No Happy Endings

by Nora McInerny

  My life, through that point, had been very easy. I mean, very easy. My parents were in love. We had enough—or, if we didn’t, my parents hid the truth from us very well—I didn’t have to think about much, because everything was provided for me. None of this was proof of God. It was proof of . . . my parents’ luck and my own privilege.

  Why, you repeated, did I believe in God?

  I remember trying to explain it to you, and realizing that you had already glazed over and checked out, and I could have said “because one time I saw the face of Jesus in a hot dog and he told me that if I ate him I could have eternal life” and you wouldn’t have noticed.

  What I want to say to you now, is this: I believe in God now, but not because of Catechism. Not because of what someone told me, or an essay I had to write for credit. I believe in God because I see God every day. I see God in people. I feel God in people. God is not a disinterested Father. God is love. She is air. God is seeing you carry Ralph to the car after your soccer games, in the wrinkling of your baby brother’s nose when you make him smile, in the story of you covering your little sister’s ears so she didn’t hear your mom and dad fighting when you were both so little.

  God is in the good parts, and the hard parts. Because life is hard, and that’s not a newsflash for you. Your childhood was not easy. You learned at a young age how to cover up for the pain around you, how to smooth the rough edges and not make a fuss. You learned how to make up for the shortcomings of the adults around you. We all suffer. We all die. We’re all loved. By each other and by an unseen force that I call God, but you could just as easily choose to call it Brenda. It’s not a love we have to earn; it’s a love that is just there. And it shows up in one another. It shows up in you and Sophie calling Ralph your little brother without even being asked to. It shows up in your dad and me, meeting when we’d both had our lives destroyed.

  God is not a promise that life will be easy. God is a promise that we will all experience joy and shattering pain. But we are here. We get all of this. We get each other. We have each other—this family—because everything we once thought was stable fell apart.

  Even then, God was there. Even now.

  I believe in God because of you, and our family. Believe in God, or don’t. Either way, dude, you are loved.

  xoxo,

  Nora

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Feminist Agenda

  THE FEMINIST AGENDA (ACCORDING TO INSECURE MEN)

  12:00 A.M.–6:00 A.M. Devil worship and blood rituals

  6:00–7:00 Tend to armpit hair; eschew showering and basic hygiene

  7:00–8:00 Feed and tend to large pack of cats

  8:00–9:00 Invent wage gap

  9:00–9:30 Breakfast: conflict-free eggs freely given by a gender-fluid chicken

  9:00–10:00 Fabricate statistics on sexual assault

  10:00–11:00 Get a recreational abortion

  11:00–12:00 Conspire to take jobs away from white men

  12:00–1:00 P.M. Lunch, probably something gluten-free and vegan

  1:00–3:00 Conference call with other underrepresented groups of females hell-bent on destroying the mythological “patriarchy”

  3:00–4:00 Delete the Second Amendment and take away all the guns

  4:00–5:00 Destroy traditional marriage

  6:00–7:00 Assault family values by creating a safe place for non-traditional families of all kinds

  7:00–8:00 Dinner of fair-trade, organic, ethically raised vegetables

  8:00–12:00 Netflix

  THE ASPIRATIONAL FEMINIST AGENDA

  5:30 A.M. Wake up; remain woke for remainder of day

  5:30–6:30 Work out, listening to playlist personally curated by Beyoncé and Gloria Steinem. Focus on arms, to lift up women of color and non-gender-conforming individuals. Shoulders, for future generations to stand on. Butt, for yourself, not for the male gaze.

  6:30–7:30 Write inspiring article about female representation in media. Read literally none of the comments. Not even one.

  7:30–8:00 Meditation with healing crystals

  8:00–9:00 Close the wage gap

  9:00–5:00 P.M. Smash the glass ceiling

  5:00–6:00 Conference call with intersectional group of underrepresented individuals on how best to smash the patriarchy and achieve a more equitable world.

