13-Going-On Grace & Frankie
I like to believe that I’m a 40-year-old woman. It’s not really a 13 Going on 30 fantasy as much as I feel as if I’m getting to the post-partnership phase. Though when I think about it, it is also about seeing women over 40 having a hell of a time in their second wave of single-dom. It’s just not the same at 31.
Perhaps I glorify the loss of my last relationship by calling myself a 40-year-old woman getting a divorce. It plays down those crippling final moments and the weight of the real thing—the additional ten years of life put into a void, the children leaving you for college, the legal nightmare. But the fantasy helped me get out of a dark situation.
What strikes me about these women on TV—who I’m not sure maybe I do have a 13 Going on 30 fantasy about—is how self-assured they are, even in moments of insecurity. They may be rejected by life or the objects of their desire, but it doesn’t seem to really stick to them. It’s like they quickly move on or bore out, or maybe feel sad, but it’s more survivable than my addiction to angst. The question is, are these shows accurate or it this the rom-com version of being 40? And when I say 40, I really mean like 70 as well because I am obsessed with becoming old enough to be either Grace or Frankie. The problem is that these women have checked off some boxes that I have yet to check and want to check, and now, in acting 40 at 31 am just delaying. My freedom from the children I now am not even sure I want will happen at like…almost 60. But this is why I have Grace and Frankie.
I remember my grandmother on my Dad’s side, who lived most of her life on Mercer Island in a house that had a lovely basement smell, went through a sort of second sorority experience after her husband died. She lived it all, the 50’s housewife, the love of a man who eventually spoke someone else’s name at his nursing home—his brain beginning to melt away in a manner I can only imagine is like watching an alcoholic, which I now understand. At the end, she suffered so much from loving him, the ton of his withering mind. They were tied together as if in a three-legged race in the hot sun where their children would show up on the sidelines. I know many of my aunts and uncles were tied to her other leg, or to his, but it’s not the same as being the partner. My dad, in his 40’s at the time, told me about giving this frail father a bath, both unrecognizable to each other. I remember everyone saying that it felt like we lost grandpa years before he was ever put into the stone memorial. After that, my grandmother and her dear friend Willie, with his piercing yap and his nervous peeing on the carpets, moved out of my father’s childhood home into a retirement community. My mom really mourned the loss of that house, even though she didn’t grow up there; she seems deeply affected by losing places and the marking of phases of life ending. Perhaps it’s her way of looking back on her youth and recognizing that time changes the nature of things. Somehow the events of her life now, though it is seemingly a richer one, seem devoid of future nostalgia. They just are. Maybe she doesn’t need them to become nostalgia; she’s such a strong and timeless person, and has been since her 40’s with increasing intensity each year.
My grandma and Willie’s new community had an assisted living option, but she chose to live in a dream of an apartment building full of people her age, mostly single, who had a lot of spunk and freedom. They were ladies who brunched on Sunday and figured out the best parts of the menu and the best table and had their crew, their grownup squad. They exchanged information about all kinds of goings-on and had so many children and grandchildren to talk about that there was never much silence. They say that these retirement communities are full of STD’s because all the now single elders are “with the times”, finally free from the shame that blocked their 20-something years and the children that plagued their 30-somethings. But, unlike in the shows I watch, I don’t know of any romances among the girls at Covenant Shores. They were just the best of friends. I visited my grandmother a few times in her last years, and I looked forward to it immensely leading up to each trip. They had a great gym, and I loved being accepted into the fold. She and I became real gal pals, late but not never.
She died in 2018, not long after Willie did. Her smoking finally caught up to her, but good for her for having her own dirty habit in the crisp air in the back garden of my father’s childhood. I had known she was in the hospital and that my dad had flown out to see her (and apparently got to her room just in time to hold her hand). I was sitting at a large table in a support group, and I felt her sort of gone and peeked at my text messages to see she had left us. But I didn’t feel her disappear, it was more like she’d been absorbed back into life, like she was everywhere within her environment now. This became a stronger feeling when I visited for her funeral and looked through her things. I was most drawn to the items that I’d become familiar with in those last years, though historic dating back to my dad’s kid life. The original mid-century table, for example, I immortalized from our breakfasts. She used to put sugar on her cornflakes, and a banana or blueberries, which I always and only ever did when I saw her. I took a few items home, like her footstool, the single-sized ceramic saucepan and oven dish, and the sugar bowl. In the span of two years, I’ve added decades to these dishes; partly because I almost exclusively use them and mostly because I have a penchant for over- roasting carrots, yams, and onions. And I live alone now, so.
Visiting my grandmother those last years dramatically altered my understanding of the course of a woman’s life. Realistically, we end up with ourselves. Even for the traditional 50’s housewife who married at 18—we are alone, just as if it never happened, but with the satisfaction of the years that passed. Yes, some people die holding their spouse’s hand, but what’s more likely is to be hanging out with our girlfriends at our favorite table, talking about someone who just arrived, or someone who just left, and then curling up on the couch to watch the Mariners with our dog. And how great is that? Like—my grandmother, for all the years that she spent in the five lives of her children and all the birthday money on her grandchildren, finally had the last few years living her life for herself, and in my impression, enjoying it. I mean, she got an SUV in her 70’s.
I moved into my own place after I left my partner. I spend most of my evenings thinking about my future dog, watching shows about divorcées on my pink couch. People ten years my senior surviving a literal divorce are much less depressing to watch than the loss of beautiful love in our offspring years. I spent the first two weeks of my breakup re- watching Grace and Frankie and deciding on the color of my couch, and then most recently I moved on to a show about a divorced 39-year-old woman and her brother and their sex lives.
I love this woman. I love watching how she goes through her phases and encounters and seeing how much she is able to handle, not just in terms of rejection, but in the general discomfort of life. She gets angry and doesn’t care about what she thinks, she knows how she feels. It gives me awareness, and joy, about my growing tolerance for pain through recent events. Time doesn’t heal all wounds, but experience substantiates the spirit. And that’s what you get when you put in all the 40—emotional grit and a sense of self. I imagine what I’ll be like after nine more years of devastation lived. Something like my neighbor who DGAF about her friends on social media and who has been through all the breakups, restraining orders included.
As can happen with breakup shows, the character eventually finds a great love situation and you get left behind. And the scale of your pain, which is pretty well evidenced by the speed of your bingeing, determines the level of frustration. While it’s miserable to get left in your hole, what’s worse is if the character doesn’t appreciate her lot. It’s like a spit in the face of your journey together. Suddenly, after all this glorious 40’s behavior, my gal did something completely self-hating and blew the whole thing up. I was enraged. I kept watching though, as one does. The writers punished her to years of solitude and alienation from everyone she loved, and like one friend. After many lonely emo moments, she ended up with some overbearing guy and then got out of it, more gracefully than I, and finally announced that was she ready to stop being codependent with her brother and live life for herself. And that it didn’t really matter if she dated or didn’t anymore, because she’d already had the biggest parts of partnership and was no longer afraid of being alone.
I realized that I missed out on the years before my grandmother sold the house on Mercer Island, alone in those empty rooms before she got to her girlfriends at brunch. What it took for her to be that Olympian soloist.
Every decade earned is paid for by the pain within it, until we ultimately end up closest to ourselves. While I might not yet be 40, if I’m very lucky, I’ll be 86.
