It's Okay to Laugh Read online

  Dedication

  For Aaron.

  Us.

  For Steve.

  Semper Fi.

  Contents

  Dedication

  Introduction

  Chapter 1: Lay Off Me, Mary

  Chapter 2: Now

  Chapter 3: Stories

  Chapter 4: Brothers Gotta Hug

  Chapter 5: Take the Message to Garcia

  Chapter 6: Where Is My Syllabus?

  Chapter 7: iPhone Therapy

  Chapter 8: My Eighties-Sitcom Dad

  Chapter 9: Family (A Story About Juggalos and Not My Actual Family, Sorry Siblings)

  Chapter 10: A Boy Is Why I Moved to New York, and a Boy Is Why I Left

  Chapter 11: How I Met Your Father

  Chapter 12: Please Let Me Get What I Want

  Chapter 13: What to Do When the Person You Love Gets Brain Cancer (or Any Cancer)

  Chapter 14: And Also With You

  Chapter 15: Sorry You Dated Me

  Chapter 16: Slut

  Chapter 17: The Game

  Chapter 18: My Ex-Boyfriend’s Ex-Girlfriend

  Chapter 19: Who Should You Marry?

  Chapter 20: The Most Magical Place on Earth

  Chapter 21: Hot Young Widows Club

  Chapter 22: A Letter to the Recruiter Who Emailed My Husband a Month After His Death

  Chapter 23: Life Plans I’ve Made Since My Husband Died

  Chapter 24: Quiet, Susan

  Chapter 25: Madge

  Chapter 26: It’s a Secret, So Hush

  Chapter 27: Immaculate Conception

  Chapter 28: Helpful Advice for New Mothers

  Chapter 29: Everyone Thinks Their Kid Is the Best but Mine Actually Is

  Chapter 30: Hoarder

  Chapter 31: You’re Doing a Good Job

  Chapter 32: Relationship Porn (XXX, NSFW)

  Chapter 33: Cool Widow Kind of Wants to Kiss Someone

  Chapter 34: Frenching in a Van

  Chapter 35: How You Do It

  Chapter 36: Please Like Me

  Chapter 37: I Don’t Want to Make It Look Easy

  Chapter 38: No

  Chapter 39: Meanwhile, the World Goes On

  Chapter 40: Is He Going to Die Soon?

  Chapter 41: “The Boy Is Mine”

  Chapter 42: Welcome to Grey Gardens

  Chapter 43: Petty Crimes

  Chapter 44: Lean In

  Chapter 45: Just Quit

  Chapter 46: It’s Going to Be Okay (I Think)

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  This is a collection of stories about my life, told the way I remember them, after losing a couple hundred brain cells. I changed some names, but not all of them. If you remember these stories differently, good for you!

  Introduction

  You are holding a book by another youngish white woman who had a pretty charmed life until her father and husband died of cancer a few weeks after she miscarried her second baby. That’s just the truth: 2014 sucked pretty hard, but for most of my life, things were easy. I have three siblings and we are all (currently) on speaking terms. I was voted Most Likely to Have a Talk Show in high school. My parents mostly loved and respected each other, even if my dad referred to my beautiful, thin mother as Large Marge. My grandparents died when they were old, so I was sad but okay with it. I got to go to private school from kindergarten to college and I don’t even have student loans to pay off. Seriously, how much do you hate me right now?

  But easy as things were, I was always certain that I was somehow wasting time, that everything was slipping through my fingers and I was never going to do anything with my one wild and precious life. I kept waiting for someone else to tell me how to do it. It seemed like everyone else always knew what they were doing . . . but how? How did they know who to marry and how to get a car loan, or what number to put for their tax deductions so their parents wouldn’t end up paying their income taxes during their first year of “adulthood”? Where was the life syllabus, and how did I miss it?

