Deathbed Regrets
Watching Hawa in the cancer ward made me think about what had happened since I had left the cancer ward. I had finally had my miracle kids, but I wasn’t spending any time with them. I was either on a conference call, in a meeting, on my way to work, or e-mailing work from home.
The problem was that I was madly in love with my job. It was the in-love, romantic phase of love, where I couldn’t bear to be away from it for a single moment. I was so smitten with my job that my family was jealous. When I was with one, the other always seemed to want or need me right now.
I should have remembered the wisdom from oncology nurses I met when I was invited to speak at the meeting of the Oncology Nursing Society. These women and men see death a lot and they are my true heroes. I interviewed a few before my speech.
“How do you do it?”
Oncology nurse: “We drink. A lot.” Then, tears.
“Every patient has taught me something.”
“Everyone seems, at the end, to wish they’d worked less, and spent more time with family and friends.”
The old cliché is that no one on her deathbed wishes she’d spent more time working.
But my cancer had made me work harder. When I was at 20/20 and having chemo, I got promoted. During treatment, I worried about work, not cancer cells. I loved TV: It was so amazing to put something out into the world in that way. It was my responsibility to find story ideas for the show, so I got to work on all kinds of pieces: from the serious—we were the first network to report on honor killings of Jordanian women—to the provocative, about a woman who had seventeen plastic surgeries to become a human Barbie doll. I also got to work on stories I discovered as an insider in the cancer community, like the story about women who didn’t have breast cancer but decided to remove their healthy breasts and ovaries to avoid getting cancer—long before the discovery of the breast cancer gene.
I was worried I might be considered damaged goods and be denied a job because I was a cancer survivor. My brothers, both attorneys, told me that would be illegal, but I was worried about perception. Would employers be worried about taking a chance on me if I could die soon?
I decided to put my cancer information on my resume under the “Awards” section: Self magazine had given me an award for my cancer activism. Cancer was a strange credential, but I was determined to use what I had.
I was hired at Lifetime Television to work in programming, but I took the job because of their breast cancer campaign, which was the brainchild of Meredith II. I got to produce celebrity biographies. I worked on the bio of former first lady Laura Bush, and that took me to the White House. I told the story of Elizabeth Taylor’s great loves and great jewels. My favorite profile was about fashion designer Betsey Johnson, which I did for the Stop Breast Cancer for Life campaign. Betsey became a friend and launched my first book in all of her stores. She created a special Big Lips T-shirt (I wore it for my book jacket photo), and she sold the tees to raise funds for breast cancer research. After the profile of Betsey, my dream came true and I was transferred full-time to Meredith’s team to work on other issues important to women, like ending violence against women, breast cancer awareness, and encouraging women to vote and run for elected office. What I loved about that job was that it was advocacy embedded in programming.
Skye had some amazing perks because of my job. I thought she’d be impressed that I was sitting in the front row at the Betsey Johnson fashion show during Fashion Week in New York. There were other projects with Christina Aguilera, Taylor Swift, Nicole Kidman. But the celebrities didn’t impress Skye; she just wanted me home with her.
I brought Skye to the LA party and premiere of the TV movie made from my own book, Why I Wore Lipstick to My Mastectomy. It was at a very chic club (Justin Timberlake was launching his own clothing line that night in the same club) and was so Hollywood, very dark and oozing cool. The entire cast of Scrubs was there because Sarah Chalke was playing me! I sat next to Zach Braff, and Skye walked the red carpet with me. We posed for photos and I thought, Wow, I can have it all.
Until the movie was over and the lights went up in the club.
Skye had fallen asleep—the time difference was too hard for her: She was only six. “Mommy, I want to go! I’m tired!”
“But, Skye, there’s an after-party.”
People were crowding around me, and Skye started to cry. I was being pulled in all directions—celebrated in the room, but a huge disappointment to my daughter.
“Mommy, I want to go! Now!”
