Kari Lizer - Arent You Forgetting Someone?: Essays from My Mid-Life Revenge

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 didnt 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 stableslimited 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 didnt die on the side of the 101 Freeway. Poverty was no longer my badge of honor, and I didnt 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 kids elementary schooldivorced-working-momthe 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 daysbetween mothering, writing on other peoples TV shows, then eventually running my own show, waking up at 4:00 a.m. to bake cupcakes from scratch so I didnt feel the burning shame of store-bought baked goodsthat I would find myself standing up halfway through peeing, declaring to no one as I yanked up my pants, I dont 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 didnt do everything perfectly, the bottom would drop out: jobs would be lost, kids wouldnt go to college, people would die! It was all on me. It was a feeling I recognized in other mothersI 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 Im mostly finished caring for my children and looking down the barrel of wiping my parents asses. Its an odd timetender 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 Im in a bad fucking mood.

Im doing what I can emotionally, nutritionally, technologically, and medically to interveneIm rubbing the estrogen/progesterone/testosterone creams into my inner thigh as rigorously as I can, cancer be damned, but there arent enough hormones on earth to offset the outrage and disappointment I feel in the country, the genders, the world, because Im just so fucking disappointed in everyone as, I guess, you know a mother. I cant 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 Im 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, whats 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 wouldnt count on it.