It's Okay to Laugh (21 page)

T
he bar is really low when it comes to fatherhood. I realized this when nurses were excited that Aaron was going to be in the delivery room, like a guy who has put his penis in my vagina should be nervous about seeing what comes out of it. But it just got worse. If Aaron held Ralph or engaged with him in any way in public, strangers would shower him with approval.

“What a
great
dad!” servers would say when Aaron handed Ralph his sippy cup.

“What a
great
dad!” strangers at the mall would say if Aaron was holding him.

“What a
great
dad!” old ladies would coo if Aaron pushed the stroller in the park.

When Ralph was nearly a year old, he and Aaron took a standby flight to Atlanta to visit Aaron's sister and her family. They waited an entire day for two seats to open up, and Aaron and Ralph spent the entire flight being doted on by attendants who were so charmed by the idea that a man and his child could fly across the country
without female supervision. Meanwhile, I could be carrying a car seat, a giant diaper bag, and two shopping bags out of Target and people would honk at me to get out of their way in the parking lot or criticize me because they caught a little side boob while I was nursing Ralph on an airplane.

I don't say this to imply that Aaron wasn't a great dad; he was an awesome dad for the year and a half he got to be one, but not because he did the bare minimum of parenting.

Ralph was born when Aaron was starting a gnarly version of chemo that meant he would be hospitalized for at least three days every month, while the doctors snaked a needle through the artery in his leg, all the way up to his brain, where they would squirt in poison and hope it killed the tumor instead of Aaron.

It was risky and painful, and it left him feeling like shit.

But you'd never know it.

Right after Ralph was born, I got a double ear infection. You would have thought that I was the one diagnosed with a terminal brain tumor, because I laid in bed crying and cursing the world, and then broke out in a full-body rash because it turned out I was also allergic to antibiotics. Meanwhile, Aaron changed Ralph's tiny diapers, refilled the small squirt bottle of water I needed to keep by the toilet to flush out the stitches holding my vagina together, and watched every episode of
Girls
even though he was uncomfortable with how much I related to the show.

While I was on maternity leave, he special-ordered the book
Lean In
and left it on my bedside table. I read it at night while I was nursing Ralph and Aaron was reading his comic books, and I had to stop every few lines to read something out loud to him, because when Sheryl Sandberg wrote about having a true partner, she was writing about both our husbands.

I was ready when I went back to work, but my brain was not,
and I found even basic tasks of adulthood completely slipping my mind. Things like turning off the burners when I was done using them, or remembering to pack a diaper for Ralph when we left the house.

Every day, I got close to the end of my rapidly fraying rope, and Aaron would give me a boost so I could climb back up. “Leave me a list of what you want done tomorrow,” he'd say, and if I didn't do it, he'd text me all day asking for things to take off my plate.

The first six months of a baby's life are supposed to be massively stressful, probably more so when your husband is also undergoing treatment for a disease that will eventually kill him. But it felt light and easy most days, because Aaron was there so fully. “Do you want to go to yoga tonight?” he'd ask me in the morning. “I can put Ralphie to bed.”

But instead of going to bed on time, they'd stay up goofing around and listening to records, and when I snuck in the back door to keep from waking the baby, I'd hear Aaron singing “Thunder Road” to Ralph in the rocking chair. When he could no longer be alone with Ralph, or lift him on his own, he'd still find his ways to lean in. He'd call friends to come over and hang out with him and help put Ralph to bed so I could go to the gym; he'd order our groceries online and make sure we had tickets to every good concert in Minneapolis.

He was a really good father, a really good husband, and a damn good partner, two other categories in which the bar is often lowered so far that men are in danger of tripping over it. He was a great partner not in spite of his cancer, or because of it, but completely apart from it, because he didn't want to let it affect his contribution to our relationship in any way.

One Sunday afternoon, I found myself in the living room of a former coworker who talks to dead people. It's a skill she was
born with, being able to relay messages between two worlds, like a living answering machine. If this sounds nuts to you, you'd just have to meet this tall, willowy human with her wild mane of black hair and her unfailing eye contact, and you'd totally believe. And it sounded a little nuts to me, but Catholics believe that if we lose our car keys there's a specific saint who can help us find them, so is it really that outlandish to think that a former project manager of mine could help me speak with my dead husband?

There was nothing ceremonial about it, either. One moment, we were sitting in Cecilia's cozy living room, my feet tucked under me on her sofa, a plate of cookies between us on her antique coffee table, gossiping about old coworkers. And then, she announced that Aaron was here, waving her arm to indicate that he was somewhere between the curio cabinet and the picture window. “Hi.” I waved to the empty room between us, suddenly shy and self-conscious.

“He says hi, but he's not saying Nora. He's saying something else. Norn?”

