Fifty Things That Aren't My Fault Read online

  It’s not my fault we’re still supposed to stuff ourselves into someone else’s version of what we should be because there are zero realistic alternatives!

  IT’S NOT MY FAULT THAT THINGS THAT SHOULDN’T MATTER STILL MATTER, AND THAT EVEN THOUGH I HELPED PIONEER A GENERATION TO THINK COMPLETELY DIFFERENTLY, I’VE SOMEHOW RAISED A DAUGHTER WHO SOBS IN THE SWIMWEAR DEPARTMENT DRESSING ROOM JUST LIKE I DID—WITH ME STANDING RIGHT BESIDE HER!—HER SELF-ESTEEM CONSTRICTED BY A WHOLE NEW WORLD OF SASSY LITTLE STRAPS!

  I turn down the wrong street on purpose so it will take me longer to get home.

  There are support groups for the big problems. Unequal pay, unjust treatment, unfair practices, global inequality. Harassment. There are politicians, movements, organizations, public forums. There’s honor in raising one’s voice about the big problems.

  There’s no honor in mentioning what happened last night with nine “100 Calorie Packs” of Mini Oreos. No one to put into perspective the thousand extra pressures, time saps, and mini confidence wreckers that added up all day and left me feeling so exhausted and useless and small at 9:00 p.m. and then so huge at 9:06 p.m. No sympathy for the minuscule things that prevent me from doing the big things. That stop me from getting through the next five minutes.

  I remember the thrill of being a twenty-two-year-old new working woman in my first advertising job. Ecstatic that I had a job, the respect of my coworkers, and the blessing of the world to succeed in ways my mom never dreamed possible. I remember the morning of a big meeting when I couldn’t get my “fat” skirt buttoned. Couldn’t get anything buttoned. Nothing fit except my bathrobe. All of life out there for me to conquer, and I had to call in sick because I literally couldn’t walk out the front door.

  I remember my insecurities being so ingrained that I parked across the street from a party and watched what other women were wearing before I was brave enough to leave my car and walk in myself. I remember it like it was yesterday.

  Because it was yesterday. For all that’s changed in me over the years, so much of the ridiculousness is still there. Stuck on my DNA like the frosting swirls on a Hostess CupCake.

  It’s not my fault that when the doors of possibility for women opened, the role models got so incredible and the comparisons became so impossible. Suddenly women weren’t just getting jobs. They were becoming dynamic career women, financial wizards, nurturing homemakers, enlightened involved parents, environmental activists, community leaders, self-assured, self-expressed, self-supporting global change makers, loving equal partners, weekend yoga instructors, online entrepreneurs—and size 5’s all at once. When the message is that all women can do anything, it’s hard not to get the feeling that all the other women are doing something and I alone am stuck in the same old ruts.

  It’s not my fault that even guilt has too many options. I used to eat a muffin and have calorie guilt. Now I have calorie guilt, carbohydrate guilt, fat guilt, sugar guilt, gluten guilt, nonorganic blueberry guilt, manufacturing process pollution guilt, non-biodegradable-wrapper guilt, carbon footprint guilt. Nine entire guilt categories per muffin. Multiply that over the whole food chain.

  Not my fault that I carry all the new guilts on top of all the old guilts. Bulk guilt. Multigenerational guilt. I bring a pre-thank-you hostess gift to the dinner party. I send a thank-you text when I get home. I write an email thank-you the next morning in which I say a proper thank-you note will follow. I search for paper upon which to compose the proper note and a pretty thank-you card into which to tuck it. I hunt for a postage stamp with a design element that coordinates with the pen color, which matches the lining of the envelope. Violet. No. Plum. No. Eggplant. No.

  Etcetera.

  My skirts button now, but I can no longer leave home for fear of how long it will take me to express gratitude if someone does something nice for me.

  I turn down another wrong street on purpose.

