It's Okay to Laugh (17 page)

O
kay, if you want to make out with me you have exactly five minutes.”

It's 11:55
P.M.
and I'm in a van parked in front of my house with a guy I've been introduced to through Twitter. I've been stifling yawns—or not stifling them—for at least two hours. What does it take to get a man to just get down to business these days?

I haven't kissed someone—not like this—in months, and I'm not entirely sure how you do it. “Oh, are you going left?” I say, which is just the kind of dirty talk a man wants to hear while you close your eyes and move your mouth around like a starving baby bird. It turns out that kissing is like riding a bike in that I'm still not feeling coordinated enough to pull it off, but I'm somehow doing a fairly competent job at it. Also, I should be wearing a helmet.

I've had even more of a tendency toward self-absorption lately. There's something about having your spouse die and then quitting your job to freelance from home that makes you just a tad socially awkward. But I've been working on my social skills, and I know it's
good to ask people about themselves instead of just talking about yourself, so I started this date out on a confident foot by asking my date a question.

“So,” I said, buckling up as his van ambled its way down my street on a sunny spring evening, “tell me about your divorce!”

I realize, as a widowed mother over thirty living in the Midwest, that divorcés are going to be my lot in life moving forward. By thirty-five, an unmarried Midwestern man is clearly defective. But a divorced thirty-five-year-old man in the Midwest? He's just shaking off the mistakes of a wholesome youth where you believe, at twenty-two, that you should for sure marry that girl you'd like to have sex with someday.

Divorce is somewhat fascinating to me. Before my father died, my parents were married for forty years, and none of my friends growing up had divorced parents. Divorce always seemed dramatic and a bit scandalous, the kind of thing that happened on the TGIF shows I wasn't allowed to watch.

I've never been great at breakups, so I can't imagine how terrible I'd be at divorce. Wait, yes, I can. I have an excellent imagination. I'd demand we sign the papers in person, with fountain pens, and make a joint announcement through social media referring to it as a conscious uncoupling and asking our friends and family to respect our privacy. Then, I'd start vaguebooking about how “sometimes, you need to burn in the fires of betrayal to become the phoenix you are meant to be.” Or, “Making like Taylor Swift and shaking it off! :-).” When the divorce was finalized, I'd insist on releasing burning paper lanterns into the air to symbolize the destruction of our once hopeful union, preferably within the presence of our new lovers, to really bring things full circle.

Instead, I completed my vows to the letter. I found someone who loved and understood me deeply, even when I was being bat-shit
insane and saying things like “I found a centipede downstairs! Grab the baby, I'm going to burn this house to the ground!” My baggage isn't about someone not growing with me, or not choosing the same direction in life. It's not even baggage, really. It's a privilege to carry Aaron with me, and the right man is going to love me—and all the parts of me I got from loving Aaron. That man is probably not my date this evening, with his man bun and his vegetarian diet and his urge to sow the wild oats that I was busy sowing in my twenties while he was being someone's husband. But Manbun is so sweet and nice that he can be right for right now, I suppose.

I feel a small amount of shame for being out tonight, with a man who is not a friend, but a guy I'd sourced through Twitter for the sole purpose of satisfying my PG-13 sexual needs.

Where can a widow find a guy to make out with her? Asking for @noraborealis,
my sister tweeted one night from my couch after a few glasses of white wine. Manbun was the clear front-runner for this job because he was the only person who replied, and he also came with references, having had a brief post-divorce fling with my friend Kelly, who described him as “passionate and willing to work hard between the sheets.” In my twenties, I prided myself on being unable to produce a sexual Venn diagram with any of my friends, but I am no longer in my twenties. I am, as my nephew recently said, “young, but not really young . . . youngish.” The last time I kissed a person romantically, he was dying. So when Manbun slid into my Twitter Direct Messages and offered up his phone number, I thought, what the hell, and texted him. I'd been spending a bit too much time trading flirtatious text messages with a friend who didn't let the fact that he had a girlfriend hold him back from texting me at all hours of the night.

Manbun is funny and clever and very cute. He knows everything about me already, because Google, but he still tries to get to know me.

I'd planned to just enjoy him through the glow of my iPhone, but something small shifted inside me. I'd attached so much meaning to the idea of my first kiss after Aaron. It's normal, I'm guessing, to have high expectations when the last romantic kiss you shared was on your beloved's deathbed. You're not just going to kiss any geek off the streets after that.

