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

  “But we don’t even know them!” he shouts in a panic.

  “I realize that, dear,” you reply calmly. “That’s why I suggested we have them over.”

  “Well, what if they’re freaks?” he asks, because apparently he’s had one too many freaky get-togethers and is extremely gun shy about a repeat performance.

  “It’s two hours, not a bike trip across Europe,” you remind him. “They might be lovely. They seem lovely.”

  “That’s what you said about the Andersons and look how that turned out,” he scoffs.

  “How was I supposed to know they were swingers?” you demand. “It’s not like they were wearing swinger uniforms or anything.”

  “I told you the day we met them that he wanted you,” he says.

  “You say that about everyone!” you insist.

  “And I was right!” he says triumphantly.

  “Can I invite the McNormals over for dinner or not?” you sigh.

  “Let’s meet them somewhere,” he counters. “I don’t want them in my house if they turn out to be freaks.”

  “Thank you for making this both simple and fun,” you say.

  Unless the McNormals are in fact swingers or Mr. M tries to get you to sign up under him in “this awesome new multi-level marketing scheme—which, trust him, isn’t like any of the other ones you’ve tried before,” you’ll socialize on occasion because you have the same school breaks and can maybe even get an occasional afternoon of free babysitting or a carpool out of the deal. You may not love them, but if you like them even close to moderately, they’ll probably get thrown into the social rotation. It’s just so easy and convenient that you can’t really fight it.

  Unless they have Food Issues, that is.

  I am pretty sure Food Issues destroy more platonic relationships than lying, stealing, backstabbing, borrowing and ruining favorite sweaters, and gossiping combined. My friend Paula recently ended a thirty-year friendship over a pair of granola bars, I shit you not. To celebrate a joint milestone birthday, she’d taken her two kids to visit an old college friend. To protect this friend’s identity, I’ll just refer to her as That Smug Bitch. That Smug Bitch has two kids also, and apparently these children have never eaten a morsel of processed food in their entire lives. Think about that: These teenagers have never had a crumb of an Oreo cookie, a sip of Slurpee, or even a single Spaghetti-O pass their lips. They down wheatgrass smoothies happily and without complaint, nibble on raw kale and almonds from their backyard garden when they get the munchies, and would have no idea what it means to have a disembodied voice tell you to “pull up to the next window.”

  “You should have seen That Smug Bitch when I gave the kids a couple of granola bars from my purse,” Paula told me, over wine of course. “They were starving to death, what was I supposed to do? That Smug Bitch acted like I was giving them a crack pipe, for crying out loud. And they were organic granola bars, too.”

  Despite decades of history and similar views on everything from religion and politics to paper versus plastic, it took Paula all of two days to realize that she and That Smug Bitch no longer had enough in common to sustain even a superficial friendship.

  “Yeah, I feed my kids macaroni and cheese,” Paula huffed. “And crackers I didn’t bake with stone-ground wheat from my backyard, too. That Smug Bitch doesn’t even work! She has no idea what the real world is like. And I don’t care what she says, her kids do not love lima beans. Nobody loves lima beans. She’s a fucking liar.”

  “One time when I was paying to get out of a parking garage,” I told Paula, “my oldest daughter leaned forward from the backseat and shouted ‘Can I please have French fries and a chocolate shake?’ You know, because she thought we were at In-N-Out.”

  “That’s why we will always be friends,” Paula told me.

  I topped off her glass and gave her a hug, because that’s what friends do.

  CHAPTER 22

  Are We Happy Yet?

  Remember when I mentioned that I have the uncanny ability to retain utterly useless information? Well, because of that, esteemed psychologist Abraham Maslow’s colorful, pyramid-shape hierarchy of needs is permanently imprinted on my brain. In case you’re not familiar with it—or it’s one of the bits from your past that you’ve managed to successfully purge—the hierarchy is a visual list of man’s greatest motivators, based on the belief that only when certain needs are met are we able to move up to the next level of our physical, mental, and spiritual evolution.

