven’t done.”

  So if this writing thing doesn’t pan out, I will forge onward. Look me up if you ever need a parrot trainer.

  CHAPTER 13

  Complaining about How Tired I Am Is Exhausting

  When I was little, both sets of grandparents lived nearby,* and we kids would occasionally have sleepovers at their houses. (Presumably, this was so my parents could get drunk and have sex without having to worry about us barging in on them, but if it’s all the same, I’d rather not dwell on that.) While my mom’s parents had the traditional king-size bed setup, my dad’s parents slept in far-apart twin beds. I was a huge fan of both I Love Lucy and The Dick Van Dyke Show at the time, so I didn’t think this was all that odd. Plus everyone knew that my dad’s mom had serious issues with sleep. She made it abundantly clear, as she tucked our little PJ-clad bodies into the pullout sofa bed, that if we made even the tiniest audible peep during the night, it would ruin any hope of her catching a single additional Z for the rest of the evening, and then her wide-awake ass would be forced to stab us to death with her knitting needles. Oh, those weren’t her exact words, but you’d better believe the threat was there.