Fifty Things That Aren't My Fault Read online

  “No new supplies! We have all kinds of supplies!” Mom says.

  “We have too many things!” Dad echoes. “The last thing we need is more places to put things!”

  “Okay then,” I huff, exasperated. “I’ll take all this back. Is that what you want? Do you want me to turn around and return everything I just bought to help you do what you’ve said you needed done??”

  “Heavens no, sweetie,” Mom says. “It’s time for lunch and then you have the ball game with Dad!”

  “Returning things can be tomorrow’s project!” Dad says.

  Day 3: Stolen Moments

  Mom’s busy in the kitchen, cleaning lettuce leaves one by one, with the care of a surgeon. Dad’s busy studying The Weather Channel to see if he should be worrying about any family members in other states before we leave for his periodontist appointment. I tiptoe into their bathroom with the haul from last night’s secret 9:00 p.m. run to Target: shelf paper, pretty organizer baskets, a new shower curtain, and a new bath mat when . . .

  “What’s all that?” Mom and Dad are suddenly both in the doorway of the bathroom staring at me, my Target bags, and the squirt bottle of all-purpose cleaner in my hand.

  “I just thought I’d freshen up your bathroom a little!” I say in my best happy, helpful, trying-to-not-sound-agitated voice. “You’ve had the same shower curtain for forty years!”

  “We like our shower curtain!” Mom states.

  “And your bath mat—” I begin.

  “We love our bath mat!” Dad states.

  “I could at least get rid of some of the things in the cabinets you don’t need and organize the things you do need in nice, pretty baskets,” I try.

  “We might need all the old things! We don’t need pretty baskets!” they counter.

  I give up.

  I stuff it all back in the Target bags, stand up, and face them.

  “I came here to help!” I say. “You said you wanted help. You said every room in your house needed a total overhaul, and I came to do it!”

  “Thank you, sweetie! We’re so grateful for your help!” Mom says, giving me a hug.

  “There’s so much to do here!” Dad says, hugging me from the other side.

  “But you won’t let me do anything!” I answer from the middle of the sandwich.

  “Of course we will, sweetie! You can do anything! Anything at all!” they both say, squeezing me tight. “Just don’t move anything, change anything, throw anything out, put anything in a different spot, or spend any money!”

  Days 4–7

  Ditto.

  Day 8: Goodbyes

  Something always happens the morning I leave Mom and Dad’s house. It happens for my sisters when they leave, too. No matter how long the visit was—even if it felt way too long—it’s always suddenly way too short. We start missing one another while we’re still standing in the same room. In the last hour of the visit, everyone tries to say and do every single thing that didn’t get said or done in the days or weeks we were there. Everyone feels a great big need to give and forgive.

  My sisters and I become more patient, thoughtful listeners. Dad makes piles of movies we never got to, books and magazines he thinks we might like. He checks and rechecks the flight schedule, The Weather Channel, road delays, and his wallet, to make sure he has a twenty-dollar bill to tuck in our hands. Mom cuts up little Baggies full of apple slices, carrots, sandwiches, chicken legs, nuts, and cookies—as if, since we won’t let her help pack our bags anymore, she can at least pack our stomachs. If they could, I think Mom and Dad would hop into our suitcases themselves.

  Because it’s the morning I’m leaving, I spent longer than usual reading the paper with Dad and listening to his stories. I’m down to thirty minutes before my cab arrives, racing through the house to finish packing, when I hear Mom’s voice coming from the dining room.

  “I’d love it if you could help me organize my stationery situation!” she calls.

  I stop in my tracks and go back down the hall to where she sits at the table. “Now, Mom??” I ask, my arms loaded with things I still need to pack. “The cab will be here in half an hour!”

  “You’re so good at making systems for things!” she says, gesturing to the piles of paper on the dining room table she must have pulled from all sorts of drawers and shelves while I was reading the paper with Dad this morning. Fifty years of random types of notepaper, envelopes, greeting cards, stickers, and stamps. There’s no need to remind Mom that I’ve been here for a week and this is exactly the kind of project I wanted to spend days tackling for her. I chuckle at the impossibleness. At Mom’s perfect timing.

  This is her goodbye gift—as heartfelt as the chunk of coffee cake I saw her slip into my carry-on bag earlier. Mom knows I came on this trip to help, and she wants to help me help her before I go. She wants me to leave with the gift of having something checked off my list. And now I need to help her help me help her.

  “Great idea, Mom!” I say. “Let’s see how far we can get!”

  In the few minutes we have left, we admire Mom’s pretty notepaper . . . laugh as we read through some of her greeting card collection . . . start organizing her stash of rinsed-out plastic bags and flattened twist ties to use should we ever get a system started . . .

  And then, way too soon, the cab honks, and suddenly my suitcase and I are at the door.

  “If only you were staying another week to help us deal with all our messes!” Mom sighs and gives me a hug. “We’ll tackle it all on the next visit!” Dad announces, joining Mom from the other side. A farewell sandwich. Way too much emotion in the middle of this one for me to say much except “I’d better come back soon.”