  At the bottom of the pyramid are your most basic physiological requirements: breathing, food, water, sex, sleep, excretion. Clearly, if your bowels are backed up to your neck or your canteen springs a leak halfway through your trans-Saharan trek, or you’re in the middle of being suffocated, you’re not going to be compelled to ask your boss for a raise or write your memoirs at that particular moment. Only as each level of needs is met do you get to claw your way closer to the top, where all of the good stuff is.

  After the life-or-death needs come issues regarding safety (shelter, order, employment, money). Next, if you’re definitely breathing and have a roof over your head, you can date and socialize. Now that you’ve got a pulse, a home, a job, and a partner, you are freed up to focus on matters related to your self-esteem (confidence, achievement, respect). Finally, at the tippy-top of the pyramid—where it’s presumed you have secured every last item in the fat triangle beneath you—you are invited to self-actualize. This apex of the motivational chain includes inner growth, spiritual enlightenment, the pursuit of knowledge, and the enjoyment of creative expression. According to Maslow, once the pressing needs for cheeseburgers, door locks, decent human beings in your life with which you interact regularly, and a complete obliteration of any self-loathing have been met, you are free to focus on the pursuit of that elusive SOB known as happiness.

  The hierarchy theory may help explain why a recent Gallup poll of more than 340,000 people found that after a certain age—namely the mid-century mark—happiness doesn’t just go up, it keeps going up. Even as our hair is falling out and our boobs are settling in around our waists and we can’t remember what day of the week it is anymore, we’re quietly becoming a bunch of giddy old loons who are only going to get ever giddier. Ostensibly this is because by this point, we’ve managed to work our way up through much of that pesky pyramid, ticking off the more mundane matters of existence. Our bases neatly covered, we get to enjoy the luxury of happiness—or at least our guaranteed right to the pursuit of it.

  Before the midlife point—when we’re plumbing the depths of that pyramid—if you were to map median happiness levels on a graph, it would look a lot like an inverted pyramid. Globally speaking, people seem to enter adulthood feeling modestly good about being above ground and upright. Then the shit hits the proverbial fan. Life gets hard and complicated (or at least harder and more complicated). Satisfaction starts to nose-dive. We have to get jobs and pay our rent or mortgages and fork over our hard-earned earnings for annoying things like plungers and bite guards and car insurance and possibly find a suitable life partner, which we all know is no easy task. Then we pop out a few babies (ouch! and expensive!) and get laid off from the job we hated anyway and maybe get a divorce or find a lump or our parents die. This sucks, we mutter, as body parts we never really thought about before start hurting and we wonder how on earth we’re going to be able to survive on the sixteen dollars we’ve managed to save so far. “What’s the point?” we wonder, often and loudly. Around this time we may experiment with (different) antidepressants or start drinking (more) or smoking (more) dope or get addicted to painkillers or Words with Friends or Real Housewives of New Jersey—anything to numb, diffuse, distract.

  After we toil in this existential space for a few decades—frankly too busy to give our ranking on any happiness scale all that much thought—the tide starts to shift. We’re probably not living on Ramen noodles and beer anymore, and
we have at the very least moved from busboy to server. We’re out of the terrifying diapers-and-choke-hazard phase of parenting and hopefully not living with our parents or off of them. We know who we are and what we like and what’s important. We’ve learned to appreciate the fragile gift that is life and to move past our mistakes. Maybe we’ve lost a parent or two, or perhaps we’re taking care of them, but either way we’ve faced the fact of our own mortality. (Oh, we don’t like it, and we try not to think about it, but it’s there, and we’re more or less resigned to it.) By the time there are fifty candles on our birthday cakes, the survey above suggests, no matter what steaming, stinking, miserable sort of monkey poo life slings at us, the general consensus seems to be: “Yeah? Well, it beats the alternative (chuckle, chuckle).” As the inimitable Anna Quindlen put it, if we think of life as a job, most of us feel that after five decades of laboring, we’ve finally gotten pretty good at it. We are—dare we even say it?—happy.

  Happiness is no longer just a nebulous goal; it’s a science. As such, the get-there guide is constantly evolving. For instance, where scientists once told us we were all born with a happiness “set point” that was mostly a fixed entity, newer research suggests that while we’re at least partially hardwired to be closer to one end or the other of the crabby-to-cheerful scale, we have control over as much as 40 percent of our happiness.