  6:00 Dinner

  7:00–10:00 Netflix

  MY ACTUAL FEMINIST AGENDA

  Wake up to coffee my husband made (good boy).

  Do my best to not raise buttheads.

  Do my best not to be a butthead.

  Netflix.

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Big, Gross, Angry Feminist

  I had no interest in becoming a feminist. Feminism was for mean, gross, angry women who hated men, and I was not that kind of woman. First off, I wasn’t a woman. I was a girl. Sure, I was biologically an adult woman, but the word woman wasn’t as appealing as the word girl. I was a girl. A girl who liked boys, and a girl who wanted boys to like her, too. You can’t like boys if you hate men, and all feminists hated men. The feminists at my college were always complaining about things like women’s rights and birth control and the monologues of vaginas. What rights were they so concerned with? I had no idea. We had lots of rights! Nobody was outright oppressing us! We could vote! We could hold elected office! I mean, there weren’t a whole lot of us in executive-level positions, and none of us had ever been president, but that didn’t mean the world was a sexist place. Only that the right woman hadn’t come along yet. So far, we were all just duds, I guess. The Feminists planned a Take Back the Night rally that was little more than an inconvenience because it made it harder for us to catch a campus shuttle to a party where we would drink warm beer and laugh at unfunny jokes made by dumb boys. Plus, why did we need a rally against rape? None of us were getting pulled into the bushes and raped by strangers! Several of our friends had sex they didn’t want to have in the basements of house parties when they were blackout drunk, but we didn’t say the R word. Instead, we followed the lead of our Alpha female and shunned our friend for a few weeks, our silent treatment the only appropriate punishment for her “sloppiness.”

  As you can see, I had no need for feminism in 2004!

  All of the above was painful to write, and painful to read, and painfully true for more than just me and the women I went to college with. A lot of us came of age believing that feminism was useless and outdated, and probably most importantly, the kind of thing that guys wouldn’t like. We knew, from a very young age, that one of our roles is to keep everyone comfortable, always at the expense of our own comfort.

  When Aaron was first diagnosed with brain cancer, it seemed so outlandish. So unique and shocking. But I started to notice that brain cancer was actually everywhere. Everyone knew someone with brain cancer, or who had died of brain cancer. It was an epidemic, and I said as much to Aaron’s doctor. He had been studying brain cancer since before I was born and disagreed. There wasn’t more brain cancer now, not really. It’s just that I notice it now. He compared it to when you purchase a new car. The car feels special when you buy it, but once you get it on the road, or into a parking lot, you see them everywhere. I nodded skeptically. Brain cancer is like my Honda Accord?

  Dr. Mustache, as we called him behind his back, was totally right. Brain cancer opens your eyes. I wasn’t seeing something new, I was seeing something that was always there, but that I’d been able to ignore because it didn’t affect me directly.

  The word privilege makes a lot of people feel gross and weird. It made me feel gross and weird and so I avoided it and rejected it. How dare you say I am privileged? You don’t know what my life is like! Well, you do know what my life is like, because I tell you about it all the time, but acknowledging your own privilege is not saying that your life isn’t hard, or your problems aren’t real. It is and they are. Acknowledging your privilege is just like me noticing brain cancer. It’s opening yourself and your awareness up to the ex
periences of others, experiences that have always been there, but that you didn’t notice. To things that may not negatively affect you directly, but that you can and should still care about.

  My feminist awakening was not 0 to 60. It was a gradual opening of my eyes and ears to the buzzing of the alarm I’d been sleeping through. It was noticing how my male colleagues consistently talked over the women in the room, and how the women always brought in coffee and snacks for everyone. It was having a male friend I trusted tell me my salary requirement for a job I was interviewing for should be $20K less than what he made for the same job at a similar company. It was looking around me and the industry I worked in at the time and realizing that all the faces at the table were white and most were male. It was listening and believing the women of color who said they were being paid even less than white ladies, who pointed out that it’s hard to lean in to a table where you don’t even have a seat. Feminism isn’t just realizing how a male-dominated society has impacted me, but how it’s benefited me, too. Because being a white, middle-class lady does have its benefits, and they aren’t benefits I’ve earned, either.

