It's Okay to Laugh Read online

  I don’t have my dad to remind me of Rowan anymore, so I have to remind myself to take the message to Garcia. I hate that, because I miss my dad and also because I am lazy. I don’t want to learn how our furnace works and why it is broken. It was Aaron’s job to set up the Apple TV and troubleshoot all my tech issues, not mine. I bought the bike trailer for Aaron to use with Ralph, but now it’s my job to make sure our son tools around our city with a good view of my butt. I am not an incredibly confident driver, but it turns out I can load up and drive a moving truck on my own. And every time I cross something off my to-do list that wouldn’t be there if my husband or father were still alive, I feel perhaps prouder than I should for just being an adult. It is annoyingly true, as we find out once we try to have our tattoos removed or find out the boyfriend our mothers never warmed up to is moving out east to join a “throuple,” that our parents are sometimes right. My excuses usually are stupid. I’m more capable than I think I am and no, I probably don’t have a rare form of cancer.

  I can take the message to Garcia. It doesn’t matter how or why. When something needs to be done, I can goddamn do it.

  Chapter 6

  Where Is My Syllabus?

  Most people in college skipped the first day of class.

  “It’s just syllabus day,” my friends said, laying in their twin beds, playing Snood on their Dell laptops, “it’s not like you’re going to miss anything.”

  “I know, so dumb,” I agreed, my backpack on nice and tight, because nobody in Minneapolis had bothered to tell me what the hell Vera Bradley was, let alone buy me a loud, quilted bag that looked like one an old lady would hide her knitting in.

  Then I hightailed it across campus with my signature speed walk. Because also nobody had bothered to tell me that it was cooler to walk slow than it was to shout, “On your left!” while zipping around people on the paths that crisscrossed our tiny campus.

  I wasn’t about to miss my favorite day of the semester.

  I had a routine for syllabus day. I’d arrive to class early, choose a seat near the front but not quite in the front row, and crack open my Franklin Covey planner and a fresh notebook, scrawling my name across the top page like I had since I learned to write in cursive: Nora Elizabeth McInerny.

  Why would you want to miss this day, where the teacher would hand you a literal roadmap to success—the exact steps you needed to take to get an A, stay on the dean’s list, and earn your father’s respect and admiration—printed on a few sheets of 8½-by-11-inch paper? We’d go through the syllabus as a class, walking through each of the items, which as biological adults we should have been able to read over on our own time. No matter, each teacher was happy to expound on the upcoming reading assignments and their expectations for research papers and essays.

  “Questions?” the professor would ask, and I’d shake my head, copying each upcoming assignment into my planner, with a reminder the week before that a due date was approaching. It didn’t matter how drunk I got at Soupie’s bar using the expired driver’s license of my friend’s ex-boyfriend’s older sister, a thirty-year-old named Melanie Beaulieu who was a five-foot-six, 110-pound Sagittarius from De Peres, Missouri. Those assignments were getting done. I was getting an A.

  I’d been getting A’s since it was possible to get an A, and I’d have done it sooner if my grade school hadn’t offered up ridiculous options like U (unsatisfactory), S (satisfactory), or the covetable S+ (more than satisfactory). I’d pore over my report cards each quarter, relishing the comments from my teachers, hellbent on turning any S into an S+ the next time that yellow sheet of paper showed up on the dining room table.

  When I crossed the stage at the Xavier University Cintas Center in May 2005, it was with a hangover and a BA in English, magna cum laude.

  “Why not summa?” my dad asked, and I flushed with shame, remembering the Latin class I’d had to drop my freshman year when it became apparent that learning a dead language just wasn’t in my wheelhouse if I wanted to keep up my aggressive drinking schedule.

  Like our graduation speaker told us, our whole lives stretched ahead of us, an awesome sea of possibility. What she didn’t tell us—what nobody was telling me—was where the fuck I was supposed to go or do next.