Manbun let me know that he wasn't really in a relationship space, but was down for a FWB situation, which I had to decipher using Google. He was just too busy for a real relationship, to which I replied that being a single mother didn't leave me with much free time and that also my heart was cold and dead and I wasn't looking for a boyfriend, either.

I wasn't going to fall in love with this guy, I knew, but I could at least let him take me out to drink and eat and hang out among other alive humans in our age bracket. What could be wrong with letting him put his hand on my knee after three drinks, or feeling the thrill of kissing a strange new mouth under a strange new beard that ended up not being strange at all. His beard feels just like Aaron's. He has the same heavy bottom lip and crooked teeth. He kisses me until his man bun comes undone, and I can feel myself coming alive again in my swimsuit zone. I notice, because I am the kind of person who keeps her eyes open when she's dry-humping in a family van in a residential neighborhood, that the digital clock has struck midnight.

“Okay! Time's up!” I say, and he lays his head, exasperated, on the soft curve of my exposed belly while I contemplate how I got here: a thirty-two-year-old woman Frenching in the front seat of a Honda Odyssey in front of the house where her mother is babysitting her two-year-old son.

The next day, I don't feel like I thought I'd feel: guilty and wrong.
I feel like I felt the day I took off my wedding ring, like the moment lacked the meaning I had anticipated it having.

I slid off my plain white-gold wedding band two days after Aaron's funeral, up north on the edge of Lake Superior for our annual anniversary trip to Grand Marais, an itty-bitty town that seems like it's perched at the edge of the earth. Since our last visit, a new store had sprouted up, filled with reimagined secondhand clothing and handmade jewelry. If Aaron were here, he'd buy me whatever I wanted. Not because we are rich, but because he was generous even with money that we didn't have. One of the women in this shop had created delicate little rings out of silver and pieces of glass that had been tumbled into opacity by the waves of Lake Superior. I slid my wedding band into my wallet for safekeeping as I tried on ring after ring after ring. None of them fit correctly, and my toddler was busy trying to destroy the entire shop with his own two hands, so I left empty-handed.

The next day, my left thumb brushed against my ring finger, absentmindedly searching for that plain white-gold band, which I'd spent three years spinning endlessly around my ring finger. It was still in my wallet, but I didn't reach for it. It was better, I knew, for it not to be a Thing with a capital
T,
another Big Event in a series of Big Fucking Events. It was better to have it just be something that happened quietly, without me even noticing.

So it's okay that the first guy I kissed after the love of my life is not the second love of my life. It is okay that I didn't feel butterflies the first moment that I saw him, and that I woke up the next morning and went about my life as usual, with no obsessive replay of the night before, or wondering how long I should wait to text him, with none of the hallmark behaviors of modern-day courtship even crossing my mind. It is perfectly fine to pine for the
man I lost and long for the thrill of a man I have not yet met. It is okay to have all of these feelings, even in one single day, and then to take them all back. I don't have a heart to give away, so there is no pretending I do.

Five months after Aaron's funeral, the semipermanent depression my wedding ring had left in the flesh of my ring finger is gone and I have kissed one man. I still find myself spinning my invisible ring some days. I'm always surprised to realize it isn't there.

I
don't know how you do it,” people say. “I wouldn't be able to get out of bed in the morning.” It's meant as a compliment—I must be so strong!—and it's nice to hear that people may think of me that way, but it's not exactly true.

I'm not stronger than anybody. I mean, physically, I can do three pull-ups, so I'm stronger than
some
people, but emotionally, I'm the same as anyone else. This strength isn't superhuman. It's the most human thing of all, a muscle we're all born with but need to exercise rarely at best. And lucky for us, it's a tenacious little thing that bounces back from atrophy as soon as you need to flex it.

While we're talking about muscles, yes, I do work out (thanks for asking). At one of those gyms that is filled with giant, heavy weights and ultra-fit humans and not much else. Working out is hard for me, probably because I am naturally lazy and like to take the easy way out. Sometimes, I'll skip a round if I have lunch plans after class and don't want to sweat too much. If I can't get in a full set of push-ups, I cut myself a break. One day, while I was complaining about how
heavy the kettlebells were, my coach agreed with me. This workout was hard. “That's the thing,” he said, “to get stronger, things have to get harder.”