  My mother and I have different interpretations of what it means to be a feminist, and sometimes that makes me incredibly mad. But she’s had twice as long as I have had to soak up the detrimental effects of a world that values women less than men. “The patriarchy will dismantle itself eventually,” she said to me once, as if any great power structure has ever willingly opened its gates to a more equitable way of life. The patriarchy won’t dismantle itself, and it won’t be dismantled by angry Facebook posts and tweet storms, but that doesn’t stop me from doing both of those things and then hating myself for it! It will be changed by what we teach this next generation of kids. Our kids have gone to marches and campaign rallies. They have door-knocked. They know where we donate our money, and why.

  Much to my disappointment, both the children who came out of my body are boys. I’m aware of the awesome responsibility of raising all four of them to dismantle a patriarchy that is hurting all of them, and benefitting all of them. I have four middle-class white kids! What the world around us needs is for them to understand the ways their skin and their economic status work to their advantage, and all the reasons why that is total bullcrap.

  In the words of Amy Grant, it takes a little time, sometimes, to get the Titanic turned back around. That’s an unfortunate lyric, given the fate of the Titanic. And I think it’s also a poor excuse for complacency. Things change when people care enough to change them, and people can change, when they care to.

  I’m not a girl anymore. I’m a woman now. And a big, gross, angry feminist.

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Destroy the Patriarchy After You Propose to Me

  Proposal stories fall into the same category as birth stories, dream stories, and drunk stories: we only care about them if they’re about us.

  But listen: Matthew’s proposal was terrible.

  We’re married, so it got the job done, but just barely.

  And it’s not because my expectations were too high, because my last proposal was me proposing to Aaron while he lay in a hospital bed, newly diagnosed with a brain tumor.

  It was just a bad proposal.

  Matthew had tried to book us a weekend away, but we had a newborn baby, so Baby was along for the ride. His needy little presence did not add to the romantic atmosphere. Because babies make everything take at least an hour longer than it should, we got a late start on the road, and didn’t arrive at the resort until well past eight o’clock. The cabin Matthew had rented online was mysteriously “no longer available,” and we were given the keys to a “comparable” one that had the vibe of a 1980s horror movie in the making. I’m no princess, so I can handle some murder vibes, but I could not handle what came next.

  There was no bathtub.

  That might not sound like a big deal, but that third wheel we were carting around had very recently wrecked the lower half of my body, our bathtub at home was too tiny for me to properly soak in, and the promise of a bath was the one thing that got my postpartum self into a car for a two-hour drive to the middle of nowhere.

  “What about a hot shower?” Matthew asked tentatively, and I burned him alive with the laser beams that shot out of my eyes.

  “What about a hot shower, Matthew?”

  It was past nine o’clock when we finally settled into a cabin that met my approval, and I ran a bath, locked the door, and cracked a book, not knowing the entire time that Matthew was teetering on the edge of his own breakdown.

  Once I’d boiled myself for at least an hour, I joined Matthew and Baby in the living room, where a fire was roaring.

  The combination of hormones and having sat in a tub of hot water for sixty minutes had caught up with me, and I instantly felt as though I was going to burn alive from the inside. “OH MY GOD,” I shouted, “it’s SO HOT IN HERE!”

  Matthew turned the (gas) fire down a few notches, and handed me a glass of wine, which made me want to throw up. And then, he started a very long and very confusing monologue that I interrupted probably four or five times because I had no idea what was happening. What was happening was he was a sweaty, nervous wreck who wanted to ask me to marry him. I figured that last part out because suddenly, he was holding a box and saying “I want to ask you to marry me.”

  Several moments passed, and then he did ask me, and I said yes, and also said, “Why are you so nervous, you weirdo?!”