  There are incalculable books, blogs, classes, and coaches eager to guide us along the paved-by-research path to contentment. From an admittedly arbitrary review of the research, I have handpicked some doable moves that actual studies suggest might make us all happier right this minute, or at least in the very near future if we’re reading this while stuck in gridlocked traffic or in the middle of root canal surgery:

  Laugh at that shit. Why do people flock to funny movies or pay money to see Jerry Seinfeld on stage or (hopefully) buy my books? Because laughing feels good. It reduces stress, increases oxygen flow, and even boosts metabolism. And life is pretty funny, when you think about it, even when things go horribly, miserably wrong. In fact, sometimes life is funniest because things go horribly, miserably wrong. But you only get all of those benefits if you can let out a hearty guffaw when they do.

  Here’s an example: We recently took a family vacation to the Florida Keys, which is pretty far from where we live and not exactly easy to get to. In order to save a few bucks on our plane tickets, we flew in and out of LAX, which is three hours away and a miserable clusterfuck on the best of all days. A visit to this particular airport ranks on my personal pleasure scale somewhere below filing my taxes and having a sharp metal stick repeatedly jabbed into my eye socket. There was a long drive on the other coast as well, making the door-to-door travel time twenty hours, horrifying even if we weren’t going to have our kids in tow—which we were. I was thinking about all of this the night before we left as we were packing.

  “So what do you think is going to be the Thing?” I asked my husband.

  “The Thing?” Joe asked, giving me his famous I-hate-it-when-you’re-cryptic-especially-when-I’m-stressed-out single-eyebrow raise.

  “You know, the Thing that’s going to go disastrously wrong but will turn out to be the Thing that we laugh about and associate with this trip for the rest of ever,” I said simply. Because every trip we have ever taken has had a Thing. I’m not talking about missed flights or lost luggage or lodging that turned out to be slightly less fabulous than it looked online, although we’re no strangers to any of those things. No, I’m talking about the terrible-at-the-time, how-will-we-ever-fix-this, can-you-even-believe-this-is-even-happening shit that we somehow manage to survive—and then enjoy reliving in glorious, horrific detail for the rest of our lives.

  There was me waking up in the dirtiest city in Ireland with what I thought was a brain tumor (but turned out to be vertigo, which is nothing that a shot in the bum and two days of sleep can’t fix right up). Getting separated from Joe on a hike in England and then being completely lost in the forest for several terrifying hours. The two of us being attacked by sea lice in the Bahamas and coming home with nasty, itchy, full-body rashes.* Every single person on my uncle’s boat getting violently seasick, one after another, during a fishing trip in Florida. The huge fight in Hawaii where I demanded Joe let me out of the car, and he did, right on the side of a very busy road, before peeling away and spraying me with gravelly dust. While each of these events was undeniably miserable in the moment, it nevertheless gets trotted out to great amusement any time the trip in question is mentioned.

  “There’s not going to be a Thing,” Joe said with some irritation—plus what I considered a naïve amount of optimism.

  Of course there was a Thing. There were several, in fact, but there are two in particular that already have become part of this particular trip’s lore and aren’t likely to be forgotten. The first was when we lost the rental car keys (we may have gotten a ride to a somewhat distant resort with some friends, where we may have pretended to be staying so we could hang out at their much nicer pool, and while we were there and enjoying their delicious frozen cocktails, we may have dropped the keys somewhere on the property without realizing it and then gotten a ride back to our own resort with our friends) and spent an entire day—and a hundred dollars in cab fare—looking for them. The second was when my husband, who is rather famous for not fucking up, locked the same damned set of keys in the rental car at midnight the night before we had to leave at five a.m. to catch our flight home. (Thank God for AAA is all I can say.) Although neither of these events was at all amusing in the moment, we’ve gotten great mileage—and plenty of laughter—out of our “keys in the Keys” stories. If you keep a little perspective, and hopefully are able to use life’s minor tragedies as fodder for your next book or blog post, you might even go looking for disaster!