  And that’s how we left it. I’m on the plane back to California now. Everything—including the plan to go through everything some other time—is completely intact. When I come back again, everything will be exactly where it was before. Bills stacked with junk mail and old newspapers on the kitchen counter next to the phone. Office full of old files in ancient folders. Linen cabinets stuffed with history we never even opened. Untouched boxes of recipes, family pictures, and souvenir circus programs. Bathroom cabinet full of expired first-aid products, gift soap too pretty to use, vitamins no one takes anymore, lotions no one’s ever opened. In Mom and Dad’s house, relationships last forever. Nothing is ever wasted or discarded; everything has a purpose and another chance. No one ever divorces a shower curtain or breaks up with a bath mat. When you belong to Mom and Dad, you have a home forever.

  I smile at 30,000 feet somewhere over Kansas. There’s something very comforting about knowing it will all be there when I get back. Something a little bit wonderful about having accomplished absolutely nothing on this visit.

  21.

  LOVE STORIES

  I should have known it would never last the first time I watched him load a dishwasher. The way he put big dirty pans in on top of fragile glasses . . . stuck bowls in between plates instead of lining bowls and plates up in their own rows like a normal person, so only six items fit in an area that should hold twenty. He put “top rack dishwasher safe” items on the bottom rack. Had long spatulas sticking way up out of the silverware tray without thinking they could block the thing that spins around and squirts water, and that if the spinning thing were blocked, the motor could overheat, the dishwasher could catch on fire, and the house could burn down.

  I rushed into marriage way too young. That was one problem. I was only forty-seven years old. Only forty-five when I met and started dating him. There were red flags everywhere before we’d even had date number three. I should have run for my life. But I was way too in love for my feet to think about moving, and apparently the brain is willing to overlook a casserole dish caked with dried enchilada sauce being stuffed into an already full load when the heart is smitten.

  I didn’t have the maturity or self-confidence to call him out on issu
es like dishwasher loading . . . or how he’d open a box of crackers by grabbing it and trying to rip the top off instead of following the clearly printed instructions, so for the whole life of the box, partly shredded cardboard flaps would just stick straight up from the top instead of closing properly, and the crackers wouldn’t stay crunchy. I knew nothing about confrontation or conflict resolution.

  I had studied all the “Understanding the Male Brain” books and had written about relationships myself for years, but had zero experience living under the same roof with a male brain. The only person I’d ever lived with was my daughter, who was four years old when I met my husband, five when we got married. People used to joke that it would ruin my comic strip if I ever got happily married, but the reality of a man in the house was so much more material-rich than anything I could dream up that being married added a lot to my work. I waited seven years after my wedding to have the characters get married in the comic strip, hoping that enough time had passed so that no one, including my husband, would think I was writing about us. I also waited because I’d promised my faithful single readers that Cathy would never abandon them for “the other side,” and I felt massively guilty about going back on my word. It finally became impossible to write about going on a date when it had been so many years since I’d been on one.

  Besides no practical experience, by the time I met the man I married, I had a 9,000-item list of requirements. Some he mowed down on date number one, with sky-blue eyes and a sense of humor that made me laugh so hard, I cried. The other 8,967, I figured I could fix. I had lots of experience with erasers. The beauty of writing and drawing about relationships on paper is that I could make up the lines for both people, and I’d been doing that for a long time. I could erase the whole other person if I wanted. Or scribble the other person out with permanent ink. Or wad the other person up. Or shred the person into minuscule pieces that I would purposely throw in the trash, not the recycling bin, so even the teensy scraps of him wouldn’t have a chance of being re-formed into something useful. Absolutely no earth-friendly file folders made from the gentlemen I shredded during my comic-strip-creating days.

  That part was possibly also my fault. My ex-husband mentioned it twenty or thirty times in our couple’s therapy sessions one through five—that I was a little bit too used to controlling the conversation by writing all the words for both sides to actually be in a conversation with a live person. I planned many things to say in response to him for session number six, but we never got to that session—partly because my husband was also planning what he’d say in response to what he thought I’d say in response to what he’d said. Both of us were writers and took upcoming therapy appointments as assignments, not so much to delve into the heart of our problems, but to see who could better script the dialogue for the next meeting.

  By the end of session number five, it was clear that we’d turned the whole thing into a creative competition, each person trying to win the session. Of course we both wanted to win the therapist’s sympathy, but even more, we wanted to see which one of us could make the therapist laugh the most. Entertaining though it was to try to outwit each other with an audience, it wasn’t really worth the $250 per fifty-minute session. Much more cost-effective to break up, we decided.

  I don’t mean to make it sound as if it didn’t matter, because it mattered a lot. My husband and I felt unbelievably blessed to have met when we did. We were a miracle for each other—he with a young son and me with a young daughter. Our children fell as in love with each other as he and I did, and it seemed as if we had all the pieces to start a beautiful new phase of life that neither of us ever imagined we’d have. We shared the exact same dream of making our sweet blended family work and of the long, long future we’d all have together.