  I had to start my grown-up life somewhere, so the day after graduation, I dragged my hungover body out of bed and headed back home. I cried for what seemed like the entire twelve-hour drive from Cincinnati to Minneapolis, smoking the free cigarettes we’d been handed at the bar by a cigarette “street team” of recent graduates who had used their degrees to help recruit the next wave of lung cancer patients.

  I drove my green Honda Civic, with its single-disc CD player, through the flat expanse of Ohio and Indiana for six straight hours, a printed, stapled list of directions from MapQuest as my navigator. My cell phone had been tragically killed in a drinking accident the night before, so I was in transit, incommunicado and in total crisis for most of my drive, listening to Stevie Nicks singing the lyrics of “Landslide” directly into my soul, on repeat. Could I sail through the changing ocean tides? Could I handle the seasons of my life?

  The answer was a heartfelt and off-key “Ooooooooooooh, I don’t know.”

  When you are an English major, they tell you that you can do anything, but what they really mean is that you could just as easily end up doing nothing. I was confident, reading all those books and writing all those papers, that I was being prepared for greatness, and somewhere outside of this generic Midwestern college campus was a job with my name on it. All I had to do was let the world know I was available, and they’d be lining up for the chance to show me what was next. After all, this was the heyday of Jessica Simpson on Newlyweds, of Paris Hilton and Laguna Beach. Success, it seemed, was just a given if you were a moderately attractive white girl with blond hair and no shame.

  To the credit of the entire world, who eventually lost interest in all three of those things, that was not exactly the case. The world was not waiting for another blond white girl whose interests were “I dunno, lots of things” and whose stated goal on her résumé was “to get a job with [name of company].”

  I envied the friends who were so certain of their futures. The ones who graduated with a degree in marketing and went to work for GE or P&G or any other company that goes by just its initials, or graduated with degrees in biology and moved on to medical school, or with degrees in political science and moved on to law school. I bought an LSAT book, but kept falling asleep in my lawn chair every time I opened it. I considered business school, but then I realized that you needed to take a test to get in and decided the first test of business school is knowing that you need to take a test to get in, and I’d clearly failed. I still bought a GMAT book, and then realized that taking “Math for Athletes” with the entire basketball team hadn’t exactly prepared me for the rigors of business school.

  I didn’t know what I wanted to be when I grew up. I was waiting for someone to tell me, but nobody did.

  Nobody told me to move to Italy after graduation and take a lazy summer as an au pair while my classmates rushed off to jobs managing rental car franchises, in a big old hurry to be grown-ups with rent and car payments. I didn’t get explicit instructions on how to move to New York City, though I hope that if I had, they would have advised me to have more than $400 in my bank account, and to maybe have a job lined up before arriving with my two suitcases and a dream, like Fievel Mousekewitz. I didn’t know how to be single, and I sucked at it, but somehow that got me to Aaron, and I got to fall in love the way I once fell down the stairs at a movie theater: hard and publicly, with just a little bit of rug burn. There was no roadmap for me to follow when my phone rang and Aaron was having a seizure at work, or when the reason for the seizin’ turned out to be a brain tumor, which turned out to be the gnarliest form of brain cancer there is. Aaron and I made it up as we went along: We got married, we had a baby, we traveled and went to concerts and sometimes got caught by the nurses getting a little to
o friendly in his hospital bed. This is not to say that I didn’t have doubts, because I did. I was sure, all the time, that I was doing it wrong. I spent a lot of time looking up from my life and craning my neck around to get a glimpse at everyone else’s paper: How were they adulting, and were they doing it better than me? Should I be buying a house in the Midwest instead of renting in Brooklyn? Should I be getting an MBA or at least marry someone who has one? Am I taking good enough care of Aaron? Is it okay that I’m still working while he’s sick, even though he tells me I should? Should I maybe not have left my full-time job when my husband died?

  I thought I was ready to say good-bye to Aaron. “It’s okay,” I told him, “I’ll be okay.” After three years of chemo and radiation, every labored breath was truly work for his body. The pain of a brain tumor was so immense that he was on a list of narcotics I’d only heard about drug addicts using, and during his two weeks of hospice he’d slipped slowly from my side into a quiet, unconscious limbo between this world and the next.