  Be grateful. Happiness researchers point out over and over that the most cheerful souls are the ones who focus on and appreciate the things they do have, not lament the things they don’t.* This is not always easy, of course, but it’s considered one of the tippy-top tickets to bliss, so we all should really make more of an effort here. Let’s give it a shot: Your job sucks? At least you have one. Oh, what? You don’t have a job, either? At least you’ve got your health. You say you’re sick as a dog? At least you’re not dead. You might have to dig really deep to find that comparative thing to be thankful for, but it’s always there. Even if you’re dead (at least you don’t have to go to that sucky job or feel like crap all the time anymore!). If all else fails, you can always resort to: At least I was never married to Charlie Sheen.*

  Surround yourself with happy people. This doesn’t merely mean you should purge your contact list of any assholes—although that’s certainly a fine first step; you also have to spend quality time with people you love and who make you feel good. [Puts “girls’ night out—woohoo!” onto calendar; feels immediately happier.]

  Get the hell off of Facebook. I’m actually not kidding. Or, alternatively, if you’re a glutton for punishment, put this book down and go peruse the timelines of your friends and take note of how thin and tan and successful and happy they are, how smiley and well-behaved their children appear, how doting their spouses are, and how many fabulous vacations to exotic far-flung locales they take. Goddamnit, they’re in Cabo right now, Instagramming sunset strolls and seaside massages and lobster dinners and miles of crystal clear water just beyond their perfectly painted toes. “This place is truly magical,” every other status update reads, as if that’s not perfectly fucking apparent from the 284 shots you just uploaded, thanks! Even their dogs are cute and well groomed, and aren’t drooling all over the kitchen floor like your mangy mutts are right this very minute.

  Alas, Facebook is to real life what a staged model home is to an actual house that has living people cooking in its kitchen and sleeping in its beds and shitting in its toilets (and sometimes shitting in its beds). It’s spit shined and digitally enhanced and, lite
rally as well as metaphorically, nobody lives there. Your “friends” aren’t posting photos of the night their teenager got busted for vandalism or the day their sewer line sprung a leak and flooded the entire front yard. Their vacation photos rarely show their kids fighting and whining in the three-hour airport security line even though you know it happened, and you almost never get to see the 278 outtakes it took to get that glowing, sun-kissed, happy-family picture that looks like the one that comes in the frame.

  Actually, some people—like me, for instance—think Facebook is the perfect place to showcase life’s crappiest moments, so we can all get a great laugh out of them together. So if you must indulge, I urge you to befriend cynics like me and not those fake-chipper bitches who Photoshop out every wrinkle before they post their pictures. They’re not doing you any favors.

  (It’s worth noting that while I thought Facebook misery was just my personal theory, several weeks after I wrote that section I saw a headline on BBC News declaring “Facebook Use Undermines Well-being.” The cause, according to researchers? Something known as FOMO, or Fear of Missing Out, a side effect of seeing your friends and family frolicking on exotic beaches while you’re sitting at your computer in Hello Kitty pajamas. See? It’s a thing, people. Just log off.)

  Read about happiness studies. This one, for instance, cheered me up the instant I scanned it: Researchers at the University of Michigan discovered that blowing cold air up participants’ noses put them in better moods than when they blew hot air up their noses. (Are you picturing this experiment? Honestly!) The takeaway here isn’t necessarily that you should go snort some dry ice or even open your freezer and breathe deeply when you’re in a pissy mood; I believe the real lesson is that we all need to appreciate the fact that we’re not participating in any sort of air-snorting studies either currently or in the near future.

  Do a good deed. Remember the movie Pay It Forward? Of course you do—it’s not nearly as old as Groundhog Day. It’s all about how random acts of kindness can change the world. If you’re skeptical, consider what it can do to your mood when some jackass snakes around you and slides into the parking spot you’ve been waiting for, patiently, with your turn signal blinking and everything. Then think about how likely you are (very) to take your venomous rage home with you after that happens and unleash it on your nearest and dearest. Obviously our actions have a powerful impact on the people around us, even total strangers. You see those “hey, I paid for your dinner” notes on Pinterest, and you like and re-pin them with abandon, because even witnessing altruism and unsolicited generosity feels good. It turns out, practicing it feels even better.