My Nest Isn't Empty, It Just Has More Closet Space: The Amazing Adventures of an Ordinary Woman (13 page)

I’m back from book tour, and here’s the recap:

The crowds were happy to see Francesca and me, but they were happier to see Mother Mary. Even though she’s eighty-six, she made it to every nighttime event for ten days. And, yes, she wore her lab coat and wielded her back scratcher like a scepter, to thunderous applause.

Of course, it went to her little gray head. By the second signing, she wanted a limo, and by the third, a cut of the royalties.

Mother Mary rocks the crowd in her lab coat.

I told her to get an agent.

At each signing, she wowed everybody with the story of how she became Earthquake Mary, when she was the only person in South Florida who felt an earthquake that happened 300 miles away from her, in Tampa. I wrote about that in one of my stories, but I’m not sure anyone believed it until they heard it from the horse’s mouth. And of course, when I gave her the microphone, I couldn’t get it back.

At one bookstore, I physically had to wrest it from her tiny grasp. There’s nothing like a karate chop to your aged mother to warm a crowd.

Not only did she tell stories, she signed books. At many stores, the audience numbered as many as two hundred people, and Mother Mary signed every book in her adorably shaky script. She also took the time to meet everybody, kiss cheeks, and give out Tastykakes, which is my thank-you gift to my readers, because she taught me that if you love people, you feed them saturated fats.

She was on her best behavior. She made faces behind my back only once. Her single slip was when she met an elegant woman reader who asked her if she was really eighty-six, and Mother Mary answered, “Yes, and still horny!”

After that, I cautioned against the Dirty Grandma routine, in no uncertain terms. Raising your parent is harder than raising your child.

Francesca, of course, behaved flawlessly. She did more than her share, even wrangling the dogs. We brought Little Tony and Pip, though we didn’t make them wear lab coats.

Also we couldn’t find any small enough.

Francesca gave a speech about why she loves to write and answered each question with typical grace. In other words, she told the audience that I was a great mother and didn’t say that we had eaten dinner at McDonald’s four nights in a row.

Nor did she mention that I didn’t give the dogs a bathroom break because it would cost me book sales.

I’m an animal lover until my mortgage is involved.

Then they hold it in.

When the tour ended, Mother Mary said it made her feel like “a rock star,” so imagine my surprise when she announced that she wanted to return to Miami early.

“Really?” I asked her. “Why?”

“I’m cold, what do you think?”

“I’ll turn up the heat,” I said, but it was already set at 73 degrees. Even the cats were having hot flashes.

“It won’t help. I want to go home.”

“But you’re supposed to stay for Christmas.”

“Sorry, I’d rather be warm. Who needs winter?”

I tried not to take it personally and had her at the airport the next day, where I got all teary. It wasn’t until the drive home that I realized I shouldn’t be sad. Francesca would be home for Christmas, and there were plenty of families who wouldn’t be together at the holiday. I thought of people who had lost family members they loved, and still others who had family serving in Afghanistan, Iraq, and all around the world.

We would all be alone, together.

And that’s not what family is about, anyway.

Family may not be there on the holiday, but they’ll be there when you need them, like on book tour.

The family tour.

Family will help you out, even if it means eating a bag of cold French fries in a car, after a three-hour book signing.

At age eighty-six.

So to those of you who won’t be with your family this holiday, I share your pain—and your love.

Family is with us whenever it really matters.

And the rest of the time, they’re inside.

Happy Holidays, with love, to you and your family.

Let me tell you about the great gift I got this past Christmas, and it’s one that didn’t come with a bow.

It changed the way I think about my life.

I didn’t expect I would get this gift, going in. The day didn’t end like it started out, at all.

Which is kind of the point.

By way of background, you should know that Daughter Francesca and I have spent every Christmas together ever since she was one, when Thing One and I divorced. She would spend Christmas Eve with him, and the day with me, and we were all happy about that, or at least as happy as anybody can be when their kid has to split herself in two.

But Francesca is older now, and this past Christmas she decided to spend the day with her father because they were visiting his family. I wasn’t happy about that, but I tried not to grumble too loudly, and you can imagine how well that worked. Me, shutting up about my feelings?

Me, shutting up at all?

So you know the answer:

Girlfriends!

I called my best friend Franca and whined. I always think that if I killed somebody, Franca would help me hide the body, but so far I haven’t killed anybody and I’ll probably never get the chance.

Which means that most of the time, Franca has to listen to me whine.

But this time she also solved the problem.

She’s divorced, too, and to my surprise, she told me that her kids would be spending Christmas with their father, although she had a better attitude about it than I, as she does in all things.

So we hatched a plan. We both love Meryl Streep and had been dying to see
It’s Complicated,
which was opening on Christmas, so we decided to go.

It’s not how I’d ever spent Christmas, but I met Franca at the theater, and lo and behold, it was almost full. We settled into our seats with popcorn, Diet Coke, and Raisinets, and I started to feel a little better. The crowd was in a holiday mood, and when I looked around, it was almost all middle-aged women like us. No surprise, as the movie is a total chick flick and we were all girl-crushing on Meryl.

