The Wrong Way to Save Your Life

Essays

Megan Stielstra

• Publisher: Harper Perennial
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9780062429209
• eBook ISBN:
  9780062429216
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Social Science Biographies
• Index: Literature

Powerful, personal observations on fear and courage—that touch on art, faith, academia, the internet, and more—from "a masterful essayist" (Roxane Gay, New York Times–bestselling author of  Hunger).
In this poignant and thoughtful collection of literary essays, Megan Stielstra tells stories to ward off fears both personal and universal as she grapples toward a better way to live. In "The Wrong Way to Save Your Life," she answers the question of what has value in our lives—a question no longer rhetorical when the apartment above her family's goes up in flames. "Here is My Heart" sheds light on Megan's close relationship with her father, whose continued insistence on climbing mountains despite a series of heart attacks leads the author to dissect deer hearts in a poetic attempt to interrogate her own feelings about mortality. 
Whether she's imagining the implications of open-carry laws on college campuses, recounting the story of going underwater on the mortgage of her first home, or revealing the unexpected pains and joys of marriage and motherhood, Stielstra's work informs, impels, enlightens, and embraces us all. The result is something beautiful—this story, her courage, and, potentially, our own.
"Sensitive and funny . . . She has a flair for nostalgia and for cultural criticism that is never pretentious." — Publishers Weekly
"When Megan Stielstra writes you can actually feel her beautiful heart pumping blood through every sentence." —Samantha Irby, New York Times–bestselling author of We Are Never Meeting in Real Life
"A life-enriching collection of essays." — Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"Reading this book is like listening to stories from a wise, compassionate, and irrepressibly funny friend." —Esme Weijun Wang, award-winning author of The Border of Paradise

forty, or Optimist

31

I told the Realtor that I was scared of Realtors—of buying property, owning property, credit checks, debt of any kind, furnaces that explode a week after the warranty expires, buyers’ markets and sellers’ markets and markets in general and niche vocabulary like equity and escrow and signing lots of documents that I don’t understand but am bound to, like cell phone contracts or gym contracts, and if I’m nervous about contracts that involve, like, a hundred bucks, then why would I dick around with not only my entire life savings but also tons of money that I don’t even have? “It’s like when my Isuzu died,” I told him. “I went to the dealership and I was like, look: I only have X amount of money so don’t tell me later that I have to pay a zillion dollars in state tax and warranty and what all, just give me a car that has decent mileage and won’t fall apart when all these crazy Chicago drivers bang into it parallel parking, you know what I mean?”

He did.

He specialized in historic buildings: vintage architecture, nontraditional layouts, the opposite of pop-up McCondos. Also he was patient, explaining everything fifteen times in layman’s terms, all of which I wrote down in specific detail although later, when I read back over those notes, I didn’t know what the hell they meant, which is very similar to reading over stuff I wrote back in college when I was drunk.*^,* Also, he jumped up and down on hardwood floors to make sure there wasn’t excess moisture, which is apparently very bad. Also, one time, when he was driving us around from condo to condo, some guy cut him off in traffic and my Realtor pulled up next to him at a red light, rolled down his window, and said, “you must drive better.” He used the same tone of voice anyone else would’ve used to cuss somebody out. Also, he plays in two bands and is super cool to have a beer with. Also, he found our new home, which, at the time, I deeply loved.