But everyone was headed to the after-party for the movie about me—so it would have been really bad form to skip it. The director of the movie had a little boy Skye’s age, and he and his wife spotted Skye crying. They offered to take her home with them.
Skye glared at me and continued crying. “Who’s more important to you, Mommy? Your own daughter, or all these people you don’t know?”
I couldn’t answer her question. The director and his wife pried a shrieking Skye away from me.
There were other glamorous job moments that I thought would be amazing Mommy-and-Me memories for Skye, but they sometimes turned sour. I took my mother and eight-year-old Skye with me to Japan to launch my book there. The plan was that she and Mom would fly home before me, because I had to give a speech at a medical school outside of Tokyo. It would have meant too much travel for Skye, and she’d have been bored at the hospital in a room full of grown-ups speaking Japanese. But when it came time for them to go—even though I had talked Skye through all the mechanics of the trip—she began to sob that she didn’t want to leave me.
We were at a mall in Tokyo, and it was pouring rain. I walked my mom and Skye out to the waiting taxi and hugged them good-bye. Skye wouldn’t let me go, and finally my mother had to pull my daughter away. I think I cried more than Skye as I made my way back to the hotel. I didn’t want to be saying good-bye to her all the time because I was working so much. On the other hand, sometimes I cried because I was so happy to be away from my kids, and Tyler too. There was nothing like having a big bed, a remote, and a bathroom all to myself on a business trip.
One morning, as I was in a cab rushing to my office for a huge meeting, my cell phone started ringing: It was my daughter’s school, the nurse’s office. I couldn’t screen. I had to answer.
“Mrs. Lucas, Skye has lice. A very bad case. Nits, live ones . . . Please come get her immediately.” Just as the school nurse was finishing her sentence, call-waiting was showing me that my office was ringing too. A colleague. Call-waiting was such a concrete reminder of the two worlds I straddled: work and home. I asked the nurse to please hold, sorry, and clicked over.
“The celebrity we’re shooting is asking for a hair-and-makeup allowance of five thousand dollars. We don’t have it in our budget. You have to negotiate it down.” As we discussed strategy, I totally forgot that the nurse was on the other line. Suddenly I remembered. I quickly wrapped up with the boss and clicked back to lice.
“Mrs. Lucas, you should probably hire Licenders to come delouse your home too, so she doesn’t get re-infested.”
The irony of the situation wasn’t lost on me: There were hair problems on both calls—if only I could have done a conference call with both parties and found a solution. I was tempted to ask the celebrity hair-and-makeup people demanding so much money if they would throw in a delousing for their price and we could call it a day. It was close to impossible to bring these two distant worlds together: the glamorous TV job I worked at and my constantly morphing family life.
I diverted the taxi to my daughter’s school, and when I arrived in the nurse’s office, I saw a woman in a white coat examining a redhead’s braided hair, under a super-bright white light, using a magnifier. Her hands were gloved and she was carefully inspecting the part between the braids. Skye was huddled in the corner with a group that seemed to have LOUSERS stamped on them. Every once in a while there was an anxious itch in the room, loud in the silence. A sound like sandpaper doing its job. I started to itch too, just from being there. My daughter’s face was like an Etch A Sketch toy—at first flushed with a huge relief to see me; then the relief completely disappeared and became upset as she blurted, “Mom, what took you so long to get here?” Then the Etch A Sketch knobs turned and landed on a final expression: She was looking at my shoes. “Why are you wearing those with that dress?” (I was wearing Uggs with a dress to give my feet a rest because I was going to be in stilettos all night at a fund-raiser for the American Cancer Society.)
“Mommy is Dream Girl tonight. Did you forget, sweetie?” The words “Dream Girl” hung in the air and smelled suspicious, as if I were the furthest thing from a dream to the daughter I had so disappointed by working instead of being there for every moment of her life. The evidence against me was overwhelming.