  Now I am a thirty-two-year-old widowed mom and I don’t have time to worry about whether or not I’m doing it right, because I know that my one wild and precious life is indeed slipping through my hands. If I want to do something Big and Important, I have to do it before five o’clock because day care is strict about pickup time. I’m not so worried anymore, because now I know nobody knows what they are doing in life, and nobody knows what to do when bad things happen, to themselves or to other people. We make it up as we go, and sometimes we are big and generous and sometimes we are small and petty. We say the wrong things, we obsess over all the ways we got it wrong and all the ways that other people did, too. The only thing I know for sure is that it is okay not to know everything, to try and to fail and to sometimes suck at life, as long as you try to get better.

  I’m not writing this book to bum you out, although parts of it are for sure a bummer. I’m thinking specifically about the parts where my dad dies, or my husband dies, or I miscarry a baby. I don’t need your pity—I have plenty of my own, and I spend it creating sad stories about old men I see alone at the bus stop. I am writing it because bad stuff is like good stuff: it just happens.

  People really expect that huge life events will make you older and wiser, and in some ways, they do. I now have a will! I don’t give all the fucks about what people say about me on the Internet! And in some ways, I came out of these events like any other person: a little irritated at how many people complain about cold and flu season like they were just diagnosed with Stage IV brain cancer, and a little preoccupied with how flat my butt looks since I had a child.

  I’m writing a book about it—the good stuff and the terrible stuff—because I know I’m not special. This stuff happens to everyone. I’m not an expert on grief or parenting or even writing (maybe I Googled “How to Write a Book,” maybe not; who’s to say?). I am just another dummy with a blog and a collection of Most Improved awards from her days as a mediocre high school athlete, trying every day to get better at life. Not every life lesson comes from death and tragedy: sometimes it comes from flipping off your high school principal because he was illegally driving in the carpool lane.

  This is for people who have been through some shit—or have watched someone go through it. This is for people who aren’t sure if they’re saying or doing the right thing (you’re not, but nobody is). This is for people who had their life turned upside down and just learned to live that way. For people who have laughed at a funeral or cried in a grocery store. This is for everyone who wondered what exactly they’re supposed to be doing with their one wild and precious life. I don’t actually have the answer, but if you find out, will you text me?

  Chapter 1

  Lay Off Me, Mary

  Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?

  —MARY OLIVER

  Umm, I don’t know, Mary. I’m not great at planning, can’t I just go with the flow? Honestly, this little quote stresses me out sometimes. It’s like YOLO for women with Pinterest.

  My life is wild and precious. I only have one. What am I going to do with it? Well, for starters, I’m going to do so many things I never wanted to do. I’m going to play sports I don’t even like just because I’m tall. Even as a grown-up, years after my last game, I will say “yep” when old men ask if I play basketball just because I don’t want to disappoint them. I’m going to be mean just to fit in. I’m going to tip waitresses 20 percent even when they are mean to me. I’m going to live with a thin little skin, where I let every insult wound me and every compliment slide right off my back. I think I am doing this
wrong.

  I will be stressed to the max, Mary. Even when I’m a kid. I’m going to be certain that every paper I write will be the one that determines my future.

  In the summertime, I will go to Lake Superior with my brother and my cousins. I will float in the icy water and imagine I am a tiny pebble. I will swim until my lips are blue.

  I will play the saxophone for a whole year and nobody in my family will remember. This will annoy me because who lies about playing the saxophone?

  I will forgive my uncle when he calls me, a seven-year-old, impersonates Goofy, and tells me I’ve won a trip to Disneyland.

  I will go to Disneyland—as an adult. My husband and I will watch the haggard couples screaming at each other over their strollers. We will hold the sweaty little hands of our niece and nephew and purchase overpriced souvenir ears and limp salads. That night, in the dark of our hotel room, we will decide to have a baby together. Cancer be damned, whatever it takes.

  I will say the f-word even after I’m sent to my room for shouting it when my little brother breaks my tailbone in a wrestling match for the remote control when we are both in high school. One day, while I am changing his diaper, my two-year-old son, Ralph, will smile, look me right in the eye, and say, “Oh, fuck!” And I will laugh.