  There was profound sadness when we finally admitted we’d failed, and many, many tears that weren’t the laughing ones. But what was best about us as a couple resurfaced when we were breaking up—it was there at the end just like it had been in the beginning, even with the 8,967 things I never got fixed. Even while we separated, my ex-husband made me laugh until I cried. We had so much fun planning our divorce, we almost could have fallen back in love and started all over again.

  Everyone has love stories—ones that worked, ones that didn’t, ones that never made it past the imagination. This time of life makes them all come to mind. It isn’t possible to reflect on where the years went, what happened, how we wound up living where we live, and which people we’ll call family for the rest of our days without thinking about our love stories. About all those choices. All those things that happened or didn’t happen, starting in the fifth grade, or maybe even before, when it first occurred to us that we kind of liked someone. That very first second it mattered to us if the other person liked us back.

  Some of us were single for a really, really long time. Some of it was on purpose.

  The world had just opened up with possibilities for women that went way beyond being housewives when I was in my prime dating years, and I fell in love with idea of launching my own life and career before I got involved with someone. I loved the thrilling freedom and power of having a job, driving to an office, and supporting myself. I loved living by myself, in an apartment I found and set up on my own, every single decision discussed only with my dog. But I was a young woman in my twenties, and I also loved the idea of falling in love with a person . . .

  The easy answer was to go out only with people who were as unready to get involved as I was. Much less risky to date someone who promised a doomed future than someone who might threaten the solitary life I loved and worked so hard to earn. But in a short amount of time, all my independence and empowerment only seemed to increase how vulnerable I was to relationships that wound up making me insecure and needy. I couldn’t stand it when someone I decided I loved didn’t love me back, even though that was the whole attraction in the first place. I couldn’t resist the challenge of trying to get the wrong person to change his mind.

  This is all a lot more clear now than it was then. At the time, it created a totally contradictory bubble that was my happy and not so happy world—simultaneously loving my life exactly as it was and longing for a life I didn’t have. A push and pull that ultimately launched my comic strip and provided a lot of what I wrote about for many years. The heart versus the brain. I was always a little bit irritated by how often the wrong one won. Also a little frustrated by the unnecessary grief I inflicted on myself. But then, I wouldn’t trade one second of the incredible life I got to have that grew out of all that.

  Some of us were lucky enough to have a dear friend through the worst of our dating years. A person so special she not only propped us up through all the drama then but is still close enough that she can give some perspective now. I have a friend like that. She just met me for coffee and is sitting across the table from me with a fat-free latte and a plate of cinnamon rolls.

  We were soulmates during years of singleness. Codependent support systems full of mutually bad advice throughout our twenties and thirties. She’s the only person I know who consistently made even worse dating choices than I did—the one woman I leaned on to advise me on mine. We were each other’s totally incompetent relationship coaches. When everyone else we knew was sick of hearing about “him,” we were there for each other. Champions of false hope. Defenders of each doomed obsession. We both finally got married at ages most would consider a little later than normal. We both raised daughters. Both got unmarried.

  And now we’re both compelled to look back and do the same kind of reflecting—trying to organize all the little pieces of life that got us up to right now. Our daughters are close to the same age she and I were when we became friends. We both wonder what possible founts of wisdom and dating advice we can be for our girls after the choices we made. After all those what-were-we-thinking years.

  We’ve been doing a binge-review of relationship blunders for an hour . . .

&n
bsp; All those brain cells given over to Mr. Wrong.

  All those hundreds of dollars spent on beautiful shoes to make a man who never once looked at our feet fall in love with us.

  All those thousands of hours shopping for what to wear on the rest of us.

  All those weeks waiting for the phone to ring.

  All those makeovers, that frantic primping.

  All that time spent translating every little syllable into a possible expression of the love he surely felt but never learned to express.

  All those pounds gained in revenge for his not being who we pretended he was.

  All those big, humiliating ideas . . .

  Yes! You should write a poem and tuck it under his windshield wiper while his car is parked at another girl’s house!

  Yes! You should knock on his door on New Year’s Eve because he was probably planning to propose at midnight, but just got too scared to call and invite you out!

  Could my dear friend and I have been worse for each other?

  Yes, we decide, on latte number two and cinnamon roll number three. Yes, we could have been and were. It wasn’t only that we helped each other rationalize relationships that weren’t good for us, it’s that we did it during years in which there were so many wonderful, positive new champions of a different way to be. Women cheering women on to assert ourselves, believe in ourselves, and demand more for ourselves in every part of life.

  It was way more complicated then than it seems now. There was so much inspiring, uplifting new talk about self-respect and having it all, but hardly any examples at the time of women who were able to do it. Most of us had grown up in houses where the men were in charge, watching TV shows like Father Knows Best. The men we dated grew up in those houses and watched those TV shows, too. They had the same mom and dad role models. It was hard enough for a young woman back then to figure out what to wear on a date, let alone figure out how to create a totally different reality in her relationships. Hard enough to find a guy to go out with, let alone one who was open to being dethroned and reprogrammed. Men and women were still arguing about things like “whether a man should give a woman permission to have a job.” Women were excited by the new world other women were talking and writing about, but without real-life proof, it was hard to believe it was possible to try for a loving, equality-based relationship with someone who would support our dreams, not try to stifle them.