It's Okay to Laugh (6 page)

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. Some
times, 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.

I FOUND MY SECOND THERAPIST
in my late twenties, when I had a new boyfriend whose email password was also very easy to guess
and who tried to tell me that his membership to a secret message board for New York massage parlors that were really “massage parlors” wasn't what I thought it was. I was one of the only people I knew who wasn't seeing a therapist, and I didn't want to miss out on the chance to have a full hour every other week to talk about myself with a stranger. Plus, that old familiar sadness had returned to me, bone-deep and impervious to the effects of drugs or alcohol.

I was a PR girl at the time, a profession whose pressures are matched only by those of neurosurgeons and fighter pilots, and maybe not even by them because I've never heard of a neurosurgeon who was found weeping on a bathroom floor over a botched delivery of shampoo samples to a beauty magazine or literally flipping a table over at a party after drunkenly cry-dancing to “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun.” My job required me to have a BlackBerry for all work emails, which was never to be switched off nor more than five feet from my body at any time. Its humming was constant, always a new email to attend to, a new “fire” to put out involving a missed typo in a press release that nobody outside our office or our clients' would ever read. I developed a Pavlovian response to this new-age torture device, my heart rate elevating at anything my body thought might be my BlackBerry alert. When RIM, the makers of BlackBerry, were crushed by the Apple iPhone, I felt more than a twinge of schadenfreude.

My second therapist was blocks from my office, the most important (only) criteria in my selection process because I was always at work. Her office was in the front room of a garden-level apartment where she lived with her adult daughter. We had no chemistry, which disappointed me. I wanted her to love me, or at least like me, but she sat in front of me blankly and I found I couldn't articulate what exactly was wrong. Looking back, it was everything and
nothing all at once. I had a good job where I made a lot of money working on things that were of no real consequence to the world at large. I was in a relationship with a boy who was chronologically supposed to be a man by now: a thirty-year-old with a passion for pot and a lot of big dreams that poured out of his mouth like smoke and disappeared just as quickly.

I had high highs because I had a lot of access to really good pot and unlocked Brooklyn rooftops, and I had low lows because I had a really stressful job and nothing resembling any sort of purpose.

She wrote me some prescriptions and when my mother came to visit, I told her I was crazy and depressed and had to take drugs and she said, “Okay.” That week I threw them all away, but not because I felt better or worse.

“HOW DO YOU STAY HAPPY
and positive?” people ask me. And I mean, they ask me this all the time. They ask me because they are going through big life things like husbands with brain tumors and they ask me because they are going through little life things and still cannot feel a spark of happiness inside. They ask me because if you look at my Instagram photos or take me to brunch, I seem to be doing okay, all things considered. I shower (a few times a week, at least), I put on lipstick (CoverGirl, preferably). I smile.

I don't know what to tell them, so I try to tell them an abridged version of my story. That I was not always like this, that I learned it from watching Aaron. His happiness was innate, but mine is not. Mine is a choice that I make, a garden that I tend to every single day. And if you've ever seen my yard, you know that I'm a really shitty gardener, so what I am trying to say is, this is work. I do not wake up like this.

Some people have real and serious problems and should absolutely see a medical professional and maybe even take drugs.
And maybe I should, but really, I think that I spent twenty-eight years as a person who didn't know how to live, who didn't know that happiness isn't something that is handed to you, but something you have a hand in making, every day. It is harder than just getting up and grinding beans and brewing coffee, but it is just as ritualistic. For me, at least. And I don't mean this in that bullshit social media way, where people love to post little memes about how happiness is a choice, like the natural way to cure depression is to just . . . not be depressed? Because it isn't. But I'm not depressed. I'm sad. I'm in pain.

It has been four months since Aaron died. I know that this pain is temporary, but I am not in a rush to get through it. I have a friend who lost her brother and father within six months of each other, one very suddenly and one very slowly, each a jarring loss in its own way. It's been years since she buried them both, but she sends me an email one night, when the pain in my heart is razor sharp, to tell me that it will dull in time. She acknowledges that I know this, but do I know that I might miss it someday? This pain signifies how close my father and Aaron still are, and as time passes, it will bring me further away from this sorrow, but also from the two of them. Their voices will be harder to recall, their presences harder to conjure in my imagination.

At lunch with a friend recently, I find myself crying for no real reason other than the sun is shining and he is so very alive, the way that Aaron used to be. “You know,” he says after hugging me, “what you're feeling is real pain. And that's not a bad thing.”

There's a school of thought around this, I find out (shout out to Google for giving me a PhD in Everything). There is clean pain, what actually happens to you (e.g., your husband dies, tragically) and then there is the dirty pain, the kind you give yourself. The negative feelings (I'm a terrible person, why didn't I die?), the
projections (I'm going to die alone), the anxiety around any topic at all (Should I drive in the snow? I might crash the car and die). I've lived a life, I realize, of dirty pain. Of hating myself and my body for no real reason. Of obsession and anxiety, of guilt over not living my one precious life to the fullest, whatever the fuck that even means. Aaron released me from that little self-imposed, self-conscious jail cell. He let me be myself, and he loved me even though I never fully put the cap back on anything when I'm done using it.