“Yeah?” I know that it really is Aaron. When I met him, I told him Nora was a hard name to nickname as a kid. He didn't miss a beat. “Nobody called you Chronicles of Nornia?” he asked, and that was my name, until he shortened it to Nornia. Or Norn.

I was a little shy at first, because it had been a while since I'd talked to Aaron, but nothing had really changed. We were still on the same team. He told me to move out of our house; it was too hard for me to be there and the home had served its purpose in our lives. It was time to go, as soon as I could.

He told me I was doing a good job, but that I needed to buck up a little and be the crazy bitch he'd fallen in love with, who stood up for herself and the people around her. I'd recently had some bizarre interpersonal experiences that the Nora he loved would
have never stood for, and I nodded in agreement and let the tears I'd been blinking back fall into my lap.

It was nice to talk to him again, like no time had passed, like he hadn't died in my arms months before. Like we weren't communicating through a woman I hardly knew, who sat in her armchair, staring dreamily out the window while our tea went cold.

He wanted a to-do list.

A to-do list? What would I possibly ask him to do, pick Ralph up from day care?

“I can still help you,” he told me, “just write it all down and I'll find someone who can do it.”

And then he was gone, and Cecilia and I were just two former colleagues who had communed with the afterworld before lunch.

I pulled over a block from her house and dug through my purse for a notebook.
HELP ME, AARON,
I wrote on the top of the page, and made a list:

              
•
  
I need Ralph to sleep through the night

              
•
  
I need someone to rent our house

              
•
  
Where will we live next?

              
•
  
I need to be happier and more peaceful

              
•
  
I need to love again. Not yet. But someday? Is that okay?

I dog-eared the page, started the car, and I went on with my life.

And things started happening.

Ralph stopped waking up hysterical in the middle of the night, and the fog around me lifted. The first house I looked at with a realtor seemed perfect, and then I got to the kitchen. The fridge was free of the debris a normal family fridge is covered in: save-the-dates
and finger paintings and free magnets from your local pizza shop. There was just one little piece of paper, the prayer card from Aaron's funeral, telling me, “It's Going to Be Okay.”

After investigating the rest of the property, I found a wedding photo, and saw that the bride was a classmate from grade school.

“Hey,” I messaged her through Facebook. “I'm in your house right now and your dog is licking my leg.”

This was clearly meant to be, and Aaron had led me right to my destiny.

Even though she and her husband accepted an offer thirteen minutes after I toured their place, she got in touch when I listed my own house for rent and signed a lease immediately.

One by one, I checked things off the list I had made for Aaron, and added new ones, because I know that's what he would want.

Maybe it's all one big coincidence, and maybe you're all rolling your eyes at me right now. I don't care. I know that Aaron is dead. But I also know that he is still leaning in to this marriage.

It's time to raise the bar, fellas.

T
here's a pivotal scene in MTV's
The Hills
that nobody but my best friend Dave and I remember, when Heidi Montag still looks like Heidi Montag and she's dating a guy named Jordan. Heidi has gotten a very coveted PR job in Los Angeles, but it comes with the unfortunate requirement that she go to the office and
work
every day, which doesn't really leave her a lot of time to hang out in bed with Jordan. One morning, while she's getting ready to start her day like a responsible young adult, Jordan urges her to instead dedicate herself to staying in bed all day.

“Quit,” Jordan whispers in her ear.

But Heidi doesn't quit. She goes to work and orders sandwiches and books travel for her boss. Or, I mean, she is filmed doing that. Most of the Internet agrees that her job was fake but just stick with me here. If you don't know who Heidi Montag is, it's because this began her rapid demise. Instead of dethroning Lauren Conrad as the queen of Southern California reality TV and transitioning into a career as an Internet fashion mogul, she ended up as a
cautionary tale married to a reality TV villain with blond facial hair who collects crystals.

All because she didn't follow Jordan's questionable advice, and quit.

If Aaron were alive, lying in bed next to me while I whined about what to do for the day, he would for sure be whispering “Baby gimme me that toot toot, baby gimme that beep beep,” because we thought it was hilarious to sexy-whisper R. Kelly songs into one another's ears.

Like Heidi, I don't want to go to work anymore. Not because I have a lazy boyfriend who just wants to have sex with me all day (I WISH), but because I just don't want to do anything at all. Grief is kind of a full-time job, and when you add in a toddler and the fact that
Gilmore Girls
is now on Netflix, I'm working double overtime right now. I don't have time to wake up, shower, eat breakfast, put on an outfit and go to
work,
where inevitably they will ask me to do things and go to meetings and answer questions. I know I'm supposed to do that, but after looking over my schedule, I just don't see work fitting in anywhere.