  It’s not my fault I have bonus guilt. I had the amazing platform of an internationally syndicated comic strip, which some people said I should have used to voice triumphant stories of unwavering feminism, but which I instead used to voice the insecurities, relationship frustrations, mother-daughter angst, career grief, and food blunders under which so many of our triumphant dreams get squashed. Some people thought my work reinforced the negative stereotype of women being obsessed with shopping, weight, and love, but it wasn’t my fault we still live in a world that partly judges women by what we wear, how much we weigh, and whether or not and who or how we love. Not my fault that with every glorious new possibility for women came an extra sense of isolation when we not only couldn’t keep up but were told we shouldn’t talk about the things that held us back.

  Many days I wanted to say, Hey, it was kind of humiliating to admit what I did in the comic strip today, but this is the truth of what’s tangling everything up for a lot of us, and it makes us feel even more alone because we’re not supposed to admit we’re vulnerable to any of it! You only looked at the subject matter but didn’t notice the small personal victory that wrestling with the subject matter included! My message was meant to be one of compassion and hope! The powerful female spirit rising above the muck!

  I spent days researching the fashion trends of the season, for instance—how women are portrayed, the convoluted sexism sold in women’s magazines that’s billed as “fearless fashion.” Images like that of a sultry executive leaning against her desk in a one-button blazer with nothing on under it (“This season’s feminine touch!”) undermining decades of efforts for women to not be viewed as sex objects in the workplace and inviting confusion at best and sexual harassment at worst. I would try to sum up days of research and perspective and the real-life experience of living in this culture into four tiny newspaper comic strip boxes with a bit of hope in the last panel . . . and would be heartbroken sometimes, honestly, when some people would say, “There she goes, writing about shopping again.”

  I wanted to write notes to all the people who were unhappy with my work and explain myself. I wanted to write notes to all the people who were happy with my work and tell them how deeply grateful I was that they let me know I wasn’t alone.

  I still owe all those notes. Thousands of them. It’s all on the list.

  It’s not my fault I just ate my whole sandwich at the last stoplight out of self-pity.

  Not my fault I’m circling completely different neighborhoods now.

  Nor that I’ve started yelling out the open window again.

  “It’s not my fault I could have had a nice dinner with friends tonight but turned down the invitation because I’m eight hundred episodes behind in my television watching and can’t hold my own in dinner party conversations anymore!”

  “Not my fault the headlines were so depressing this morning, the only way I could reclaim some personal power was to go online and buy another pair of shoes!”

  “Not my fault that all the time I’ve gained from owning a smartphone has been lost searching for my smartphone!”

  “Not my fault that my selfies no longer resemble myself!”

  “Not my fault I still pay monthly dues to a gym I haven’t gone to in a year because I’m too embarrassed to call and cancel my membership!”

  “Not my fault I keep running out of color ink when I only print in black!”

  “Not my fault I look completely different in the store mirror than the home mirror!”

  “Not my fault that when I open my mouth to say something to my child, my mother’s voice comes out!”

  “Not my fault that even after all the times my heart’s been broken, I can still be seduced by the promises of hair products!”

  “Not my fault I can summon the energy to run to the kitchen and make a hot fudge sundae, but not the energy to strike even one yoga pose during a commercial break!”

  “Not my fault I used up another half hour of my life last week trying to figure out w
hich pack of plain white paper to buy!”

  “Not my fault I have so many passwords in my brain, I can’t remember the names of friends!”

  “Not my fault that I can go so quickly from restorative meditation to shrieking at a voice on an automated answering system!”

  “Not my fault that no matter how many times I’ve repeated yesterday, I believe with all my heart that I will be completely different today!”

  “Not my fault that every now and then, the most positive thing I do for myself is rip up all the affirmations stuck on the front of my file cabinet!”

  “Not my fault that almost every time I’ve listened to my body, it’s told me to do the wrong thing!”

  “Not my fault that now that everything has a link to more information, I never, ever feel I’ve finished anything!”

