Drew Barrymore's "Good Stuff"

When Drew Barrymore was a child I watched her on TV being grilled by a bloodthirsty journalist bombarding her with every bad thing that had befallen her before demanding to know how she copes. Drew’s reply is still my emotional armor.

“I just know that my good stuff is coming,” Drew said with a quirky smile that told me she both believed that to her core and that this interviewer was now toast. That's because her answer serves as both a sword and shield against those who treat us shittily. It can also slay our nagging internal monologues.

Here's my proof.

First we crunch the numbers. Those nine words from someone 10 years my junior have resonated through the devastation of a marriage that fell apart four days short of a 30th anniversary with a pandemic that hit two months after the ink was dry on the papers.

The “good stuff” words shielded me this week when a call from my employer that began with, “Hey, I just wanted to catch up” unexpectedly morphed into being told my job is being outsourced and I’m suddenly unemployed at age 58.

I honestly didn’t realize how effective her words are until I finally said them out loud to someone who was cluelessly grilling me about losing my job.

“Well, I just don’t know how you’re going to make it,” the woman blathered. “I’m just feeling so sorry for you. It just seems like every time you’re finally doing well it all falls apart for you. Am I right?”

I stood in my mind palace in a shimmery set of wings and thought, “Just breathe” before answering, “I'll be fine. My good stuff is coming. ”

In an unfathomable act of relentless bitchery she answered, “Do you really believe that after the life you’ve had?”

BREATHE.

“I put a fairy door on a tree in my front yard during the first pandemic lockdown and gave hope and relief to thousands of people,” I said as I envisioned her clutching one imaginary wing she’d managed to tear from my back. “I’ve raised money on TikTok to get a disabled, homeless grandmother off the snowy streets and into a safe place. I helped a Muslim woman from Morocco with Stage Four breast Cancer get past Trump’s discrimination to spend her last years with her American husband. Then I helped raise the money to send them to Mecca where she could die in peace last month having her final wish granted. MY. GOOD. STUFF. IS. COMING.”

This woman was making a solid run at the Barbara Walters Lifetime Achievement Award for Karens because she didn’t stop.

“But you just took in your mother, who's 92, with a brain tumor,” she demanded. “Your son came out as transgender. You can’t possibly believe that’s true! You're NOT OK! You can't possibly be.”

That’s when I knew why those words are taken up as a shield by some and felt like a sword to others.

“I think the issue here is that you don’t believe your ‘Good Stuff’ is coming,” I said to her. “So, it really grinds your gears that I still believe in my life.”

I get it. She's looking at a 58-year-old divorced woman, mother of five grown people with three living at home who's marriage imploded days before the 30th anniversary. She sees a woman suddenly unemployed in a market with a million algorithms designed to dispatch my resume to the darkness because Gen-X went full metal workforce at a young age without a Master’s Degree.

But I look in the mirror and see the Queen of the Fairies.

This is My Good Stuff

I run a little community project called the Fairy Tree in Norfolk, VA where people who need a little magic and hope in their days leave letters to the fairies and get a handwritten reply (and often a tiny vial of fairy dust or a necklace) in reply from their fairy. This isn’t a business. I fund the Fae.

The fairies have prevented eight suicides by helping them believe that their good stuff is coming. They united my neighborhood by magically creating common ground.

More Good Stuff = 50 First Dates with My Mom

Just before Christmas of 2022 I took in my 92-year-old mom who has a non-cancerous but debilitating meningioma (brain tumor). It gave her instant dementia.

I am her sole caregiver because insurance doesn’t cover much of anything she needs. She’s run out of savings and I’m still paying all her utility bills on a house in New Jersey until it sells.

Before the tumor Mom was angry over the death of my younger brother due to bipolar illness and wished aloud that I'd been the one to die.

Now she doesn't remember any of the pain. She only remembers me as the daughter she loves. Our days are filled with laughter.

A five-year-old showed up at my door dressed as the Phantom of the Opera and sang to me “the Fairy Lady” because he feels so good when he visits his fairy friends that he wanted to give back.

The Children’s Librarian at the Slover Library here in Norfolk, VA saw my TikTok video about losing my job and invited me to read one of my children’s books about mermaids at a big event there in May. That’s “good stuff” right there!

My ex-husband heard about the job loss, took me to lunch and then paid the mortgage for me for next month. I promise you that nobody saw that stuff coming. I think I heard my Fairy Godmother keel over in a dead faint.

I don’t know how I’ll pay the mortgage after that or how I’ll keep funding the Fae’s efforts for my community, but I know it won’t happen if my belief in my own ability to rescue myself dissolves.

I’m putting this story out there because this is how I fight for myself and for everyone who cries alone in the rain, then gets up and keeps going because they know their good stuff is coming but they also know they may have to meet it halfway by simply believeing it can exist.