There's No Coming Back from This

by Ann Garvin

I’d use every James Bond tool in my long and storied career of being a woman to get us back on track,

His robust voice opened muscle memories in pleasure centers that had been on life support for a long time.

Love, in the moment, is a smoke screen to differences, age, stage, or anything else.

“You’ve always had the keys to me,”

Single was safer.

“Mental illness isn’t personal, it’s illness.” Going on to say, “You wouldn’t take another person’s diabetes as a slight against you, would you?”

I’d heard the phrase unreliable narrator and recognized my father in the definition.

That wasn’t my motto, though. Mine was: Be likable. Ask for nothing.

I’d been in the Midwest, around my tight circle of people, for so long, I hadn’t seen myself through outside eyes. I wondered what else they saw that categorized me. Subtle things I wore like skin but they saw as a label or a truth.

It didn’t matter how far you’d come in the world of competency; women were always judged by their outward appearance.

Three had this look that said, I want to know everything about you, even though I see you.

This emotional spinning wheel of fortune was normal for parenting a kid who was almost a grown-up. Excitement, melancholy, wonder, fear could be packaged in one sentence and forgotten the next hour.

The trick was to listen, support, and do no problem-solving until a solid problem was defined. Emotions were not to be solved.

I knew how to please while observing, predicting needs, and putting my desires for eating and peeing aside. There was power in this behavior and I knew it.

Interesting that the people who kept the movie on budget were the ones relegated to and described as beneath the others.

That was the trade-off about being good at change. Although you might adapt, you could never let your guard down.

It was like that old joke about people like me, people who cared knowing they shouldn’t: I’m going to give up people pleasing if that’s okay with everyone.

I saw myself through the eyes of a stranger. I was either unseeable, pitiable, or dismissed as “just a mom,” the culture’s most misogynist label of a supremely capable individual.

Toddlers were hard, their heads so heavy, toppling into every corner of every coffee table, but as a mother you could pick them up and move them out of harm’s way. Teens, across the country, you still had the responsibility and stress of keeping their heads unharmed, but no parent had long enough arms for the adult hazards of the world.

I knew from my childhood that asking questions came with answers you didn’t necessarily want. I’d learned over the many years that keeping your questions close was a way to self-protect.

I was often the mouse in the corner in my own life, spying rather than experiencing. Experiencing was for people who were secure.

You know, if you stood up for yourself like you do for everyone else, maybe I could respect you. I did put others first. I’d long known that if you focus on other people, you don’t have to figure out what you want. If you never ask anything for yourself, you’ll never discover who cares or, for that matter, doesn’t care.

This was the first time that doing my best for others annoyed those others. The system I’d used my whole life was failing.

I’d thought I was a woman of the world, but in fact I was a woman of my world, my tiny world that I had made work by wanting as little as possible.

The rewards of that kind of life reside in a bat-like ability to hear personal pain deeper than the initial broadcast.

I offered him my mother smile, which was not so much maternal as it was made of sincerity without agenda—the kind of thing I hoped people could see when they looked at me.

“People do what they want and from what I see, you want something. But you think you have to take care of everyone to feel okay about it.”

“How do you stand up for yourself when you don’t have any power?” I asked. “That’s not the question you need an answer to. You need to know what you want first. Then what you need is dignity and integrity.

“I think it takes trial and error and practice. Nothing is a forever decision. Nothing can’t be undone.”

Just because it’s hard doesn’t mean it’s wrong. And then, Just because it’s easy doesn’t make it right.

I’d slid into so many roles because of duty and ease. It was much harder to make strong choices, forge a new way forward. To figure out what you want to do, go for it, fail, and try again.

“Awwww, look at you. So hopeful. Honestly, you and your sunflower ways are heartbreaking. Such a purehearted soul.”

That you need caring for, just like the rest of us. And, just like the rest of us, when we feel desperate, we want to hold somebody’s hand in the night. We’ll pretend we didn’t need it. It was all a mistake of identity.

This moment had a stretched rubber band about to break quality to it.

“I can assure you, I am not an alcoholic. I am a product of Hollywood.”

Just because it’s sweet doesn’t mean it’s soft, she said. Maybe it was a dental warning or maybe it was a life lesson.

I’d seen everything through the eyes of a rule follower. A non–wave maker. Someone who lived her life guided by others’ rules because how easy was that? You didn’t have to think about the reasons for your actions at all.

The little girl without a mother, the older woman thinking her only value was to be pleasing. So many like us, just like us, misunderstanding the adoring looks, only to be tossed aside when asserting . . . anything real.

Women learn to be pleasing—often their lives and livelihoods depend on it.

“All arrogant men underestimate women. It’s a thing.

There was so much to learn, and it occurred to me that the largest life lesson of all had to be answering the question of how much to give, how much to keep. How much do you matter versus how much do others count when trying to be a mother, friend, or good person?

An object that can be used and tossed. Something she thought about herself. Disposable, dispensable, invisible except as an object of sexual fantasies

My father had me convinced that whatever I wanted would draw conflict. So I stopped wanting,

With the quiet countenance of a woman who’d nursed a child through mastitis, drove herself to her own colonoscopy, and understood deeply that life was loss spelled incorrectly,

The love I’d returned to as the gold standard because I thought he saw me, really saw me. And I’d been right. He saw a woman he could manipulate just by being nice. Until he couldn’t, and then, like my father, turned into whatever he thought he deserved.

You’re a likable person, Poppy. It’s your strength and your downfall.

nobody likes a doormat, no matter how much it aims to please.”

I knew our friendship had been unbalanced for the past few months, but it always leveled out—I never worried that Chelsea’s friendship hinged on quid pro quo. I did think it was time to identify the people in my life who liked me for me, not for what I did for them.

Whatever all else comes and goes—memories, parents, houses, children—the truth I’m left with is this: I am mine. What if that was enough?