  “Not my fault that my ego soared just long enough to convince me I’d remember what was on the fifteen full memory cards I tossed in my desk drawer without labeling!”

  “Not my fault I can’t share my dreams with friends because they’ll ask how it’s going and expect me to have made progress!”

  “Not my fault it seems best to skip the positive self-image books at this point and simply start shutting my eyes in the shower!”

  “Not my fault that I believe my wants and needs are more deeply understood by Amazon Prime than by 99 percent of the men I ever dated!”

  “Not my fault that some days, even with all I know and have done, I still measure my self-worth in fat grams.”

  But not today.

  I’ve been driving in circles for an hour, and now I’m heading down my street, a changed woman. I’ve breathed in the possibility of innocence, great big gulps of it, and I feel good.

  I pull up to the garage that’s too full of stuff for a car to ever fit in it. I squirt anti-bac on my hands and breath spray in my mouth so my dog won’t notice I ate a sandwich without giving him the chance to beg for a piece.

  I open the front door. Am tackled by the dog. My life is exactly as I left it an hour ago, but it feels completely different. I drove an hour and ten miles out of my way to get to back where I belong—to a place of perspective, freedom from the past, and renewed belief in myself.

  I look at the handsome four-legged guy who’s waited so long for me to return, and say the one and only thing I am completely sure of at this moment in my grown-up life:

  “It’s not my fault the fastest way back to me was to take the really long way home.”

  2.

  WHY THERE’S A LIFELESS BODY IN DRESSING ROOM NUMBER TWO

  This is being written from a four-foot-by-four-foot dressing room in a Top 10 Sporting Goods store. Not written, actually. I’m dictating it to my iPhone, as I only have the use of one finger to press the little microphone icon. The rest of me is trapped in a sports bra. Not the Sexy Sports Bra of my daughter’s world. This is a normal sports bra made for normal women.

  These could be my Last Words. My Audio Goodbye—just in case this is the day I actually die of strangulation from underwear. On the odd chance that my sole beneficiary, my nineteen-year-old Sexy Sports Bra Princess, doesn’t pluck the iPhone from my dead hand and sell it on Craigslist without even listening to my big speech, I’m leaving this for someone else to hear.

  I’ve been stuck in this sports bra for seventeen minutes. Have contorted my body every way possible to get out of it. Tried to wrench it upward, tug it downward, pry it away from my crushed rib cage.

  The bra is now lodged halfway between my chest and my chin, with my left arm and hand squashed flat under it. The lower half of my right arm is sticking up out of the neck hole, which is how I got to the microphone icon—by bending over and poking at my purse on the floor with the index finger of my right hand until the phone fell out and I could jab the screen.

  Before I black out, I need to be heard. More pressing than the primal urge to scream for help is the primal urge to explain why it’s a size L in which I’m stuck. This is not the classic “If I must die, please, God, let them find my lifeless body wearing an S.” Or even the “Let the paramedics all be men, because humiliating though it will be for them to find me like this, at least they won’t peek at my size tag.” This is more urgent than all that.

  I’m trapped in an L, not an S, because I couldn’t stretch the size S wide enough to get it over my head. I couldn’t have stretched it wide enough to get it over my daughter’s old American Girl doll head. The S sports bra is not made for any female, plastic or otherwise. The L barely got over my shoulders, then sprang back around my chest like a rubber tourniquet, where it will apparently stay until it’s removed by the surgical scissors of whoever finds me passed out on the Gatorade logo that’s embedded in the linoleum floor of this dinky room. I’m briefly bizarrely cheered by the fact that if someone bothered to embed a Gatorade logo in the linoleum, it must mean they planned for people, like me, to be upside down in underwear staring at the floor while speaking Last Words into an iPhone. I’m not the only one!

  The cheer ends. Of course I’m not the only one. If a small person can’t get into an S and a small person can’t get out of an L, what are 99 percent of the world’s women, who are medium to extra large, supposed to do? This is why I have to speak up before my battery or I expire.

