It Was an Ugly Couch Anyway: And Other Thoughts on Moving Forward

by Elizabeth Passarella

“It Was an Ugly Couch Anyway is a delight—wise, funny, beautifully written. I devoured it in a day. And cried a little, for a couch I never sat on. I loved this book.” —JULIA CLAIBORNE JOHNSON, AUTHOR OF BE FRANK WITH ME AND BETTER LUCK NEXT TIME

“I love reading anything Elizabeth writes because, well, she’s hilarious, and I really admire that in a person. But there’s another aspect of Elizabeth’s writing that’s on fine display in It Was An Ugly Couch Anyway: a grounded, sincere tenderness that anchors every bit of her humor. Whether she’s writing about marriage, health, faith, work, or a complicated real estate transaction (I don’t mean to be dramatic, but I experienced secondary stress), Elizabeth opens the door to her very real life and rolls out the proverbial welcome mat as she shares her stories. The end result is a book with so much heart that it’s going to feel like home to the people who are lucky enough to read it. What an absolute gift.” —SOPHIE HUDSON, BESTSELLING AUTHOR AND CO-HOST OF THE BIG BOO CAST

“A buffet of honesty, humor, and quirkiness that borders on chaos, Elizabeth Passarella’s writing gives us permission to cherish the strange experiences and honest mistakes that make us human. This book is a heckuva ride and I devoured every word.” —SHANNAN MARTIN, AUTHOR OF START WITH HELLO AND THE MINISTRY OF ORDINARY PLACES

Or maybe being a mother wasn’t the identity I wanted to celebrate, indelibly, on my body anymore. That thought crossed my mind.

But it is also about the displacement we often feel, even when our surroundings haven’t budged. If the wildness and brokenness of the past few years have taught me anything, it is that whatever you think is solid in this world will shift, and that includes your strongest-held opinions about yourself. I have reassessed my stance on everything from running to dogs to whether it was a good idea for me to have children.

These are stories of what we hold on to, and what we can let go. They are about trudging forward without certainty, without a clear destination. They are about looking back on where we’ve been and being okay if it’s maybe worse, or different, than we remember. Sometimes

I hope these stories remind you, as they have me, that we have less control than we think, that the hard parts don’t last forever, and that apartment dreams can come true. You just need a lot of patience and a dumpster.

In their minds it was being rehomed to a better place, a city where furniture born in the South that no longer felt like it fit in the South (meaning it was not in the English country style that my mother now embraced) could be welcomed for its boldness and finally be happy. They could have also been talking about their daughter, for what it’s worth.

When loved ones die, we become suddenly, desperately attached to material things we never knew we cared about. The Bible says, “Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moths and vermin destroy, and where thieves break in and steal” (Matthew 6:19), and I’d add, “and where your formerly unsentimental children become so emotional about inanimate objects you loved that they find themselves skinning a couch while weeping uncontrollably.”

Michael said to do whatever I wanted, because he has always let me have complete control over our home’s decor and also maybe noticed that I was petting and murmuring to the couch, like my dad’s spirit was living in the armrests.

My father taught me to have one credit card and pay it off every month. I was in my twenties before I even knew there was such a thing as a minimum payment. You get one card, my father said, and if you can’t pay it in full, you need to rethink your life choices. Michael’s parents are different. They have managed their finances just fine, not that it’s any of my business, but I sense that when they die, Michael and his sisters might have to slice open some mattresses.

The urgent care doctor wanted to send him to the ER. “Really? That seems like overkill,” I said. My philosophy about diseases was that anything I’d never heard of certainly couldn’t kill you, and shouldn’t he just come home and rest?

For years we joked about it as if the entire episode was, in fact, made up—an excuse to get a break from the relentlessness of parenting small children. When one of us would feel a cold or sore throat coming on, and bedtime duties or dirty dishes hung on to us like sandbags, we’d climb into bed, pull the covers up, and say, “I can’t. It’s rhabdo. It’s rhabdo.”

I looked at everyone’s eyes and listened to them “Hmm” and tried to gauge how hysterical I should become. Friends were texting to ask if they could bring meals. One had contacted our pastor, who was checking in, which was incredibly thoughtful. But it was also a busy Sunday. Father’s Day, no less. Were we at a pastor-visiting level of seriousness? I had no idea. Couldn’t a professional just tell me how much to freak out, please?