Like the time she literally took her first steps in a Stride Rite shoe store on Eighty-Third and Third Avenue while I was on a conference call across town. Hawa called me crying, she was so excited. The entire store was cheering, even the jaded shoe guy who must have handled eight hundred toes in kids’ shoes while explaining to each uptight mom that the shoes were indeed big enough; the child had room to grow. He got to see my daughter’s first steps and I didn’t. “Your baby girl walked!” Hawa was telling me on my cell over the cheering in the background, while I had muted the conference call I was supposed to be on. I heard the joy I was not part of. It was as if she had taken first steps on the moon, the cheers were so loud. I needed to get back to the conference call. I had been on mute too long and it was probably my turn to talk. The Halloween costumes, the playdates, the sick days. I wanted to take her to the pediatrician when she was sick. I wanted to pick her up at school and have her run into my arms and scream, “Mommy’s here!” I wanted to be in two places at once so badly.
But there in the nurse’s office, I wished I could be at the celebrity photo shoot where there were no lice. I was trying to copy down the nurse’s information about Licenders, but I had a call coming in from my boss. Lice or boss? Boss or lice? I held up one finger to the nurse, and my daughter’s eyes widened. What could be more important now than her delousing?
Meredith’s voice sounded weird and mine must have too: “Hey, I’m in a meeting. . . . Could I call you right back?” (Well, it was sort of a meeting. With the nurse. About lice.)
“It’s urgent. We have to talk. How long will it be?” I had never heard Meredith speak like this.
“Soon, I promise. I’ll call you back soon.”
It sounded like I was about to get fired, but first I needed to delouse my daughter. My priorities felt okay for once. My daughter grabbed me. “Mom. We have to go. Now.” My daughter’s classmates had started to pile into the hall between classes and now word would be out about her lice. As I turned to leave, I saw the light reflecting off the magnifying glass the nurse was using to examine the girls’ scalps for lice. It was huge and it could reveal even the tiniest nits that would hatch and become lice. I asked her if she could check my scalp to see if I was infected too, because now I couldn’t stop itching. As she was looking, examining, I pictured my life being under that magnifier and I wondered if the nurse could see the choices I had made. My daughter’s ballet recital, at which I spent the whole time texting with the office. Her birthday, where I struggled to stay awake because I had taken the red-eye home from another business trip. I was so tired, it hurt to sing “Happy Birthday.” The apple-picking field trip, where I couldn’t ride the tractor because there was no cell signal and I had another conference call.
Miraculously the nurse couldn’t see any larvae on my scalp.
“Mom, hurry up!” My daughter caught me spacing out. The nurse explained that the minute we got home we had to call Licenders, and put all Skye’s stuffed animals into plastic bags to suffocate any lice, and wash all the sheets in boiling-hot water to kill the nits. My phone was ringing again, vibrating actually. There were no cell calls allowed in her school.
Meredith. I screened her because I needed to call Licenders. It was a more crucial decision than I realized: It turned out that I had a lurking case of lice, imperceptible even under the magnifier. I was infected too. The nits were a symbol, I would later decide. My problems straddling work and home were about to hatch if I didn’t deal with them in an extreme way. I needed a magnifier, fine-tooth comb, some intense rinse, to clean up my life.
I panicked when I realized that I had hair-and-makeup people coming to my apartment too, at noon, to make me look like a Dream Girl for the fund-raiser that night. And my mom was coming in to see me win that award for my cancer work. I needed my mommy. On the way home we had to stop at the drugstore for an anti-lice shampoo called Kwell, which smelled like furniture polish. Was it safe to put that so close to our brain cells?
My mom arrived just in time for me to start pushing her around. I was trying to be nicer to her, but I had lapses. “Put all Skye’s stuffed animals in a plastic bag, put this stuff on her hair, call Licenders. I need to call my boss.” I was being obnoxious to my poor mom, who’d been hit with this lice tsunami.
“Your boss can wait.” My mom looked at me like I had all my priorities wrong, and I sort of knew it, but I needed to call my boss. So I called my boss even though my mom was glaring at me.