Something inside me, possibly that third glass of rosé, tells me it's time to quit my job and be a single, stay-at-home mother whose child is in day care full-time. That something is definitely not my financial planner, whose advice was
not
to quit my job, and instead
keep
my job, as having a steady source of income would be wise as a single woman. She has done a lot for our family, like explaining to me and Aaron that Nikes are not an actual investment, and that there are places to put our money that aren't our closets. Still, I think she may be wrong about this one.

I am not sure if quitting my job is going to signal my own Heidi Montag–level breakdown or help me avoid one, but I'm willing to risk it anyway. I mean, what's the worst that can happen? My
husband and dad can't die again, and jobs are like bobby pins: you can lose a thousand of them, but you always find another one. I'm just not interested in pretending that I still have the life I used to have, where I had a husband and a baby and a normal job. That life died when Aaron did, and I'm still trying to figure out what this new life looks like, like the girl I used to dance on the bar with in college who is now a Catholic nun.

Like most Midwesterners, I was raised to appreciate perseverance. Your marriage should last at least fifty years and end when one of you dies. When the going gets tough, the tough get going. So I did a lot of things I didn't want to do, just because they were expected of me. I played basketball just because I was tall, even though I spent most games after ninth grade just sitting on the bench, avoiding eye contact with my coach and hoping I wouldn't have to sweat and ruin my makeup. I stayed with a boyfriend twice as long as I should have because when I was like “let's break up,” he was like “no, thanks.” I did that more than once, with boys and with jobs, because somewhere along the line I'd absorbed the idea that it's not good to have too many of either of those things. But why not? Dating a lot of boys and having a lot of jobs should tell you that I'm interested in finding the one that's right for me, not just hunkering down and suffering through sex with someone whose bones protrude so far I can actually hear our skeletons clanking together, or a job where my boss thinks that the pizza we are eating for lunch is topped with “shit-talking mushrooms.” I refuse to let people slut-shame me for having a lot of jobs. I watched two different people die last year, and neither one of them was like “oh, gosh, if I have one regret it's based around my employment history.”

The happiest people in my life are people who did the thing our coaches and parents always told us not to do: They quit. And
once they do, they wonder what took them so long, and why they had been so dedicated to something they disliked so much. Before you're, like, okay, wow, what a privileged point of view, let me tell you,
yep
.

But I'm not just talking about job quitters, because yes, it's a privilege to have a safety net that lets you just quit your job to figure out who you are and that shit doesn't always work out for everyone because life is not an indie movie about finding yourself through a passion for artisanal soaps.

I'm just talking about not doing the things you hate doing anymore. Aside from paying your taxes and flossing, which are nonnegotiable. But most of what we don't want to do are not things we actually
have to do
.

When the pressures of digital relationships detract from real-life relationships, sign out. Give the password to your best friend and tell her to keep you out for a few weeks. When you go back, you'll have missed nothing but a few birthdays of people whose birthdays obviously weren't that important to you in the first place or they'd already be in your calendar. Trust me, if your sister has a baby, you'll find out even without Facebook. Then, you can go on an unfollowing spree, cleansing your feed of every person who still says “Bruce Jenner” or abuses Facebook in the name of “network marketing,” which used to just be called a pyramid scheme.

You don't actually have to hang out with people who make you feel exhausted or take little digs at you. You know how everyone has a friend who is basically just mean to them, and you can't figure out why you are friends with this girl who says things like “Did you guys totally give up on trying to have nice things when you had a kid?” while she's sitting on a couch that you are proud to say has very few visible boogers crusted onto it? You don't need to go
to her home-shopping party and buy a bunch of personalized bags you'll never use.

If you're married to a total butthole who doesn't keep up his end of the bargain? Quit. Marriage isn't supposed to feel like a cage, it's supposed to feel like a hug that lasts just a few seconds too long.

Now, is not quitting her job directly related to where Heidi ended up in life? For the sake of this essay, the answer is yes because she stayed at that job, broke up with Jordan, and ended up with Spencer and zero friends. What is not debatable is that some of our greatest national treasures are ours because they were big old quitters. You think you'd see old people grinding to “SexyBack” at every single wedding if Justin were still in N*SYNC? I doubt it. Don't you appreciate
30 Rock
more knowing that it was possible because Tina Fey quit working at
Saturday Night Live
? Isn't it amazing that Robert Downey Jr., used to be a huge mess but then he quit drugs and now our kids can watch him save the world as Iron Man?

The world will keep spinning, and your life will get a little bit better every time you give up on the shit that is taking you away from your one wild and precious life. Nobody is making you go to coffee with that guy you haven't seen since middle school who is going to try to get you to buy a time-share; nobody is making you stay up until 2:00
A.M
. making “end of school” gift bags for forty-eight second graders or accept Facebook invites to birthday dinners you'd rather not attend. These things aren't jobs, but they feel like them. So let me be your Jordan, whispering gently into your ear, only pushing you toward better things in life because I have your best interests at heart and I'm not sleeping with you.

Quit.