  I’m going to make sure I spend most of my college experience stumbling drunk through the streets of Cincinnati. Or, better yet, being pushed around in a stolen grocery cart. I will know I am wasting this opportunity, so I will try to keep that feeling quiet. I will try to starve it away, or push it down with hours in the gym. I will let my jeans slide on and off without unbuttoning them. I will count my ribs with my fingers at night.

  I will spend years mimicking the fashion stylings of Britney Spears: pierced belly button with a hot pink jewel, tanning-bed tan, and chunky highlights. When she and Justin Timberlake break up, I will cry in my dorm room and wonder if love is even real.

  I will listen to a friend tell me about having sex in the basement of a party with a senior. When I repeat the story to my boyfriend, who is halfway across the country at a small liberal arts college where he takes women’s studies and plays football, he will say, “That’s not sex, that’s rape,” and I will know he is right but not what to do about it.

  A very important thing to do with your wild and precious life is to get a job, so I will do that. I will sit in a cubicle, I suppose. And then another cubicle. I’d always imagined a really stately office with lots of books, but this beige little pen will do just fine. It comes with a wastebasket! And a little sorter thing for all my folders, which I will never use because that’s what a computer does now. I will make a lot of PowerPoint documents about very important “strategies” for things like how a “consumer” can “connect” with a fossil fuels brand on Twitter, because you know what? That’s all people want to do these days. They’re just opening up Twitter hoping to start a dialogue with the guys who put the gas in their SUVs. And I can say I helped make that happen, Mary. Isn’t that something?

  I will sometimes hate-read blogs written by people I despise, just to make my blood boil. You probably don’t hate-read anything because you have a sparkling mind that has not been pecked to death by the incessant information assault that is the Internet. But seriously, Mary, how many lifestyle blogs does the world need? How many photos of coffee? How many hashtags do we need on one photo and can’t we just have a brunch without labeling all the beverages with small chalk signs, Mary?? Can’t we?

  Sometimes I will read Twitter right when I wake up, when only one of my eyes opens fully. I will follow hashtags that make me want to punch someone. I’m talking about you, #notallmen, #meninism, and #alllivesmatter.

  I will fall in love, quickly the first time, and slower every time after that. “I hope we are in love FOREVER,” I will write in my bubbly, high-school-girl handwriting.

  I will say “I love you” when I don’t exactly mean it, but “I love you” sounds better than “You are my best option at the time, though I know you have reached your full potential and I am destined for greater things, buddy.” That’s okay, right?

  I will choose the wrong man sometimes. All right, most of the time. Okay, every time except once or twice.

  I will sometimes miss these men who were not right for me. I will think of them when I hear certain songs by long-lost indie bands, or smell marijuana in the summertime. I will always say it wasn’t love, but it was. Love is not always perfect, is it, Mary? Isn’t it sometimes awkward and bumbling?

  I will move to New York for love. I won’t have a job, or any money, but I will feel very alive and very special and cosmopolitan even though “date night” sometimes means eating at Olive Garden in Times Square, because I am dating a man who is comfortable enough to admit that his favorite kind of Italian food is “Italian food.”

  I will learn the words to misogynistic rap songs, even though I am a feminist. I will always turn it down when my car rolls up beside an elderly person.

  Sometimes I will be small and mean and ugly and jealous.

  Sometimes I will be open and loving and generous.

  I will do anything to avoid being lonely. I will wake up in beds where I do not belong, grab my things, and go.

  I will pick my nose and hope nobody is looking.

  I will judge other people, and find myself doing nearly all those things I judged them for. See: my giant, all-terrain stroller; handing my child an iPhone to keep him quiet when we are out to dinner and he is losing his mind; co-sleeping with him until he is thirty (fingers crossed).