“Pour yourself a glass of wine.” I did what she told me to, because I did love and respect her. “Our department is being transferred to LA. We want you to come with us. Would you consider moving your family to LA? Think about it. This is a shock to all of us. I’m so sorry, I’m so disappointed too.”
Meredith must have poured herself a glass of wine before she had to deliver the news. I knew I’d miss the glasses of wine we’d shared after big launches.
The thought of my job, wearing sunglasses, taking meetings, made me nauseated. My job would go on without me and become an LA player. It seemed so unfair. I said to Meredith, “Okay, let me think about this.”
As I hung up the phone, I gulped down the drink I had poured and started to cry. Not because I was losing my job, the job I had chosen over my daughter so many times, but because I’d been so mean to my mom when she walked into my apartment to be here for me tonight. She deserved the award. She had come to every chemo; she’d been at my bedside. She had cleaned up my vomit and I had just given her a verbal vomit. Why was I so mean to my mom? Especially when things were going wrong in my life and she was trying to help?
I needed to get one thousand dollars from the cash machine to pay Licenders. I thought about what I could do with all that money. Then I thought about all the conference calls I needed to do to afford to delouse my daughter. But now they were going away. What would I do without those conference calls? Whom would I talk to?
I told my mom my job was gone and I was panicking. My mom got angry.
“After all you gave to that corporation, your job went away in three minutes. Well, your daughter needs you now. You have two years left where she’ll actually want to be with you. Then she’s gone. She’ll come back, but it will be a long, long time. . . .” Mom looked wistful, as if she might cry, and she knew exactly what she was talking about.
“You won’t get this chance again. Trust me. I still drive by the school bus stop wishing you were there. I would give anything to be there for you now.”
But she was here for me now. My mom worked when I was little. She brought home the bacon and tried to fry it up in a pan. She had three kids in less than four years, and we were all in diapers at the same point and she was tired all the time. She worked in an elementary school as a school guidance counselor, helping other kids, but she missed her own. She had to work; I’ve had to work.
She told me that she’d get the cash for the Licender lady; she packed up the stuffed animals in plastic bags, stripped the bed, threw all the sheets in the washing machine, and made lunch for my daughter. I needed her today maybe more than I did then.
When Licenders arrived, my daughter announced that she would get the door. We had rehearsed what she should say because I didn’t want the fancy hair-and-makeup people to know that she had lice. “Maman, my French tutor is here!”
As I was leaving for the Dream Girl Ball that night, my daughter stopped me in the hallway, studying me. I imagined she wanted to tell me how surprisingly good I looked, or maybe that she was proud that I was getting an award from the American Cancer Society for my work helping cancer patients.
“Mom, I don’t know how to say this to you. . . .” Maybe she was happy that my job was moving so we could spend more time together bonding?
“Don’t walk out the door. Your butt looks so big in that skirt. Change. Seriously, look in the mirror! No one else will tell you the truth, except me, your daughter!”
I walked off the stage backward that night, just in case my daughter was right, which was pretty tricky in my super-high heels. That night was the last time I would wear heels in a long time because my transition to full-time momminess didn’t involve many high heels. I decided the best way to separate from my job was to rip it off, like a Band-Aid. I was going to do a cannonball into the mommy pool. I didn’t want to start looking for a new job right away. It would be like having a Bloody Mary to cure a hangover. I needed to try to be more of a mom, and really try to be more “there” for my kids. A new job would mean working even longer hours and expending even more energy to impress a new boss.
I’d have a bit of severance from my old job, and we’d scale way back. And there would be new expenses for our family: I had always provided the health insurance through my corporate job. Even though he was a doctor, Tyler had to pay so much more for our health insurance through his job than mine. He was a bit surprised at how much more it would cost him to pay for the things that had been my contributions to the family, but he was supportive anyway, now that I wanted to spend more time with the kids. Tyler and I had always tried to support each other’s careers. I wasn’t saving lives at work, but I loved my job as a TV journalist. I loved my job so much that when Tyler had to do specialized training in Philadelphia, I took a train to and from New York City every day to keep working. I had showed up for work every day during chemo.
