It's Okay to Laugh (5 page)

S
teve had high expectations for his four children. And why wouldn't he? Before he'd even turned twenty-one, he'd spent several years as a marine, served in a war, and become an accomplished alcoholic.

“Stand up straight,” he'd bark, slapping me on the back just between my shoulder blades. “Roll those shoulders back and put them in their pockets!” I cannot imagine that last part being a marine phrase, but I repeat it to every sloucher I see because poor posture really is such an unattractive trait.

In addition to disapproving of bad posture, Steve wasn't much for excuses, either.

“You need to take the message to Garcia,” he'd insist when we offered up reasons for not returning our rental videos on time, for not mowing the lawn or unloading the dishwasher or completing our homework.

“What does that even
mean
?” we would whine, as he thrust a plastic bag into our hands and pushed us out the door toward the piles of dog shit that had accumulated in the yard while we were too busy “studying” to clean up after the dog we'd sworn we'd take care of.

“It
means,
” he said, “that when something needs to be done, you goddamn do it!”

That's another marine/Dad thing, I think, placing swears in awkward places where they don't exist.

No matter what our excuses were, my father's answer was always the same.

“My bike tires are out of air, so I can't bike to work.”

“Take the message to Garcia.”

“I got a C because my teacher hates me.”

“Take the message to Garcia.”

“I think my arm is broken.”

“Take the message to Garcia.”

My siblings and I still love this phrase, even if we were never really sure where it came from. Not because my dad didn't explain its origins, but because he explained it to us so many times that we just took for granted that he'd always be there to try to drill a life lesson into us.

Here's the CliffsNotes version. And by CliffsNotes, I mean Wikipedia. So, America is about to get into a war with Spain. And President McKinley needs to get a
message
to General Garcia in Cuba. Because he just does, okay? Anyway, McKinley is sitting around wondering how they're going to get this message to Garcia
in Cuba, and he can't think of anyone. I kind of imagine him looking around at a table full of guys who are just avoiding eye contact and hoping they don't get called on, until his eyes meet with a young guy named Lieutenant Rowan and it becomes immediately obvious: This is the guy. He will take the message to Garcia. I know this isn't how it actually happened, history buffs. Just relax, I'm telling a story and using Wikipedia in place of my dad, okay?

So Rowan takes the message to Garcia. That's the whole point. He doesn't ask, as my dad pointed out to me every time I tried to claim I didn't know how to start the lawn mower,
how
to get there. He didn't ask
why
he had to take the message.

This is kind of a heavy concept to get through your thick skull when you are young and stupid and just want to watch MTV and paint your nails, but dammnnnnnnn, Steve had a good point, because I have a bad habit of not taking the message to Garcia, but instead saving the message to Garcia as a draft and forgetting about it for seven to ten days or weeks. And I have my
excuses
reasons.

For one, I am really tired. I didn't get a ton of sleep last night because I was up too late binge-watching
Orange Is the New Black
. Also, my phone died and I recently lost all my contacts and something came up at the last minute and I didn't have a baby-sitter so I couldn't make it, sorry. Also, I just lost two hours of my life going down an Instagram rabbit hole and now I'm following an English guy who has spent $100K to make his face somewhat resemble a drawing of Kim Kardashian and I'm 99 percent sure I should probably get a nose job, right? Also, I was on Google last night and then I ended up on WebMD diagnosing myself with a rare cancer, so I probably shouldn't plan on taking any messages to anyone, at least not until my treatment is over.

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.

M
ost 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 too 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.