(My friend Merritt, a former nurse, explained that the heart has plumbing and electricity. Cardiologists are the plumbers. Electrophysiologists are the electricians. This would prove to be the most helpful information I collected in all of our hospital stays.)

Michael is a loud, active sleeper. As are all of my children. They breathe as if they’re blowing out dozens of birthday candles with every exhale—heavy, forceful whooohs. They flop like fish out of water. They wake up with wild hair. Normally, when Michael would let out a harumph and roll over, pulling me backward into a spooning position, I’d elbow him back to his side of the bed. Now I held his forearm across my chest and leaned back into his body, pressing every part of myself against him that I could, the backs of my knees cradling the fronts of his, my feet twisted around his toes. I listened to him breathe.

I feared something was wrong, but I didn’t want to panic. One, I had the boys in the car. Two, I did not want to run into the building with my hair on fire only to have Michael casually stroll off the elevator. Life is usually boring. Situations are rarely emergencies. Headaches aren’t always brain tumors. My husband was almost definitely just on the phone.

I feel older than him in all the unwelcome, annoying ways. I’m the tougher, less playful parent. I’m the one who knows how to take apart the p-trap under the sink to find an item dropped down the drain. It’s my shoulder that hurts when I sleep funny.

Medicine is murky. Doctors are human. Research changes. No one can tell me the socially acceptable level of panic in a given health crisis.

Apparently New York was not dead; it was molting. Everyone emerged from lockdown, peeled off their own four walls like shapewear at the end of a wedding, and went looking for something roomier.

Unfortunately every three-bedroom apartment in the building faced the park, which is like saying a perfectly lovely black dress is also trimmed in gold-dipped hummingbird wings.

Whew. There was a feeling I’d come to know well during my short time at Vogue, of giving just enough of a right answer to win a second of approval, and you could slip out the door on that approval if you had the sense to keep your mouth shut. Under normal circumstances, when a person brought up being from Texas, I’d launch into a conversation about my aunts and uncles who lived in Houston and Dallas before bringing up the regional preferences of beef versus pork barbecue. I was like a wind-up toy in these situations. Let me loose, and I’ll tap-dance through a delightful conversation about our shared experience! But something told me to shut up and sit still.

I wrote thousands of words about eyebrow threading, which of course has been around for centuries but had yet to break through to the world of white beauty editors. My editor sent me to Chinatown to try what she’d been told was a “string facial.” I sat on a cushion in the living room of an elderly Chinese woman, who zipped and pulled the twisted string across every millimeter of my face, from my forehead down to my clavicle. I’d entered her apartment with no idea what the treatment entailed, so having a woman moving her face in a pecking motion so close to mine that our eyebrows rubbed together was paralyzing. I didn’t know where she’d stop. My belly button? Several times she paused to say, “Tough. Tough,” after breaking a string on my wiry sideburns. I’d heard the same thing from a bikini waxer. “You look fair, but you have some Eastern European in you, no?” she’d declared. The first draft of that threading story was terrible. I began with a deep dive into my hair removal history, including weekly electrolysis in college and one at-home waxing disaster where I chickened out on pulling off the strip and attempted to slowly dissolve the wax with hot water and rubbing alcohol. Many editors would just rewrite your piece. Amy was patient and encouraging. She gave nudges and suggestions and extra time until I landed on a draft good enough to send to Anna. It came back with the blessed seal of approval: “AWOK: Anna Wintour OK” was scrawled across the top. A humble threading salo...

To this day, I can’t stomach that fish. I eat oysters and escargot and have sucked Cheeto dust off of my toddler’s fingers without batting an eye. Salmon is the one food that everyone I know seems to enjoy, and I’d rather swallow my Apple Watch band right now.

During my time in the beauty department, everyone only painted their toenails in a nude or pale ballerina-pink polish, because that’s what Anna did. She found colors garish, I heard. I followed suit. At first it seemed nuts, but I’m here to tell you that I am still painting my toenails nude twenty years later.