I’d been working since I was eleven years old. I’d been a babysitter, a busgirl, a waitress, a lifeguard, a swim instructor, a camp counselor, a retail salesgirl, a marketing executive, an intern at a TV station, a TV producer, a writer, a speaker. I always put on my identity with each of these jobs, like putting on my coat in the morning. The jobs made me feel purposeful, like I was contributing something to someone. Now that Lifetime had left me, I was about to start at the hardest job of my life: full-time mom.
I thought it would be so cool to finally have the opportunity to drop Hayden off at his little preschool program. Before, when I went to a job, I’d never had the chance to do drop-off or pickup. I felt so responsible, like a mom with a capital M, the first time I breezed through the school door. Hayden waved to the security guards and I continued to smile until they stopped me and asked for ID. “I’m his mom,” I said sort of smugly.
“You are not in the system.” The guard frowned back, and I humbled myself and registered. That should have been a sign to me that maybe I didn’t belong, but I persisted. When I kissed Hayden good-bye at the classroom after actually meeting his teachers for the first time, Hayden threw himself on the floor and started to scream.
“Don’t go, Mommy!” He screamed so loudly that all the other moms peeked their heads outside of their classrooms to catch the show.
“Why don’t you stay for a bit; he’s probably anxious because you haven’t dropped him off before,” his teacher, Lisa, sweetly offered.
A bit turned into three weeks.
My new office: a kiddy classroom desk at Hayden’s preschool, with a small chair that I was so uncomfy in. I was being instructed on how to make something out of Floam. Floam is the new Play-Doh, but it is sort of Styrofoamish and comes in neon colors. It feels smooth and cool, and doesn’t get hard like Play-Doh. Every once in a while, Lisa came over to me to give me some help with my Floam technique. And thank goodness it was snack time soon because I was starving. I wished they served coffee at snack time because I had skipped my coffee to drop off Hayden, and I had a pounding caffeine-withdrawal headache, but Hayden still wouldn’t let me leave him. Every day I made intricate Floam creations, as if taking out all my work experience on the poor Floam, and I started bringing coffee for snack time. I even raised my hand to share at circle time. It was sort of awesome.
This was my new normal, and I slowly started to adjust to my new “office” with Hayden. There was something really cool about sitting in a circle every day and being assigned a task, like cleaning up after a snack. My favorite job was wiping down the tables because I got to use this little squirt bottle.
I felt bad when some of the other kids in the classroom started getting separation anxiety because I was in the classroom. The teacher explained to me that most of the kids in the class had already separated from their babysitters and parents, a gradual and arduous process that had started back in September. But I arrived in January, when almost everyone had settled in. I was separating from my job, so I had sympathy for separation, such a painful exercise. Whenever a kid cried about missing her mom, I wanted to cry and nod about missing my job.
Hayden introduced me to his friend Joseph, a too-handsome-to-be-only-three-years-old Italian boy wearing a gold charm around his little neck.
“You have such beautiful hands, Hayden’s mommy.”
I felt sort of hot when I played with my Floam because Joseph kept staring at my hands. So inappropriate, but I needed a bit of attention. No one had ever told me I had beautiful hands! When I kneaded the Floam, I added extra flourish, just for Joseph. When I saw him staring at my hands, it gave me a little rush. I was a hand hottie. But I tried not to get too conceited. Maybe he just missed his mommy.
I missed getting dressed in the morning like I had somewhere important to go. These days I was in a ponytail and sweats. In my former working life, the purpose of my high heels was always, I thought, to look great in the boardroom, but probably they were more of a signal that I didn’t belong on the playground. I missed having a lockable door so badly that often I locked myself in our bathroom at home just to remember the feeling of being in a place where no one could disturb me.
