Aren't You Forgetting Someone? Read online

  Copyright

  Copyright © 2020 by Kari Lizer

  Cover copyright © 2020 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.

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  First Edition: April 2020

  Published by Running Press, an imprint of Perseus Books, LLC, a subsidiary of Hachette Book Group, Inc. The Running Press name and logo is a trademark of the Hachette Book Group.

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  Print book cover and interior design by Frances J. Soo Ping Chow

  Cover photos copyright © GettyImages

  Author photo credit: Peter Konerko

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2019953643

  ISBNs: 978-0-7624-6933-8 (hardcover), 978-0-7624-6934-5 (ebook)

  E3-20200218-JV-NF-ORI

  The Essays

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Alexa, Is Everything Going to Be Okay?

  Cry It Out

  Daughter, Divorcée, Storyteller, Jew?

  We’ll Call That Love

  Empty Nest

  Denial

  Winter Break (Down)

  Growing Pains

  The Californian

  Gravity

  I Am the Best Person Ever

  The Art of Self-Defense

  Want

  Me on All Fours

  Isolationism

  Under the Influence

  Something to Believe In

  #NotMe

  Tick

  Happy Endings

  Kate Middleton’s Bangs

  Late Bloomer

  Inked

  I Don’t Know Why I Say Hello

  Chasing Nothing

  Sometimes They Come Back

  Live Like You’re Dying (You Are)

  Acknowledgments

  Discover More

  For Annabel, Elias, and Dayton—I forgive you for leaving me to go live your lives.

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  Alexa, Is Everything Going to Be Okay?

  At eleven years old, I got my first job at the Lazy J Ranch, where suburban teenaged girls boarded their show ponies and I shoveled horseshit. I didn’t get paid, but for each four hours of mucking, I was allowed to ride Squaw, the twenty-two-year-old cancer-ridden paint mare, around the perimeter of the stables—limited only to a slow walk because of her deteriorating condition. It was a good job because it was a horrible job, motivating me to find better jobs, ride better horses, work for better people, and make real money. Since then, every phase of my life, fueled by outrage, injustice, and an inappropriate sense of humor, has been a powerful motivator to propel me to the next, better phase of my life.

  My underappreciated high school theater geek self was determined to show the popular crowd how woefully they underestimated me, which sent me to Hollywood to pursue my dreams of professional acting. It was the 1980s, and Hollywood was more wet T-shirt contest than meritocracy for actresses in their twenties, driving me to expand my reach into writing parts for myself. Writing parts for myself made me hungry to write parts for actors better than me and led me to full-time writing. Becoming a full-time writer educated me about how hard it was to be a woman and a comedy writer, and there I was, back to shoveling shit, but motivated to create my own opportunities. And then came motherhood. The most powerful motivator of all. I suddenly cared about owning a car that didn’t die on the side of the 101 Freeway. Poverty was no longer my badge of honor, and I didn’t long to reside in a house in a neighborhood that screamed, “Artists live here!” My priorities had shifted. My character had transformed.

  When I became the dreaded double hyphenate in the school drop-off line at my kid’s elementary school—divorced-working-mom—the Mommy Wars fueled my fire for a few good years. The stay-at-home moms criticized the working moms. The working moms sneered at the yoga-pants moms. The wet-ponytail moms whispered about the Drybar-blowout moms. The no-vaccine moms were the enemies of the Happy Meal moms. A couple of the moms felt fine about themselves, but nobody liked them. We moms should have banded together, of course, because no matter how much we did, it was a pretty thankless task.

  I was so busy some of those days—between mothering, writing on other people’s TV shows, then eventually running my own show, waking up at 4:00 a.m. to bake cupcakes from scratch so I didn’t feel the burning shame of store-bought baked goods—that I would find myself standing up halfway through peeing, declaring to no one as I yanked up my pants, “I don’t have time for this.” Meanwhile, it seemed to me a dad could show up for one midday assembly and have the science wing named after him in appreciation.

  I had this sense that if I didn’t do everything perfectly, the bottom would drop out: jobs would be lost, kids wouldn’t go to college, people would die! It was all on me. It was a feeling I recognized in other mothers—I saw it in their eyes when they forgot a permission slip or realized their kid was the only one without the regulation socks on the club soccer team. I saw them at work, pretending to have read the chain of emails that had been filling up their inbox since dawn. There was no such thing as balance. No middle. Until now. This middle age. This indefinable in-between. When I’m mostly finished caring for my children and looking down the barrel of wiping my parents’ asses. It’s an odd time—tender and aimless and mean… menopause kicking in as the kids walk out the door. To have the people you love most in the world go away when your emotions are as unpredictable as a Hollywood career for a woman in her fifties. Finding my voice, which can only come with age and perspective, just when I have no one left to talk to.