  There are at least six hundred sports bras in this store—proud symbols of athletic emancipation, opening a universe of sports and exercise to women because we’re finally supposed to be comfortable doing sports and exercising when we wear one of these. This is what we come to buy when we’re committing to feeling good about ourselves. But as far as I can tell from the times I’ve shopped for one, every sports bra is only going to make the woman who tries it on feel horrible about herself.

  I want to scream, but in my current condition, how much do I really want anyone to come running? I want to rally like-minded women to protest with me . . . but my kindred spirits are all stuck in their own individual four-by-four Top 10 Sporting Goods dressing rooms, trapped just like me in underwear that was supposed to set us free that we can’t get out of. Part of a huge, liberated, utterly immobile group, each member of which feels completely, half-nakedly alone.

  I stare down at the Gatorade logo. It’s making me thirsty. Also it’s reminding me how much I wish I’d used the ladies’ room before I came in here. I remember the Top 10 corporate policy of “restrooms for employees only” from a previous unhappy visit. I start calculating if there’s any chance I could escape the sports bra, get dressed, apply for a job, and get hired in the next three minutes so I could qualify to use their bathroom. Frustration rises like the tide, a giant wave of discomfort and injustice rushing over . . .

  I instantly regret using a water metaphor. As so often happens in the crusade for change, the urgency of the greater cause is washed away by the urgency of the needs of the moment. More water imagery. Fewer minutes remaining of anything good happening in this room. I give one last panicked, futile squirm, after which I vow to not move one muscle until I’m hopefully unconscious for the rest of the day.

  I think of our foremothers in their laced-up corsets. I think of the centuries of underwear injustices, of athletics that were so out of reach they weren’t even a dream; of the millions of strong, defiant female voices that never had a chance to be heard because women couldn’t even imagine speaking up about such a thing. I think of my frostbitten ancestors, trudging to the outhouse in ankle-length bloomers and non-sports corsets in the middle of winter. I think of all the areas of life that appear to have been transformed for women, but with innovations that missed the mark just enough to leave us stifled in new and different ways. I think of how far we’ve come only to be stuck where I am right now. Mobilized but paralyzed, incensed but silenced. Incarcerated a mile away from a public ladies’ room by a puny chartreuse sports bra.

  One day, I promise, someone will go to all the women’s dressing rooms, gather up the cel
l phones of my generation, and transcribe our voice memos. And then, finally, we’ll have ourselves a real revolution.

  3.

  DRIVING LESSONS

  Want me to drive?”

  “Sure!” I say as brightly as possible through a jaw spasmed shut in horror.

  It’s a sunny Sunday afternoon and we’re starting from the safest possible place—a carport wide open on three sides with a nice long driveway that leads to a quiet residential street.

  Still . . .

  I get in the passenger seat and shove it as far back as it will go so I won’t be crushed when the nine airbags deploy. Strap on the seat belt. Calculate how my arms can shield my face from shattering glass without being lacerated themselves. Legs better off bent? No. Straight ahead. No. Bent. No. One bent, one straight, giving a fifty-fifty chance of needing only a cast, not a wheelchair, after our half-mile drive to the market. I’m gripping the inside of the door so tightly, I might self-inflict a stress fracture before she even gets the car out of the carport.

  “AAACK!”

  “WHAT?” She snaps her head toward me, glaring.

  “You lurched!” I snap back.

  “I lurched because you screamed!”

  “I screamed because you lurched!”

  “Do you want to drive?”

  “No! I want you to drive! You’re doing a great . . . AACK!”

  “WHAT?”

  “You lurched again!”

  “Do you want to drive??”

  She slams the gearshift to P.

  So far we’ve moved twelve inches and I’ve aged eleven years. I try to uncurl the clenched fingers of one hand with the paralyzed fingers of the other, assessing damage. I’m not being self-absorbed here. If I’m injured, there will be no one to take care of her. Just like strapping the oxygen mask on myself first on the airplane.