  I will choose the right man when it really matters. I will tell him once that it is my dream to be on the kiss cam, and at every sporting event, he will conspire to make sure we make out hardcore every time the Jumbotron camera passes by us. I will watch him die in my arms. I’m not saying that to be dramatic, I’m saying it because aside from pushing a live baby out of my hidey-hole it is the most meaningful thing I have done with this wild and precious life. I will tell our son that his papa is in his heart, and in mine. Like the word “fuck,” Ralph will remember that. He will remind me on gray spring days when I am wiping his lunch from the floor, where he’s been so kind as to sprinkle it. “My papa loves you,” he’ll say to me, with his crooked-teeth grin, “he’s in my heart.”

  I’ll be quick to forget everything good I’ve ever done. I will replay every time I have ever been an asshole, and hate myself for every wrong thing I’ve ever said and done.

  Yes, it stressed me out to be asked about my plans for my one—ONE—wild and precious life, but I will still like this phrase every time someone has turned it into art on Pinterest or Instagram. I will try not to let it stress me out. I will try to be better. I will try to bring more love to the world.

  Chapter 2

  Now

  I don’t want to have cancer,” he whispers. We are curled up in his hospital bed, trying to go to sleep in the alternate universe we’ve found ourselves in. When we woke up this morning, we were just a regular young couple secretly cohabitating after a year of dating. But somewhere in the middle of the day, he’d had a seizure, ended up in the hospital, and found out he’d somehow grown a brain tumor without even noticing.

  “You don’t have cancer,” I tell him, because he doesn’t. He has a tumor. And until they open up his head to take it out, that tumor could be anything: a conjoined twin absorbed into his skull at birth, a silver dollar, a handful of cotton candy.

  But it’s not cancer. Because I won’t let it be, and in my twenty-eight years on this earth I’ve become goddamn used to getting whatever the hell I want. My first boyfriend, an A when I deserved a B in American history junior year of high school, my first job, the dimple in my right cheek. That’s just a sampling of the things I’ve gotten through sheer willpower.

  Whatever the nurse gave Aaron a few minutes ago is starting to work, and I can feel his body gently relax next to me. I’d asked if I could have a sleeping aid, too, but Nurse Neil just laughed and dropped his
signature line, “I know, right?” so I’m left wide awake in the glow of my boyfriend’s heart monitor. I keep my hand on his head and my head on his heart and in the glow of our new night-light I command the universe to keep going my way.

  And then I am standing by his grave, having traveled at light speed from the present to the worst-case scenario. The priest is swinging incense over Aaron’s body, I am kneeling next to his mother in a church pew, I am throwing a handful of damp earth onto his casket, shiny as a Cadillac.

  We are young and in love, and my boyfriend is going to die.

  He will die, I know it, and I go there, though I have no business doing so. Our human imaginations are woefully unprepared for predicting actual pain, but I hack away at it anyway, trying to form a scar before I am even wounded.

  November has always been the cruelest month. November is gray and stark, each day growing shorter and shorter until December can plunge us into total darkness. November took my uncle and my grandmother and many years after we’ve laid them each to rest, when the sting of this month has become more of a dull ache, November is trying to claim Aaron.

  As a child, I was always worried that my parents would die if I slept away from our home, because I was a very normal and happy child with no anxiety issues at all.

  Sleepovers were rare, because my father was strict and old-fashioned and believed that a child belonged in her bed and not on the floor of some half-finished Minneapolis basement watching PG-13 movies and getting made fun of for her headgear, but they did happen, and I’d always spend the night racked with insomnia, imagining the demise of my parents and my impending orphanhood.

  One by one, my friends would drift off to sleep, and I would lay awake among them, imagining my older sister delivering the news when I walked into our home the next day with my sleeping bag under my arm, and calling out to our family, “Yoo hoo!” in imitation of our now dead mother. I pictured my siblings and myself lined up in the front row of the church, kneeling before our parents’ coffins in coordinating all-black outfits. My brothers would offer me their handkerchiefs to dry my tears. My brothers would apparently have handkerchiefs.