  And then the world decided to go crazy with me. Adding mind-blowing insult to soul-crushing injury, the fall I dropped my third and final child at college was also the fall that Donald Trump was elected to the White House. That fall, as I drove down Interstate 93 in New Hampshire, just before the election, when the outcome was still inconceivable, I had a bumper sticker on the back of my car with a picture of Donald Trump that read, “Does this ass make my car look fat?” because I thought it was funny. Heading south through the White Mountains on the mostly empty highway, I was suddenly cut off by a jacked-up pickup driven by a forty-ish white man. As he ran me out of my lane, he screamed out his open window, “I hope you die, cunt!” Shaken, I pulled off to the side of the road. That would be the first time of many to come that I felt something had been unearthed: some deep misogyny I had missed or forgotten about or ignored until it poked up its ugly head at Hillary. Later, as the #MeToo movement kicked into gear, I found myself spending a lot of time on the side of the road, wondering whether we were going backward or forward or just blowing up. And now I’m in a bad fucking mood.

  I’m doing what I can emotionally, nutritionally, technologically, and medically to intervene—I’
m rubbing the estrogen/progesterone/testosterone creams into my inner thigh as rigorously as I can, cancer be damned, but there aren’t enough hormones on earth to offset the outrage and disappointment I feel in the country, the genders, the world, because I’m just so fucking disappointed in everyone as, I guess, you know… a mother. I can’t even eat my feelings anymore since one deeply unkind thirty-year-old nutritionist-slash-lifestyle-coach got me off bread by shaming me for what she described as my “wheat belly.”

  So I’m left sitting on my couch in my pussy hat, starving to death, screaming at the TV, cheering on the Justice Department and the judicial committees and Nancy Pelosi, waiting for life to be fair.

  I find myself relying more and more on my Alexa, perched on the kitchen counter: “Alexa, what’s the temperature? Alexa, is Mary Tyler Moore still alive? Alexa, is everything going to be okay?”

  And Alexa answers, “The current temperature is seventy-three degrees. Mary Tyler Moore died January 25, 2017. I wouldn’t count on it.”

  A friend suggested I get out of the house. Get around people. The isolation, she said, was making me weird. She said it was no good to sit home and stew. So I went to a friend’s game night, where we were supposed to bring a potluck dish for running charades. I brought a vegetarian stew. While we waited for the fun to begin, there was a thoughtful conversation among thoughtful liberals about how one deals with the problem of sexual harassers, perverts, and predatory power mongers without sweeping up some good guys in the process. I blurted out, “Who gives a shit? Where were the good guys when Harvey was opening his robe to ingénues in hotel rooms? When Les Moonves had a woman on the payroll for blowjobs on demand while he was fucking with my life’s work? I’ll tell you where they were—keeping their mouths shut, kissing their asses, hitching their wagons to those assholes’ stars. Personally, I’m in favor of a good old-fashioned prairie castration.”

  My charades team fell silent, so I went on to explain (as if their silence was because they had questions regarding the technicalities of the prairie instead of my unfortunate rage burst). “See, when they don’t have surgical instruments on the range to geld the rams, they take a thick rubber band, wrap it around the base of the scrotum, and leave it there. It cuts off the circulation. It’s incredibly painful for the first few days as the balls swell up to the size of grapefruits then eventually turn black, until they finally fall off altogether. I’d like to watch Harvey’s balls drop to the floor.”

  “You’ve thought about this,” one man who didn’t know me, and didn’t want to, finally said as he protectively crossed his legs.

  “Yeah. I have,” I told him, unblinking, without the hint of a smile.

  “But you’re kidding, right?”

  “Sure,” I said, “I’m kidding.”

  “Oh. Okay. I heard you were funny.”

  Then we started the game. Where it didn’t get better.

  I got Les Misérables for my charades clue, and I just stood there, motionless, while my team yelled at me, “What does it rhyme with?”

  Nothing I could think of.

  “Act it out!”

  I couldn’t.

  “How many syllables?”

  I couldn’t even count. Finally, after what seemed like a very long time, we heard a cheer from the other room as the opposing team won the round. My team didn’t tell me it was okay, good try.

  I believe I’ve become unsuitable for mixed company.

  I didn’t stay for another round, and all the way home, my party shame grew.

  I don’t hate men! I know too many spectacular ones—including the two I birthed myself. As I walked into my empty house, I wondered what would become of me. I might live another forty years. Why did I quit smoking?

  I can’t escape the continuous MSNBC news feed that does nothing to reassure me about the fact that cheaters are prospering all over the place and nice girls are finishing last. I’m getting into one-sided arguments in my bathroom mirror with Betsy DeVos and Woody Allen. Is this really the next, better phase? I have too much fight and no designated enemy. Or is everybody my enemy?

  I laid down on the couch and called out, “Alexa, how many syllables in Les Misérables?” While she was thinking, I heard a text come in. It was from the dark-haired woman on my charades team. The one who was sitting at the end of the couch. She was about my age, and I think she was a fashion photographer or a lesbian or a chef. I had thought she was trying to kill me with her eyes. She was one of those charade savants who guessed The Iliad when the only clue given so far was “a book.” She wore clothes that looked like they came from Japan and had a haircut that did what she wanted it to. Her text said, “Hey. Sorry you left. It helps to know other people are going crazy too. We’re in this together. Try to breathe.”