I missed the office most when my daughter shut her bedroom door on me after I’d waited all day for her to come home so I could finally see her. She was behind closed doors, and I wasn’t invited. I wondered if I had already missed that magic window with Skye, the one that my mom had warned me about. Skye was getting older and it seemed like she needed me less.
I missed going to meetings in the corporate boardroom and actually having people listen to my ideas as if I had something to contribute. I felt lonely—I didn’t have my water-cooler friends to gossip with and feel validated by.
I missed the business trips where I had too many places to go and not enough hours for all the people I needed to see. I even missed the long, long conference calls. Sometimes. These days my calls were with teachers, dance instructors, and tutors, and my kids always interrupted me when I was talking on the phone. I had always been judgmental of moms who let their kids interrupt them when they were on the phone. I’d never do that, I had promised myself. Now, whatever conversations I had included sidebars with Hayden and Skye. I guess that qualified as conference calls, sort of.
Somehow I never had the time to take the morning shower I’d thought I would take three days ago. My hygiene had become what my son’s was. When I begged him to take a shower, he replied, “I can’t really smell myself.” I got it: If I don’t smell, I don’t shower. I used to wear fabulous perfumes called Love in White and Love in Black. I used to alternate my fragrances, and I smelled so good that people would swoon, “Mmm, what are you wearing?”
As a full-time mom, most days I smelled like McDonald’s. My toes used to be pedicured; now they were shoved into sneakers. When I grabbed my sneakers from the closet, I caught a glimpse of the heels I used to wear. They seemed so lonely, sitting on the shelf with nowhere to go. My heels and I should have had a glass of wine and discussed our lives. They must have been mad at me because I had moved on to sneakers. Like spurned lovers, those heels appeared to be moping. What wouldn’t I have given to be complaining that my heels were pinching my toes again?
There was a time when I had standards for my appearance, and they weren’t even that high. I had loved wearing black suits with black tights to work, and I’d had my hair blown out regularly. I’d always done my makeup in the cab, going to my job, and I’d always worn bright red lipstick. My standards were slipping and Hawa had noticed. She seemed quite concerned about my appearance these days—she even stopped me from leaving the house.
“Where are your earrings? Where is your makeup? You know my rule that you are not allowed to leave the house in sweatpants anymore.”
I missed the office routine and how productive I’d felt. The minutes at home frittered into hours, the hours piled up into dinnertime, and my watch felt as if it had melted. The worst part of my new mommy job was when Tyler came home from his office and asked with a mixture of curiosity and voyeurism, “What did you do all day?” I didn’t know what to say, but I must have been doing something because I was sticky all the time now, usually from something being wiped on me, or from wiping my hands on myself because something gross that should have been thrown away had ended up in my hands instead.
“Mom, are you the garbage?” Hayden asked me in all seriousness one day at pickup from preschool.
“Yeah, I guess so.” I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. He spit out whatever was in his mouth—sticky but sweet-smelling—into my open hand. And to prove that I was his garbage, he wiped his sticky hand on my jeans, leaving a gooey trail. Another mom, also waiting in the hallway, noticed and offered me a wipe. Her son had just done the same thing to her. We really hit it off: Her son had also thrown himself down screaming the first time she’d dropped him off. The conversation was going amazingly well until she said, “Do you have a card?”
She wanted to make a plan to hang out, and all I had were my business cards, no longer valid. I took one out, crossed out my old info, and wrote in my cell phone number. It was a little awkward having to explain why the card wasn’t valid, like a credit card that had been declined. My business card had told the world (and me) who I was, why I was important, why you should know me. I’d been someone with a title: Geralyn Lucas, Lifetime Television, Director of Talent Relations and Corporate Communications. I’d had my own phone number (out of reach of my kids’ and my husband’s interruptions), an office with a door (and a lock, also kid- and husband-proof). Who was “I” now? That scared me. I had wanted to see if I could switch teams and spend time with my kids, not as an extracurricular activity, but as the main activity. But I still carried my card around, a vestige of who I used to be, and I could always write in my personal cell number if anyone asked for it. It offered me a sort of half-life identity. Like a dying cell battery, there was a tiny bit of juice left in it. The more people asked me for my card (and I kept crossing out my old title and info and writing in my cell) the stranger and more demoralized I felt. I hated crossing something out and feeling so unprofessional in my presentation now that I was no longer actually a professional. I especially hated how long I had struggled over getting a new title, when now it was obsolete. I thought about how hard people I knew worked to make partner or to get from VP level to senior VP level, as if “senior” totally changed them. They got more money and more responsibility, and all because of one word on a small card.