If you showed up to meetings prepared and spoke with confidence, Anna would treat you with respect, even if she didn’t like your story idea.

I can only speak for myself; after that meeting I thought, I can’t take off enough parts of me to fit in.

Everyone’s math is different when it comes to how much you are willing to change or cover up to fit in, whether it’s at a job or a garden club. There was nothing particularly noble about my leaving Vogue. The math ceased to add up after a while, is all. What I have come to learn in the years since is that there are situations and relationships in which you cannot avoid reshaping whole chunks of yourself. A job doesn’t need to be one of them. To stay in a marriage, or even in some friendships, you will let go of things you think are important. Those sacrifices are worth it.

Every cool club you want to be in is never as great as you think it will be.

We wrote about “cooking by feel,” which simply meant that the ultimate freedom in the kitchen came from learning enough basic rules and ingredient pairings to be able to cook without a recipe, to be flexible, to sense when something was finished, to pull together an easy meal with what’s seasonal or on hand. Writing is a bit like that, in a way. You study great writers and listen to your editors and learn everything you can from every job, good or bad, so that, eventually, you know how to bend the rules to find your own voice. You feel your way.

During the summer of 1987, on our family’s annual trip to Greers Ferry Lake in central Arkansas, my father ran over me with our station wagon. I wasn’t critically injured, but it was close. The tires of the station wagon missed my head by about six inches. I assume it was an accident. Of course it was. As stubborn and tiresome as I was as a rising fifth grader, I’m certain my father wasn’t actually trying to kill me. That said, I never asked him. The incident happened, a narrative formed, we all agreed on the narrative, and then we never talked about it. Now, when I think I’d like to ask my dad about that day and, more importantly, how he must have felt pulling his child out from under a car after (allegedly, accidentally) running her over, I can’t because he’s dead. In the final few years of his life, it seemed like poor taste to bring it up. My family’s vacations to Greers Ferry are some of my favorite childhood memories, station wagon situations notwithstanding.

Family vacations do what they do, which is splinter into self-contained pods, clustered on your branch of the family tree.

Of course that was the clear explanation. The station wagon did not malfunction. But when Max said it, my heart fell. I’d told myself something different for so long, and now my dad was gone, and I wasn’t interested in revising any memories of him.

In 2006 Nora Ephron wrote a book, I Feel Bad About My Neck, which is full of wonderful pieces about the complexities and indignities of being an older woman.

Stephanie claims it is most pronounced when doing a downward dog in yoga, which is why I haven’t noticed a change in my knee skin; I don’t like yoga. But I have been growing a patchy beard every day since high school, an affliction I would trade in a hot second for droopy kneecaps. When women I know talk about how they are going to sign a pact with a friend who will commit to “plucking that one curly chin hair” for them when they’re old and incapacitated, I laugh and laugh. One chin hair? One? I’m going to need a small lawn mower, not tweezers, by that point. Is that interesting to anyone? Is everyone starting with necks because necks are more palatable? Is everything else too gross? I hope not, because what I’d really love to discuss is peeing my pants. Don’t worry, this is also a story about running and family dynamics. But it starts with peeing my pants. My mother hates when I say the word pee. And I don’t blame her. Tinkle or tee tee, her preferred choices, are both a little less crass sounding. But I am forty-six years old, and if I’m going to be real about the indignities of involuntarily wetting my pants, I think I need to come in with more firepower than tinkle.

What it started, however, was years of me running to please someone else. My dad desperately wanted me to run track. I ran track. Once or twice, I ran a 5K with him to make him happy. A couple of years after college, my sister invited me to run a half-marathon on Kiawah Island in South Carolina with her and her husband. Because I thought it would make me disciplined, and because I relished any chance to hang out with my older sister’s friends, I said yes. I ran it twice, maybe even three times. I don’t remember exactly, due to situational amnesia brought on by the fact that I hated every mile of training.

So it is very strange for me to say that I began to enjoy running at age forty-three, during a pandemic, right around the time I started peeing on myself every time I coughed. I know I really enjoy running because the steps I have to go through to get out the door are absurd. I am middle-aged, and what moisture is left in my body is being hoarded by my skin in its quest not to look like a dried riverbed. I get dehydrated easily.