Both my shoulders and my inner strength are more developed now than they were a few years ago, because even though I try to half-ass it through push-ups and I got through most of my life with zero problems, I've been through some shit. And someday, you will, too. Maybe you won't lift weights—although it is recommended to keep our bone density up, ladies—but something hard is going to happen to you. Your husband may get sick. Your parents have a 100 percent chance of dying. I don't mean this as a scare tactic. I mean it as a pep talk.

Someday, the universe will throw a wrench in the works and your well-oiled machine of a life will grind to a halt. And then it will keep going. Because after you got bored of crying and worrying, you took a deep breath and pushed it back into motion.

“I don't know how you do it,” someone will say to you while softly touching your arm.

But you'll know it's really nothing special to keep one foot moving after the other. You do it reflexively, like breathing, because it's not something you can choose not to do. The world goes on, even when you wish it would just lay on the bathroom floor with you for a little while. Your water bill still needs to be paid, they are adding your favorite shows from the nineties to Netflix, and your child insists on waking up and eating breakfast. Every. Day.

So, you do what needs to be done. You get through it. The way Britney got through 2007 and made it a distant memory and an Internet meme; the way Reese Witherspoon got through her divorce with Ryan Phillippe when he was super hot and now you're, like, Ryan
who
?
The way Jackie Kennedy got through picking up pieces of her husband's brain and then married a Greek bajillionaire. The
way Beyoncé got through the dismantling of Destiny's Child and emerged as
Beyoncé.
The way Khaleesi emerged from the fire and became the Mother of Dragons.

You won't do it because you are Superwoman, you'll do it because it's your life, and there is nobody who can live it for you. You will do it because you come from a long line of strong women. Women like Britney and Reese and Jackie. Women like Beyoncé. Women like your mom, who pushed you out of her vagina or picked you out of the whole world to love you and raise you up. Women like
you,
unless you are a man, in which case just imagine a woman you admire and be like her.

It was the middle of a normal Monday when Aaron had a seizure that turned out to be a brain tumor that turned out to be brain cancer that turned out to kill him. I'd woken up a normal twenty-seven-year-old woman who still had her hangover from Saturday night, and somewhere along the way, my life had been tilted on its side without my permission. I was not pleased. I had a very important PowerPoint to finish! I worked in advertising! I needed people to click on Internet ads and buy things! I made my mother drive me to the hospital, and I could feel my heart beating through my chest the entire three-mile ride from downtown to south Minneapolis. My mother had things to do at work, so she pulled up to the emergency room, leaned over me to open the door and all but pushed me out of the car.

“Go in there and be a woman,” she said, and even though I had no idea what she meant, I did it.

Don't try to win over the haters, you're not the jackass whisperer.

—BRENÉ BROWN

I
n fifth grade, I ate dog biscuits because my friend told me to. As an adult, I can say something logical like, “Well, any girl who wants you to eat dog biscuits clearly isn't your friend,” but Erica turned out to be a really good friend once she stopped making me eat dog biscuits after school for her own entertainment. Erica also gave me an ice cream cone to reward me for the dog biscuit I ate, so it's not like she was a total psycho. But even better: she liked me. I was in. We were going to be friends for life, because when she told me to eat a dog biscuit if I wanted an ice cream cone, I said yes and started chewing.

I would love to say that my dog biscuit days are over, and that I am one of those incredibly confident women who just doesn't care
if you like her. Women on that list include Beyoncé and my mother and of course, Erica, who I liked immensely even while I was choking on a dog biscuit, and who grew up to be a pediatric intensive care nurse and real-life angel. It does not include me, because I am the human equivalent of a golden Lab. I just want your approval, even if I don't really like you and can smell that you are probably evil inside.

The Internet is a really great place to hone this skill. There, millions of people who are actually strangers who have never met you at all can say whatever they please about you. And even though I know in my heart that nothing good ever comes from entering the comments section, I occasionally take a peek. And it doesn't matter how many nice people say nice things about you, because you know from your middle school days that you don't remember them. No, what you remember is the stranger who described you as “just awful” and the girl at a sleepover who told you that you would be pretty if it weren't for your face. In both instances, my reaction should be, “Well, okay, fuck you, too,” but instead it is something more like, “But, okay, how can I change myself to make you like me and what can I do to earn your approval? Because I'll do it, stranger. I will change everything about me to get you to like me, even though we will never meet in person, and your comments should have no bearing on my actual life.”