  The moment he was gone, I wasn’t ready anymore, and I was filled with a crippling sense of doubt. Was I good enough for you? Did I make this easy enough? Why did I get mad at you for forgetting garbage day? What the fuck do I do now?

  At twenty-two, with an expensive degree and no plan for my life, I felt like a fucking loser.

  At thirty-two, with an expensive degree, a mortgage, a child, and no plan for my life, I feel like a fucking genius.

  Somewhere in those past ten years, I became, against all odds, an adult. Emails started arriving in my inbox from recent grads with dreams of working in PR and marketing, asking me what I thought they should do. My sixteen-year-old neighbor burst through my back door with her finger wrapped in a pile of bloody paper towels after slicing it open trying to halve a bagel. My response to both situations was an internal, So, why are you talking to me? And then it hit me: They thought I was an adult! Oh shit, I was an adult! I somehow bandaged up the girl next door and got her finger to stop gushing blood on my granite countertops, and I replied to nearly every email I got from younger women looking for advice. But I told them all the same thing: I have no idea what I’m doing, and it’s okay if you don’t, either.

  I know that I will never be ready to be an adult, that nobody will ever give me the proper instructions, and even if they did, I’d treat them like I do most maps or IKEA manuals and wing it anyway. Being an adult is doing everything before you are ready. It’s having the guts or blind stupidity to take your own route and make it up as you go.

  I was never going to move to Cleveland and stay at home with my two children while my banker husband brought home the organic, nitrate-free bacon. I was never going to be a lawyer or an MBA, though all three of those are fine things to be.

  I was always meant to find my own weird little path in life, no matter how many years I spent following the one laid out for me.

  I still sometimes feel that gnawing feeling that I am doing it wrong, that I should be more like my friends with normal jobs and normal lives, but I know that the voice inside me is sometimes an idiot, because that voice is the same one that convinced me to get the Reese Witherspoon Sweet Home Alabama haircut even though I’m six feet tall with a weak chin and ended up looking like a brontosaurus. I don’t know what is next, and that’s okay. It’s more than okay, because I actually get to decide what it is. I can keep inventing this life as I go, creating the world I want for myself and my son, showing him that life is best when you live it yourself, rather than waiting for someone to show you how it’s done.

  There is no syllabus for life that outlines the steps you need to take to graduate to the next event. This life itself is the lesson and the test and there is no dean’s list and no gold stars. There is just the sum of your relationships and your actions, measured by how you feel when you lie down to go to sleep at night, and how many people heart your tweets.

  I never thought I would say this, but fuck syllabus day.

  Chapter 7

  iPhone Therapy

  I overcame myself, the sufferer; I carried my own ashes to the mountains; I invented a brighter flame for myself.

  —FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE

  A lot of people go to therapy when their spouse dies. Or when their father dies. Or when they have a miscarriage. I don’t know what other people do when all three things happen to them within a few weeks, but I spend ten minutes twice a day meditating with Oprah and Deepak Chopra.

  I haven’t paid for the full version of the app, so ten minutes is all I get. It’s worth it, though, to have a little bit of time dedicated to quieting the dozen or so monkeys in my brain, wearing their fezzes and vests, clanging away with tiny cymbals.

  I don’t know if what I am doing is meditation or really just a guided nap, but I do it anyway, repeating the mantra endlessly in my head, using those words to suppress the urge to create a mental to-do list or run through a list of failures and embarrassments from the past thirty-two years of my life.

  People don’t know what to do with me. It’s hard to see someone suffer, so some people don’t see me at all, and some people rush to share their own personal recipes for happiness. My doorstep finds new packages every week: books on mourning and grief or the power of prayer. I’m given yoga passes and links to articles about “dealing with grief,” like the cure for what ails me is going to be a hot take like “take your time, there is no rush.”

  “You know,” my friends say casually, “so-and-so actually went to a therapist after her father died and she thought it really helped. . . .” And I’m sure it did help so-and-so. And it might even help me. But right now, I’m busy cobbling together my own version of therapy, which basically boils down to letting me do whatever I want, whenever I want to.