  I sat for a moment, so strangely and instantly comforted by the solidarity of a woman I didn’t know. Breathe, she said. I’m going to try that. I called out to the empty room, “Alexa, how do I breathe?”

  Cry It Out

  In the summer of 1995, a few things happened: my twins, Annabel and Elias, were born; O. J. Simpson was on trial; and many new parents and their pediatricians were clinging breathlessly to Dr. Richard Ferber’s book How to Solve Your Child’s Sleep Problems. Dr. Ferber’s method of getting your child to fall asleep on its own became known as Ferberizing. Most of the new mothers I knew at the time were desperately on the lookout for someone who knew more than we did about raising children, which was everyone. We were inexperienced, insecure, and easily shamed by experts. La Leche League, the advocacy group for breastfeeding, told us if we couldn’t nurse our newborns, we failed; the yogi on La Brea told us if we used an epidural during birth, we failed; and Dr. Ferber told us if we didn’t get those babies to develop healthy sleep associations, not only had we failed, but our children would fail for the rest of their lives! Millions of sleep-deprived parents all over the world, desperate for answers to their sleepless nights and zombie days, bought Dr. Ferber’s book and gave his method a try. Most people I knew, including myself, didn’t actually read the whole thing—we couldn’t keep our eyes open long enough—but we got the gist: in order to sleep train your child, you must give them healthy bedtime rituals and arm them with the ability to self-soothe. The habit of continually running to your baby’s side the minute you heard even the smallest squeak, scooping them up, sticking them on the boob or bottle, rocking them in the chair, driving them around in the car, or placing their infant seat on the vibrating dryer until finally surrendering and taking them into your bed where you would let them sleep attached to your breast like they were sleeping in a vat of chocolate so you could finally close your eyes was no damn good.

  You were setting your child up for a lifetime of quick fixes and dependency on external salves to their internal stresses. The Ferber method promised to be quick and easy: establishing a bedtime routine, then letting your child fuss without running to soothe him or her for a predetermined and ever-increasing length of time until that baby learned to settle on his or her own and fall back to sleep without you. Dr. Ferber scoffed at the idea that this was a “cry it out” method, as some people accused. The time you left your baby to cry was a mere three minutes at the outset—hardly torture—then increasing to five, ten, maybe fifteen minutes at the longest. But within a week, he assured, you would have a baby who could get herself back to sleep without your harmful interventions, a self-soother who would take this important skill from the crib and into the world and the time when you wouldn’t be there to solve her every problem for her. You would not be setting your child up with a crippling dependency on you or anything that promised instant relief the minute she felt a twinge of discomfort (read: heroin).

  In the first few months of my twins’ lives, I had probably already ruined them. It was the beginning of the twenty-four-hour news cycle, and I was obsessed with the O. J. trial. Every picture of my newborn babies also has Marcia Clarke or Johnny Cochran lurking in the background on the television set. The nursery, which
my husband, Jack, and I had painted a sunny yellow with a “cow jumping over the moon” wallpaper border, was furnished with two matching cribs with custom linens and visually stimulating, brain-expanding black-and-white mobiles that stood untouched where they’d been assembled the month before the twins’ arrival.

  Annabel and Elias had spent every night in bed with me, mostly because breastfeeding twins is simply a matter of survival. There is no time for luxuries like feeding schedules or parenting strategies, and as far as Dr. Ferber’s warning that my children could suffer separation anxiety later in life, that meant nothing to me. I was pretty sure there would be no “later in life” because these babies were going to kill me. The thought of sending these ravenous creatures off to college seemed so far away he might as well have talked to me about the time when I would want to have sex again. It was like science fiction. There was no place for modesty or even dignity in those early days. The minute I snapped up my size 38 triple H nursing bra from one feeding, the other baby would be ready to go, so pretty soon I stopped bothering. I didn’t even wear a shirt.

  Jack’s relatives, who had always had the annoying habit of just barging into our house unannounced, learned quickly to knock or risk seeing things that couldn’t be unseen—like me resting cool cabbage leaves on my bosoms to draw out the heat and pressure of the overwhelming milk supply while sitting on a hemorrhoid donut, shoveling food into my mouth because I had never been so hungry in my life and it felt as if those creatures were sucking out my marrow. I eventually discovered the only way I could eat in peace was in my car. The drive-through meal became my savior, the twins buckled into their car seats while I feasted on twenty-four-hundred-calorie double cheeseburgers in the parking lot. In-N-Out Burger even offered a very civilized lap placemat. This was our existence for four blurry, beautiful months. My babies and I stared into each other’s eyes, ate on demand, slept when we could, showered very little, and cocooned ourselves inside the very small world of getting to know you.