31

New neighborhood, new condo: in Uptown across the street from the Aragon Ballroom. Our street was full of tour buses: Pixies and Yeah Yeah Yeahs and Bob Dylan and the Flaming Lips, guys in orange vests directing traffic as bands tried to parallel park, fans lined up down the street for the Aragon and the Riviera and the Green Mill underneath the Red Line stop at Lawrence. Due north: the West Argyle Street Historic District, or Little Saigon. Due east: five blocks of Lawrence Avenue ending in the Montrose Dog Beach, where we went religiously every Sunday so Mojo could run it out. Due south: an empty parking lot under an enormous billboard that changed ads every few months, mostly for upcoming films (Little Miss Sunshine, Casino Royale) and various cold medications (we immediately got sick). And high above it all, eight hundred square feet of a top-floor walk-up with a balcony and a turret and a refrigerator that had a little button and when you pressed it, ice came out, my ice, ice that I owned, ice bought and paid for with the American dream, i.e. Monopoly money and your firstborn child. It felt exactly like that Lorrie Moore story “You’re Ugly, Too”: Zoë buys a house. She keeps going into the basement because “it amused her to own a basement. It also amused her to own a tree. The day she moved in, she had tacked to her tree a small paper sign that said Zoë’s Tree.”

I didn’t own a basement.

I didn’t own a tree.

Somehow, that made it less scary.

31

A year after going off the pill, alone in a single-occupancy restroom at the Uncommon Ground on Clark Street. I peed on the stick. I waited the three minutes.

31

Four hours later, I was on a table at the gynecologist’s office. I’d made an appointment after three plus signs appeared in three tiny windows of three separate pregnancy tests. The soonest they could see me was after lunch, so I went to the table where Jeff and I met up to write, twitching from the effort of not telling him. My whole body shook. “No more coffee for you,” he said. “Okay,” I said, drinking water instead, glass after glass to keep my hands busy.

Recently, I went back through my journals to find what I wrote that morning. At the top of the page is the date, followed by a single word: please.

When I got to the doctor’s, she had me pee in a cup and tested it for HGC. The results: not pregnant.

I’m nineteen years old, there on the table.

Thirty-one, on the table.

It doesn’t matter how old you are, how well you know your body.

I showed her the three plastic sticks with the pink plus signs. “How about that?” she said, and did a blood test, which verified the pregnancy.

Apparently I’d drank so much water that there wasn’t pee left in my pee.

32

I didn’t know I was supposed to be terrified about bringing a child into this world until I went to the eco baby store. I was there to buy paint. Our friend Kat was making the baby a mural, two weeks on ladders and a twisty forest climbing his walls. At the time, we were desperately broke, watching the value of our home plummet with the recession and trying, like many of us raising children, to figure out how we’d manage both a mortgage and child care.

The saleswoman brought me the paint and asked if I had a crib mattress.

“I—”

She listed the ways mattresses would kill my baby and pointed at one that was safe. It cost over a thousand dollars. I went home and read about VOCs. About SIDS. About entrapment. About vaccinations and cord blood and cryogenically freezing your baby’s teeth to preserve stem cells in case your baby gets cancer. Did you know formula will give your baby cancer and that hat will give your baby cancer and what do you mean you don’t breast-feed, you’re killing your baby and how can your baby live without a Bumbo and a Boppy? I read about life insurance and health insurance and auto insurance, renter’s and casualty and disability and college savings and you have to pay for college or your child will be in debt forever and without college they won’t get a job ever and they’ll live with you forever and you can never retire and how will you retire and why are you eating that chicken it will kill you GMO HMO PPO and you’re already thirty? You should freeze your eggs. You should wear this band thing to help you get your abs back. You have to get your body back or no one will love you. Here: makeup for new moms, me...

Table of contents

• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Contents
• I Am Still Fighting with My Big and Small Fears
• ten, or The Little Girl Character
• Here Is My Heart
• F
• Stand Here to Save Lives
• twenty, or Good Lord, It’s Me, Jane.
• Come Questo
• The Buildup To and Takeaway From
• This Essay Is Done
• thirty, or Come Here Fear
• Course of One’s Life
• The Blogger’s Wife
• What Belongs to Us
• forty, or Optimist
• Real and Imaginary Ghosts
• We Say and Do Kind Things
• The Wrong Way to Save Your Life
• Acknowledgments
• Tools or Weapons, Depending on Your Translation
• About the Author
• Advance Praise for The Wrong Way to Save Your Life
• Also by Megan Stielstra
• Copyright
• About the Publisher