  “Nora,” I say, “do you want to remove that shitty tattoo you got in your twenties when you were trying to impress a roommate who didn’t like you? Would you like to go to yoga in the middle of the day? Get a new tattoo? Maybe get some laser hair removal? Take a trip to California? Quit your stable, steady job and be a stay-at-home mom whose one child goes to day care full-time?”

  The answer is a resounding “yes!” and I do it all.

  I run. I do yoga. I drink a lot of wine and watch ancient seasons of Real Housewives, specifically the inaugural Orange County season that started it all, because I find comfort in a simpler time, when the world was all about Juicy tracksuits and Paris Hilton was our most controversial celebrity. I stay up until 2:00 A.M. reading, until Ralph unfailingly wakes up crying for me. He just wants to cuddle in Mama’s bed, and his slow, steady breath lulls me to sleep. He likes sleeping in, too, so our mornings are nice and lazy. Sometimes, I drop him off at day care still in my pajamas and retainer, and curl up on the couch with coffee for an hour before I even open my laptop to work. I cancel plans with friends and acquaintances, turn inward as much as I can.

  I go to Catholic mass at churches where nobody will recognize me, and I watch the faces of the faithful, elderly congregants. I want what they have: an unfailing North Star to guide them. I watch the first ten minutes of a Scientology documentary and think to myself, All right, now I can see how this would be appealing. . . . I am slightly jealous of all the recovering alcoholics in my life, with the steady rhythm of weekly AA meetings to keep them on the straight and narrow, eyes to God. I wonder how long it would take me to develop a drinking problem, or if I may already be there.

  I am creating my own path through my own grief, toward my own version of happiness.

  TO BE CLEAR, I HAVE been in therapy before, when I was young and my life was free of any tangible problems.

  “Why are you seeing a psychiatrist?” my high school boyfriend asked me when I told him about my upcoming appointment. He was truly shocked. “Are you crazy or something?”

  “I don’t know,” I told him, staring out the window of his father’s 1985 BMW, crying. “I’m just sad all the time and I don’t know why.” He didn’t get it, and neither did I. I was on the honor roll.
I played varsity sports. I had a boyfriend who was on the football team, loving parents who had been married for years. My mother bought a lime green VW Bug and I got to drive it to school every day, like Private School Barbie. But I was consumed by anxieties.

  “I just feel like I could be doing more with my life,” reads a diary entry of mine. “Be more successful. Be a better writer. Save more money.”

  I wrote that when I was ten.

  I wore a pink linen maxi skirt and a white spaghetti-strap tank to my first appointment with a therapist in downtown Minneapolis. I’d scheduled it for the morning so I could still make it to my job as a lifeguard at the public pool, which opened at noon sharp. My pale Irish skin was tanned to a deep brown. “That’s thanks to me and my people,” my father told me every summer, comparing our forearms to one another. “Your mother is the kind of Irish that just burns. But not us.”

  I remember nothing about that appointment, not the name of my doctor or the outcome of our relationship, just the image of myself in the shiny buildings of downtown Minneapolis, my deep summer tan against my sun-bleached hair, as beautiful as I would ever be in my life, and just as sad.

  “You’re fucking crazy,” my boyfriend would tell me every time we fought, and in a way, he was right. I was impatient and mercurial. I did cool things like tossing eggs and toilet paper at a girl’s house because she was also dating him, and going to the MAC counter at Dayton’s before a high school dance and telling the makeup artist to give me a face like Christina Aguilera. He did cool things like secretly dating girls from other high schools and calling me crazy, and I did even cooler things like hacking into his email to make sure he wasn’t exchanging any secret messages with girls who weren’t me and wondering why he thought I was so nuts. Incidentally, he was secretly messaging and dating other girls, though it is my duty to tell any teenage girls that you shouldn’t read your boyfriend’s private emails because it is 1) illegal and 2) I guess wrong to do.