The reason I endure the discomfort of wet leggings is that I have realized something very important about running. My children do not do it. That’s how this whole enterprise started.

I don’t think Ruth followed her mother-in-law because Naomi was a bag of fun. Naomi was super depressed. Ruth followed because God was calling her—to a new land, a new husband (surprise!), and to him. That’s the only hope for mothers- and daughters-in-law, I believe. God has to be in the middle of it. We’re doomed otherwise. God’s gentle, persistent tugging at me to see my mother-in-law as a fellow suffering human—and a treasured child of his—instead of the constant impediment to my wishes has changed my heart.

Eventually, my grandmother moved in with us. My mother treated her with such respect and tenderness every single day. It was a beautiful picture of sacrificial love. My grandmother died in our house when I was a sophomore in high school. My mother never got the adoration she deserved. I wonder if it was enough for her to remember that this woman raised the man she loved. It’s so obvious, and yet we forget. We can’t have one without the other.

York City streets, with their crosswalks and tourists and bike lanes with speeding delivery men, require focus that doesn’t come naturally to either James or me. If I’m so much as listening to a podcast or even wearing a hat—don’t ask, it makes me feel like my vision is stunted—while walking, I will forget where I’m going and pass it right by. It shouldn’t have surprised me in the least that James did not notice us walk through the Walgreens revolving door.

I’ve thought about that since, how often I stay lost because I’m forgetting—or ignoring—the instructions.

The whole crux of the Christian faith is that we cannot save ourselves. This is meant to be good news, although for people like me, who pride ourselves on being supremely capable, it feels irritating at times. Even when I have a win—I succeed at being gentle with my child! I forgive someone who hurt me, despite the fact that I really didn’t want to! I am humble for a few minutes in my day!—I know that I can’t fix the brokenness inside me or overcome my own sin. For people who don’t share my faith, this sounds totally depressing, I know.

the hosts—all Episcopal priests—were discussing the movie Tangled. One host in particular thinks it is the best Disney movie ever made. I tend to agree. His point is that we spend most of the movie following Rapunzel and Flynn Rider and waiting for them to fall in love and wondering if Mother Gothel will catch them. But the most touching part of the movie is that the king and queen, Rapunzel’s parents, are sending lanterns out into the sky once a year, remembering her, longing for her, looking for her. That is how God is with us. We are missing the revolving door to Walgreens and fumbling around in Times Square, but he is looking for us, always. He wants to pull us back so badly that he sent his Son to die for our sins, so that we can stop striving and simply accept that gift of salvation.

When I am lost, I don’t have to remember the way home. I don’t have to get the message right. Because he is out on the crowded sidewalk, looking for me.

My father was not going to get a dog for nostalgic or practical reasons. He did not grow up with cocker spaniels, for example, and care about giving his children a love like he had with Bubbles or what have you. He did not hunt. There would be no bird dogs or retrievers for that purpose. My father did have excellent style, though—stick with me here—and appreciated well-designed clothes, jewelry, and kitchen gadgets. He prized cleverness—in kids, dogs, and anything else sentient that crossed his path. I just had to find a breed that was known to be smart and handsome, according to his standards.

We took him home a couple of weeks later and slowly watched the innocence and cuteness drain from his body, replaced by raw psychosis.

I’ve known dogs that were wild and stupid, who chased squirrels and cars and got themselves stuck under fences. But most of them were lovable dummies who would also put their heads in your lap and let the baby fall asleep on their rumps. Not Bandit. He would settle in every night for an evening of mind games and torture. We were always on edge.

My friends, however, are weak. Every friend of mine who gets a puppy inevitably confesses that it is harder than having a newborn.

If there is something you take away from these pages, let it be that God is passionately, personally concerned with every small hurt or inconvenience in your life, and you should talk to him about whatever you want, whether it is a real estate deal or a broken washing machine. What happens, though—what certainly happened to me—is that in thinking about how God cares about the humdrum business of your day, you start to fall more in love with him and less in love with the thing you started praying about in the first place. That’s the best possible scenario, if for no other reason than you are a little less stressed out.