In many ways, my grief has been very public, but this pain, this clean pain, is mine. I don't Instagram it or blog about it or tweet about it. I keep it for myself, for late nights in bed after a bottle of wine. For moments alone in the car, driving past the homes I shared with Aaron. For throwing my keys on the counter and knowing there's no reason to call out, “We're home!” I want to keep my hand on this fire, because someday it will burn out, and all I will have to remember it by are these scars.

I have buried the two most important men in my life. I have lost a pregnancy. I have had the riptides of grief pull me out from shore in rapid succession, but for the first time in my life, I am not drowning in it.

I know that I can do it, that Aaron and my father gave me the tools I needed to live life without them. And if I need them, Oprah and Deepak are in my iPhone, waiting for me.

M
y parents referred to their brand of child rearing as Benign Neglect. I don't think that they coined the phrase, but they at least perfected it.

When my older brother was in fourth grade, he fell on his arm during a game he had invented where he jumped from a folding chair to the clothesline. Before each jump, he would move the chair back a few more inches, making his lonely game just a little more daring. I remember watching him writhe in pain on the grass while my parents went about their business. Austin was, as my father put it, a malingerer, always trying to claim some sort of disability to get out of things like going to school or setting the table. It was clear, as he turned a pale shade of green while lying on the sofa, that he was faking it. “Here,” my mother said to him, rubbing some Bengay on his swollen arm, “if it still hurts after Dad is done grilling the steaks, we'll take you to the hospital.” Later that night, the emergency room doctor explained to my father that kids' bones break like green twigs, staying somewhat intact even
though the bone bends in on itself, not like adult bones, which snap apart like dry sticks. He also noted that my sister was relieved to hear about Austin's arm, because if they drove all the way downtown and his arm
wasn't
broken, our dad was “going to break it for him.” My father assured the doctor that Meghan was autistic.

I'm not going to say that my parents fat-shamed my sister, because that term didn't exist in the eighties, but they definitely offered to pay her if she “wanted” to lose weight. In the eighth grade.

None of this sounds great, so I need to be clear that we had wonderful parents who loved each other and us, and always treated us well, even if our dad's default threat when we misbehaved was that he would “give us something to cry about.”

Our parents were just . . . complicated.

Before our dad was a recovering alcoholic and writer of infomercials responsible for the clutter in your basement, he was just an alcoholic. And before that, he was a teenager in Vietnam. He was never the dad I longed for as a child, which is to say that he was not Danny Tanner. I wasn't even allowed to watch
Full House,
but I snuck enough afternoon reruns to know in my heart that I wanted the kind of dad who would respond to my emotional outbursts by sitting with me on the edge of the bed and asking me about my feelings.

Instead, I got the kind of dad who told his skinny fourteen-year-old daughter that she looked like a praying mantis. “It's not a bad thing,” he said when I burst into tears. “It's just your arms and hands are freakishly long!”

Our mother also worked in advertising. She wasn't like other mothers at school, and I both loved and hated that about her. When she lost an earring—and she always lost one earring—she'd just wear the one she had, like some sort of new-wave pirate. She wore a button on her denim jacket that just read
BALLS.
The backseat of her
car was littered with dirty coffee mugs, rolling around on the floor. She didn't hang out at school or make friends with other moms. Her friends were the collection of advertising weirdos she'd met through work: guys with Pez collections who let me play with X-ACTO knives and foam core when I came into the office with her on weekends, women who rode Harleys and helped me use the printer and binder to give my school reports a professional edge.

As long as there was money for it, she let us do absolutely every activity we wanted. She just didn't remember to pick us up from it. “Sorry!” she'd call out the window, roaring into the parking lot outside of the pool in the Geo Prizm onto which she'd let my brother caulk a plastic turtle, like a thrift store hood ornament. I'd be waiting so long after swim practice that they'd closed the pool, and my hair would freeze into little icicled dreadlocks. “I thought your
dad
was coming to get you!” she would shout, like she was talking about an estranged ex-husband and not the man she had woken up next to twelve hours earlier.

Somehow, my siblings and I grew up to be somewhat contributing members of society, with children of our own. Sure, our little brother claims to have “invented man buns” and wears adult Crocs in public and yes, my dad once saw me do the walk of shame from our neighbor's house on a Saturday morning, but overall, we turned out all right. We did not have the kind of parents who came to softball games or volunteered in our classrooms. My dad missed every college graduation but mine because he had scheduled golf trips already, and my mom went to London with friends instead of attending our little brother's first communion because one of those things is fun. They were total weirdos compared to other parents we knew. But they were consistent. About their weirdo traits and their love for us. We were loved, cared for, and taught by example that love is patient, kind, and often annoying.

When our dad was dying, I sat on the edge of his bed and rubbed his feet. He wanted to talk, and I knew that this was it: I was going to get the Danny Tanner talk I'd been waiting for my entire life.

“Nora, I'm glad you're here. I have something I want to tell you.”

He said this over the course of several long and labored breaths, under the respirator that fogged up over his open mouth.

I stopped rubbing his feet for a moment and leaned in, hungrily. Even my mother looked encouraged by his sudden liveliness, like he was going to reveal the whereabouts of a buried treasure.

“It's time for you to know . . .”

I waited patiently for him to catch his breath, and see just a small hint of a smile at the corners of his papery dry lips.

“Nora,” he said, breathing heavily.

“You're adopted.”