  The proposal wasn’t bad because of the cabin, or the fire, or the attempted monologue. It was terrible because I didn’t need it or want it but he did it anyway.

  You know why Matthew proposed to me? Because I wanted him to. I know I just said that I didn’t want him to, but this big, loud feminist just wanted to know what it would feel like to be The Bachelorette (which, even though it’s a woman picking a spouse from a sea of hair-gelled Ken Dolls, still requires that the dude propose). A part of me wanted the ring, and the proposal, and the story.

  And a part of Matthew still felt like it was his responsibility to perform that part of a relationship. When I saw his sweaty, nervous face, I thought . . . why? Why was this his job? This is a shy, sweet man who once left Dairy Queen with a completely blank cake because he didn’t want to bother the staff with writing Happy 4th of July on it. Why does the responsibility for a big, romantic overture fall onto him when I’m so obviously better at it? This man had recently seen a human being emerge from my vagina. We had, with the birth of this child, who slept through this entire debacle, entwined our lives forever. We didn’t need to put a ring on it; we had put a baby on it. Why was he nervous for what should really be just a conversation? Why was he awkwardly handing me a ring?

  MY GRANDMOTHER REFUSED TO BUY a wedding gift for any couple until they’d been married for a full year. She also found wedding registries tasteless—is it really a gift if you’ve already selected it for yourself and someone else just pays for it?—so she’d send a piece of Waterford or a work of her own art after your first anniversary. No explanation, no apology. To grandma, weddings were nice parties, but they never impressed her. “Do you want a wedding,” she’d lecture us, “or do you want a marriage?” The two weren’t mutually exclusive, but she wanted us to know that our focus should be on the latter. Grandma was what we’d call today an “untraditional bride.” She and grandpa were married during World War II, on an army base, where she had taken the train to visit my grandfather before he shipped out. She wore a suit. Two guys from the army served as their witnesses. Not even her own parents were in attendance. There is one snapshot from that day. By today’s standards, where the average American wedding costs upwards of $33,000 (!!!!!) that’s not much of a wedding. But by today’s standards, they had one hell of a marriage. I don’t think the success of a marriage can be measured in the number of years together. The duration of a marriage tells you only that they held on, but not what they held on through. My grandparents were together for several decades. They had t
en pregnancies and nine living children. They built a business together, and sold the business. If they had problems, I certainly wasn’t privy to them, but I knew even when I was too young to know that it mattered that they really, really liked each other. By the time I was old enough to know them, my grandparents were old, but they were still deeply in like. My grandfather woke up hours before my grandmother, and had her coffee ready for her when she was up. She laughed at his corny jokes, and called him out when he was being less than reasonable, coming to our defense when we complained about spending yet another day moving a pile of bricks from one side of their property to the other. They spent their retirement voluntarily living in a secluded cabin in northern Minnesota with one bedroom and a semi-functioning TV.

  I have always enjoyed weddings. As a child, I cried at nearly every wedding I attended. I was at least ten to fifteen years younger than most of my McInerny cousins, and because we were raised Catholic, several of them were married shortly after they graduated college. I cried at Becky’s wedding, when I was five, in part because I caught her smoking in the bathroom and was certain she had instantly contracted cancer. I cried at Susie’s wedding, in part because I saw her groom drinking beers in the parking lot and knew that it wasn’t a good thing. I cried at Patty’s wedding, when I was thirteen, in part because my parents had idolized Patty, and it felt like watching a movie of my future life. I would be a vibrant, glowing bride. My father would dance with me to a Frank Sinatra song; my groom would look at me like I was a piece of pizza and he a drunk college student. I sensed at a young age that the wedding itself was not as important as what the wedding symbolized. Not the coming together of two lives in eternal commitment, but just the simple fact that every wedding is a stake in time. They are not more important or less important than any other moment, they are simply anointed as special. These moments are treated like they’re of a limited quantity, gold coins you spend just by being alive.