Free Might as Well Laugh About It Now by Marie Osmond, Marcia Wilkie

floor. My heart is racing and I can’t stop crying.”
    She wanted the name of the doctor who helped me through my postpartum depression.
    I could hear in her voice that she was in no shape to figure out how to get to any appointment.
    “Hang on,” I told her. “I’m coming for you. I’ll take you to the clinic. You’ll be okay.”
    The swelling in my eyes had gone down far enough to see to drive, even though my eyelids were so heavy that blinking felt like weight lifting.
    “I can’t go today!” my girlfriend cried over the phone. “I look like a wreck. You wouldn’t believe how red and swollen my eyes are. Don’t come for me. I’m not going.”
    I could tell she would only go downhill. She needed some attention.
    “Listen,” I said. “If I promise to look worse than you, will you go with me to the clinic?”
    “You never look bad,” she sobbed.
    “Just come get in my car when I get there. Okay?” She agreed.
    As soon as she got in the car and saw me, I knew that she was going to be all right once she got her hormones balanced. The tears running down her face were now from laughter.
    “At least if your raft tips over you won’t drown,” she said. “You’ve got two floatation devices on your head!”
    I looked so awful that the clinic receptionist called a nurse over to check on me instead of my friend.
    “I’m fine,” I insisted. “I brought in my friend. She’s having a hormonal meltdown.”
    The nurse looked over at her.
    “She looks perfectly fine compared to you,” she said.
    And she did. My girlfriend seemed to be cheering up by the minute. As I waited for her to get her blood drawn, every nurse, doctor, and patient that walked down the hall stopped to take a long look at me. The word on the street was “Marie is experiencing a horrible relapse of her postpartum depression. She looks awful .”
    When we finally got back out to the car, my friend’s dose of B vitamins, her hormone concoction injection in the tush, and her acupressure massage seemed to have kicked in fully. She appeared to be the picture of calm mental health. I, on the other hand, was exhausted from explaining to people that I was only having a reaction to tattoo dye. I didn’t know which was worse: the look of sympathy for my assumed relapse into PPD, or the look of horror at my lapse in judgment in having my eyelids tattooed.
    As I pulled back into the driveway, I looked at my swollen, oozing eyes in the rearview mirror. I was thinking: “I should have called my brother Wayne. He would have talked me out of having this done.”
    Wayne always thought I looked perfect no matter what. At this point in my life, I appreciate that more than I can possibly tell him. On my sixteenth birthday, though, his opinion made me want to disown him!
    The day I turned sixteen, I was at the studio to tape the Donny and Marie show. I was waiting anxiously in my dressing room . . . not for the show to start, but for something much more life-changing: a complete earlobe transformation. The countdown to sixteen was over and I had arranged for a doctor to come and pierce my ears before we taped the show.
    The scheduled time came and went. I couldn’t understand why it wasn’t happening. Then I found the cancellation culprit. Wayne. He was the one who had called off the appointment.
    He pled his case to me, confessing that he couldn’t imagine that his baby “Sissy” was ready for pierced ears. He told me, “You weren’t born with holes in your ears, so you shouldn’t be putting any in them.”
    I picked up my high heel and said to him, “You weren’t born with a hole in your head, either. But, if you don’t get out of my dressing room, you’ll be sporting a permanent Nine West shoe hat.”
    I was so upset I couldn’t fathom making it through the day. I called my daddy, who was at home. Somehow he was able to understand various phrases through my sobbing: “you promised,” “why did this happen?” and “canceled.” My poor