An obsessive need to be liked is problematic. First, it's not very practical. You're not going to get everyone to like you, even if you're a wonderful human. I once saw a kid give a nun the middle finger, and you're (probably) not a nun. And to paraphrase Brené Brown, trying to get everyone to like you is time-consuming and exhausting, and it will take up the free time you could be spending with the people who don't need convincing that you are excellent.
I know that sounds like something your mom would say, but I'm a mom, and your mom and I are right.

I live every day with a reminder of how dumb it is to try to convince someone to like you. I only see it about three times a week because I don't shower that often, but on my back is a tattoo. A dumb one that means nothing and wasn't particularly well done by the guy in Brooklyn who was telling me about his hangover while etching an indelible vector image across my ribs. I don't want to get into the details about what the tattoo is specifically, but if you were imagining a circle of barbed wire around a four-leaf clover, right over a Chinese symbol for strength? You're wrong. But close.

Tale as old as time: I got this stupid-ass tattoo to impress a girl. I met Ricky when I met all my other Brooklyn roommates, at a party. I had a boyfriend at the time, and we were cohabitating in Queens. It was shaping up to be the saddest, loneliest year of my life, but finally he let me tag along with him to a party, and then I met Lauren. Lauren was very cool and thin and covered in layers and layers of vintage jewelry, like an Olsen twin. She was standing on her deck chain-smoking Parliament Lights while I chugged beer after beer and stood alone, trying to figure out what to do with my hands. Between drags, Lauren asked me where I lived, and with who. When I pointed out my boyfriend, she shook her head. “Nope,” she said, “we're too young for that shit. Move in with us.” Us? I was going to be a part of an “us”?? Us was two other girls: sweet Lorraine, who baked and sewed and was beautiful inside and out . . . and Ricky.

Ricky was instantly terrifying and magnetic. For one, she had a tattoo of her name on her bicep, and hair that was dyed jet black. She said “fuck” a lot, even by my standards, and she had a way of sort of looking just beyond you while you were talking.

I wanted her to love me, and she did. Until we actually all moved in together, when Ricky decided she hated me for things like being in the kitchen when she wanted to be in the kitchen, buying food that was similar to hers, cooking too much or too infrequently in our shared kitchen, or having friends over on a Sunday, which was the day she used to spend three hours in the bathroom on an exhaustive beauty routine, the details of which we could only guess at but which seemed to require a whole lot of concentration. In between hating me, she would sometimes decide to like me for brief, sparkling moments of time. She'd stand near me at a bar and not turn her back to me, she'd put me on a funny email chain, she'd sit down on the couch and watch some VH1 reality shows with me and not say anything mean to me. It was awesome.

During the years—yes, years—that we lived together, tattoos were really hitting the mainstream. I know that's a dorky thing to say, but this was right when Amy Winehouse was getting big, and full-sleeve tattoos went from being a sign that you were comfortable on the outskirts of society to being the kind of thing that fat suburban dads in cargo pants proudly sported. So one day, when Ricky made an appointment for a new tattoo, I went with her. “Really?” she said, and I sensed in her a very, very faint interest in me as a person. “Yeah,” I lied, “I've been thinking about it forever so I think it's time.”

Ricky doted on me for the whole week after I mangled my torso. She brought me ice packs and spread Aquaphor across my back to speed the healing process. And then, just as quickly, she was done with me. I think because I once had my boyfriend over at the apartment where I paid rent, and he went pee in the bathroom at some point and she didn't like that.

Ricky and I moved out of the apartment and we never spoke again. But I have a permanent memento of our time together. It's
not quite as bad as getting a tattoo that says “no regrats” but the sentiment is the same. The tattoo isn't the worst thing I've done to get someone to like me—I did eat dog biscuits, and started smoking, and pretended to be interested in hockey—but it's the most permanent. And while that's a very valuable lesson and a good story for my children to hear someday, this tattoo has got to go.

Like most mistakes, it is easy come and long, grueling go. Instead of the instant gratification you get when you get a tattoo, you have one appointment every six weeks, where you feel like your skin is being hammered with a million tiny nails, and afterward, things look slightly different.

When it is gone, my skin will still have a little bit of scarring, because the tattoo wasn't really done correctly and because that happens sometimes when you try to undo a permanent change to your body. I'm okay with that. Things change, and so do people.

I can't do everything right, and I can't make everyone like me. And Lord knows I can't erase most of the mistakes of my twenties. But I can start with this one.