So we were enjoying the movie, which, as you may know, is about a divorced woman who has an affair with her ex-husband. And about halfway through, there’s a scene in which Meryl Streep’s character gets wistful and says something to the effect that, “every divorced women wonders if she should get back with her ex-husband.”

At which point the audience exploded into laughter.

It wasn’t supposed to be a funny line, but it cracked everybody up, and somebody shouted at the screen, “Oh, no, they don’t!”

Which renewed the gales of laughter.

That was the moment I realized that I could very well be sitting in an audience of women who were probably divorced, whose kids were spending Christmas with their fathers, and who had come to the movie with their divorced girlfriends to see a movie about everybody’s favorite divorced girlfriend.

And none of us wanted to get back with our ex-husbands.

Not for one minute.

It took a while for the laughter to die down, but eventually it did, and when the movie ended, we all went home to our lives.

I had learned a lesson, which took me this long to understand.

It’s all about expectations.

I never expected how my life would turn out. That fact comes into relief on holidays, because they’re the time when expectations are front and center, and all divorced people have different holidays than they expected.

I’m not saying we have better or worse, I’m just saying that they’re not what we expected.

And I learned on Christmas that that’s okay.

I can live with that, and so can Franca, and so can the forty or so women in the theater that day.

Because we can still laugh and be happy, but in a different way.

Best gift ever.

Happy Holidays, year ’round.

Time for my annual UnResolutions lecture. If you don’t know how this goes, I’m trying to change the way everybody in the world does things.

Now you see why I’m divorced. Twice.

Here’s what I mean.

In the real world, everybody makes resolutions for the New Year, i.e., things they don’t like about themselves and need to change. For example, I’d love to lose some weight, so I resolve not to eat chocolate cake.

Impossible. Wrong-headed. Dumb.

God wouldn’t have invented chocolate cake if he didn’t want us to eat it. Therefore, ipso fatso, resolutions are a waste of time.

And they’re so negative. Why even make a mental list of all the things you hate about yourself? Why start the New Year keeping all of your faults firmly in mind?

I have a better idea.

Flip it.

Hence, the UnResolution.

Think back to the things you’ve been doing this past year which make you happy and which you intend to keep doing. Come up with your own list of UnResolutions, and there’s no limit on the number of great things you can think about yourself. In fact, I hope you have a long list of reasons for your own awesomeness. Anything qualifies, even if it sounds odd or weird. In fact, especially if it sounds odd or weird.

This isn’t counting your blessings, exactly. It’s more like counting your eccentricities. As you will see below, with mine.

UnResolution Number One: I resolve not to wash my hair. By way of background, I used to wash my hair every day, like the shampoo commercials say, but nowadays, I wash my hair once a week and national holidays. And you know what? It looks better. And not in that too-cool-for-school dirty-hair way, but just healthier. Shinier.

Well, shinier, for sure.

Bottom line, washing your hair every day isn’t great for hair as “highlighted” as mine, which is euphemistic for bleached into blond obedience. So I resolve to keep my hair dirty this year.

Thus ensuring my single status.

UnResolution Number Two. I resolve to keep watching the same movies over and over because I love them. Now this is going to sound crazy, but I love to have movies on TV while I work, especially movies like
The Godfather.
I have seen
The Godfather
probably 145 times, yet I watch it every time cable shows a marathon. Bottom line, one of the great things about living alone is that no one is around to say, “You’re not going to watch
The Godfather
again, are you?”

Answer: You’re darn tootin’. I’m going to watch it until I have it memorized and then some. And I’m going to love every minute.

And
The Godfather’
s not alone. I’m talking
Donnie Brasco. Mamma Mia! Something’s Gotta Give. What About Bob? The Bird-cage
.
Analyze This.
There are so many movies I love, and if they’re on TV, I’m watching them. And I’m going to keep watching them, over and over, all year.

UnResolution Number Three: I resolve to keep my car too clean. I love my car, which now has over 100,000 miles. It’s as white as a bar of Ivory soap, and I love how it looks when it’s clean, so I get it cleaned a lot. This may be because all I have to do is sit on my butt and drive it through a car wash. If they had a House Wash, my house would be immaculate.

When my car is clean, I feel an unaccountable surge in self-esteem, as if a clean car means that I’m an organized person. Even though, at some level, I know I’m really a disorganized person with a clean car. Still, I resolve to keep my car too clean and not worry that it’s becoming a sexual fetish.

UnResolution Number Four. I love my two cats, Mimi and Vivi, and four dogs, Penny, Angie, Ruby The Unmedicated Corgi, and Little Tony The Anatomically Incorrect Cavalier. They make me happy every day. I love to walk them, talk to them, and kiss them on the lips. Well, this Christmas, I added to the brood, a little female Cavalier puppy named Peach.

And she’s a peach.

I know it sounds crazy and weird but she’s already making me happier, sleeping beside my laptop as I write.

With the TV on, showing
Analyze This.

Happy New Year!