Who I used to be and who I was now seemed to blur, and my entire identity felt body-snatched. My business card had told me who I was, and without it I was measuring my worth based on how good my Floam project was that day. Whatever I had done in my career boiled down to the info on that little card, so small and rectangular, almost like a tiny headstone in a cemetery. It had defined my life, and by default it would be my obituary. This little card was all I had ever seemed to be. I started reading obits for ideas for my new business card. The first one I found: cat lover. I’m allergic. My former title had sustained me 24/7 and told me exactly who I was. There were e-mails and texts and calls to remind me. If I’d thought I was someone else for even a few hours, I was quickly sucked back into the magnetic field of that business card—the guiding, pulsing force in my life.
I finally figured out that I needed a new business card, but the problem was that without anyone telling me what my position was, I actually had no idea what to have printed on it. How did I want to sum up who I was, now that I was no longer a title in an organization? I could have declared my skills, like a “writer, producer” kind of card. I could have created a “calling card” with just my contact info. I was completely terrified about how to define myself in such a monumental way.
I’d had cancer and gone through horrible treatments; surviving that was a huge credential. But what else had I done? What was my worth? My work credentials felt so yesterday, now that I wasn’t in my job. What was left when that job fell away and stopped? How should I present myself to the world? I decided that I wanted to be authentic in this stage of my life, and eliminate anyone who might try to befriend me because of where I worked or what I could do for him. Losing my job would be my reinvention moment. There was no looking back on my former titles. Telling people what I used to do felt very past tense and like I was trying to network, and I didn’t want to give the impression that I was looking for work. I wanted to be present, in the moment, exactly where I was in my life, and I wanted to own exactly what I was doing.
I just wanted to be myself for once in my life. I didn’t want to put on airs about all the great projects I was developing for the future. I wanted to focus on my kids, and so for a quick minute I thought the calling card solution would work—my name and contact info. There would be an air of mystery around it. I’d heard that celebrities had calling cards. It felt classy.
But then I was inspired to go deeper and be even more real. Aside from the Floam creations, my biggest accomplishment lately was being a mom. I loved spending time with my kids, except that sometimes being a mom got in the way of being a mom. There were so many forms to fill out for school, visits to pediatricians, camp trunks to pack, so many details of parenting. Right then, Hayden was mastering the potty, and the process had started to feel like a real boss/employee dynamic. “Ouch, you’re wiping too hard,” he’d complain after I tried to get that perfect wipe. It wasn’t now about earning a promotion; it was the more existential concept of taking true pride in my work.
Freud said we need work to make us happy. The communist worker was supposed to feel a certain pride in the work he did, no matter how small, since it was contributing to a greater societal good. I was a tushy wiper, and I was going to be a damn good one. I was part of the circle of life, like in The Lion King. Gone were the days of bonus checks, glowing job evaluations, and thank-you lunches at fancy restaurants. Now I just had wiping.
After one very long day of mommydom, Hayden came over to me with his underwear still around his ankles after he’d flushed the potty with great flourish. He must have sensed my sadness and my lack of purpose these days. “Mommy, is wiping my tushy your favorite job ever?” I thought about all of the ass I kissed on my way up the corporate ladder: the mean ass, the skinny ass, the entitled ass, and then there was this chubby-cheeked angel.
It was very humbling, to be performing such sacred yet menial labor. It was my favorite job . . . but I had a flash of entering the gates of the White House and of hanging with Taylor Swift during a shoot. My new business card, if I got one printed: Tushy Wiper. But I wanted something more distinguishing to prove that I was earnest, that I took it seriously, and that I still had game.
Geralyn Lucas. Wiper Extraordinaire. The addition gave it a bit of panache. It was a wink and a nod that I did hard work and did it well. It also seemed low-key, yet upwardly mobile.
The moment to debut my new life and try out my new title appeared. I was at a very important TV party where I should have been networking with all my former colleagues. Everyone was gathered around the few famous people there. Geraldo Rivera looked at me as if he knew me, but couldn’t place how. I had a fabulous conversation with a TV star. I was suggesting what her next pieces should be. She asked me for my card.
“I’m just a tushy wiper now. I don’t carry a card,” I sort of mumbled.
“There’s someone you must meet,” she said, and she was absolutely determined.
She introduced me to her husband, a stay-at-home dad.
In a party full of VIPs the two wipers were networking.
We compared notes about wiping, but then we started to talk about how nice it was to be out of the house and have a glass of wine after a whole day of being the garbage. It felt so real. We had a genuine spark; there was no ulterior motive for work advancement, no false promises about having lunch in the future. We just compared notes on how hard it was to be a parent, and how our spouses didn’t get it. Sure, we missed our offices, but there was a je ne sais quoi about being there for someone, being vulnerable for another person. The endless meaningless tasks of the day added up to some gestalt I couldn’t describe and neither could he. I was tired, I’d gained a muffin top, but I’d also gained some perspective about myself: I could exist without a business card. I had a new job, one that didn’t pay, but made me feel so complete.
The next day Hayden seemed reluctant toward me when he headed for the potty. “Mommy, close the door. I need my privacy. I can do it now all by myself.”
I was fired—no title, out of work again. I thought about how important my role had been. Hayden was now an independent little guy, and I had definitely had a hand in it. Maybe my greatest work to date.
I still experience PTSD because my job actually left me, went off to LA, like a boyfriend. I fantasized that my job would miss me so much, not be able to go on without me, beg me to come to LA. I pretended that my job couldn’t live without me. But my job had met someone new.
One day, after a long session of Floam, Hayden and I were walking home. The feeling of having nowhere to be hit me. At first it was scary, that no one in the office needed me, that I wasn’t being summoned to a meeting. But I looked down and saw Hayden’s little hand holding my wrist, pulling me toward a bright red firehouse door.
“Should I knock, Hayden?”
“Yes! Mommy, I want to say hi to the firemen!”
Mommy wanted to say hi to some nice firemen too. It had been a bit isolating hanging with my son and all his friends.
I hoisted Hayden up and he rang the bell. It was a very loud ring, and I was worried that maybe we would be disturbing their important work. But a tall, redheaded, blue-eyed firefighter answered the door promptly. His name tag said MIKE and he seemed thrilled to have company.
“My son and I wanted to thank you for keeping our neighborhood so safe, right, Hayden?”
Hayden sprinted as fast as he could toward the awesomely huge, shiny red fire truck. Mike ran after Hayden, scooped him up in his arms, and climbed up behind the steering wheel. With Hayden on his lap, he demonstrated how to honk the horn. He even extended an arm for me to join them in the front seat of the fire truck. Mike was as hot as the fires he was called to, but he was also sweet. Watching Hayden awed by the station, Mike seemed to puff out his chest a bit more and feel even more important.
I got to honk the horn too, and it blasted straight to my brain. In my old life I was on a conveyor belt, moving too fast to step off. I was moving too fast to take time to stop into firehouses on a whim; I was always at a corporate job. Any free time, I was thinking about work.
It felt so good to have this little adventure, to meander and let life seep in, so slowly that I almost didn’t notice. And my relationship with Meredith, who had been my boss and my friend, had morphed into a friendship that became even closer. What I’d thought was the biggest disappointment in my life—losing my job—turned into a window of opportunity for change. And there was even more change on the way.