I Can Barely Take Care of Myself (24 page)

I didn’t like the movie
Stand by Me.
I was terrified that any second those boys would
stop bonding and find that body. I do not like dead bodies. I know that you’re thinking,
Nobody likes dead bodies, Jen.
I beg to differ. Some people perform autopsies for a living! Nobody is making them do it! Some people even put makeup and wigs on dead people for a living—I’d be too scared to be alone in a mall, working as a mannequin dresser. Recently, in the Hollywood Hills, some hikers found
a human head in the woods on the side of the trail, after their dog sniffed around and pulled it straight out of the plastic bag in which it was hidden. This is why I don’t have a child, or a dog. Both of them always want to play with things that aren’t toys—like Mommy’s vibrator and plastic bags filled with heads.

When I go hiking, I want to look straight ahead and listen to a Dr. Wayne Dyer
self-help podcast. I want to get contemplative or listen to Madonna and pretend that I’m in a music video. I have no time to stop and let my pet/kid off its leash so it can run to the edge of the woods and start playing with body parts. I’m not going to wear a fanny pack just so that I can carry hand sanitizer on the off chance that I have to wipe crime-scene DNA off my toddler’s tiny hands.

If you’re married or have kids, that doesn’t mean you won’t die alone. You could be groggy from last night’s Ambien and mistake a white paper napkin on your counter for a slice of cheese pizza. A few bites in and you start to choke. You collapse to the floor, gasping for breath; the sink is so far away and all you need is some water to wash it down. You eventually give in to the comfort of the white
light that you see in front of your eyes. You lay your head down and die, holding on to shards of a half-eaten napkin . . . all of this can happen when your husband is driving the kids to school.

No matter how many assurances you think you might have that you’ll be surrounded by and cared for by your children at your last breath, that kitchen floor awaits, ready to take you before your time.
I’m safeguarding my home and saving my life by not bringing children into it who will be so messy that I’m required to keep
lots of napkins on our countertops. And I take other precautions around the house: I don’t engage in any antics like shower dancing or autoerotic asphyxiation. Ultimately, I
am
afraid of pulling a Mrs. Sanders. That’s another reason I don’t have a dog. If I do fall to my
death while changing a lightbulb, I don’t want my face to be licked off before somebody comes to find me.

11. It’s None of Your Business, but Since You Asked . . .

Feel free to skip this chapter if you’ve ever been at a cocktail party and asked someone whether he or she wanted to have children, and after that person said no, you pressed on and either told the person what to do (have a change of heart and have a child) or asked follow-up questions such as: “Well, are you open to adoption?” and “What
does your husband/mother/father/sister/brother/psychic/proctologist/mailman say about your selfish refusal to pass on your DNA and contribute to the excessive number of double-wide strollers on narrow city sidewalks, not to mention the selfish preservation of the sanctity of your bedroom by not adding a crib and doing whatever you want with your free time?”

I’ve worked myself up into a bit of
a frenzy and am admittedly heated. So, warning: This chapter might not be for you if you’ve ever asked someone whether he or she wants to have children and after that person says no, you’ve tried to guess
why
, didn’t listen to the answer, and instead offered unsolicited advice on how to still make it work, such as:

“Don’t worry about the money now. Just get pregnant and it will all work itself out.”

“You should freeze your eggs because if you’re feeling like an empty soulless husk as you get older, it will be too late.”

“Not
everyone
shits in the hospital bed when they deliver a baby. If you poop before you go to the hospital, you’ll be fine.”

Most people who don’t want kids also don’t want to be cornered by strangers at parties who launch an informal investigation into our psyches
and backgrounds and decision-making capabilities. It’s been proven that vice presidential hopeful Sarah Palin wasn’t vetted as extensively as I have been in the company of women who are searching for a yet-to-be-discovered “good reason” why I don’t want to have children.

Because a woman might have reached a certain age (at which her eggs are rotting in her abdominal refrigerator) or wears a wedding
ring (signifying her clear willingness to settle down with one sexual partner for life and gain some permanent weight around her midriff), people seem to think that it’s high time to encourage her to take the next natural step in life: getting nauseated at random scents that nobody else can smell, not being able to have more than one glass of prosecco on New Year’s Eve, and experiencing the
near impossibility of a sex life for six weeks after the baby is born. Invalidating a woman’s life choices by saying things like, “Oh, but you’ll regret it if you don’t have kids,” or, “I didn’t think I wanted kids either until I had one,” is like me going to an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting and telling the newly sober that eventually when they grow old, they’ll want to take the edge off with a little
gin and tonic and that if they could only just be mature enough to control themselves, they could go on a fun wine-tasting tour in the Napa Valley.

Ladies, if you have recognized yourself in this chapter, I have news for you: you are not the first person to say these things to us childfree-by-choice-ers and sadly you probably won’t be the last. These comments aren’t things that I can laugh off,
like when your charming toddler tells me that I look fat. (Okay, nobody’s toddler said that, but it does sound like something a toddler
could
say.) You are
forcing your values onto my life and I know that you don’t think you are doing that. I know you think you are saving me from a life of childfree loneliness by telling me what it’s like on the other side, but what you’re really doing is making
me scared of you mom types. I will walk down a dark alley at night and not flinch at the sight of a shady man in a doorway—but if I see one of you coming toward me on the sidewalk in broad daylight while pushing a stroller, I will cross the street.

I BARELY KNOW Eileen. She’s a friend of my friend Derek and we were talking at his son’s daytime birthday party at Dr. Tea’s Tea Garden (a trendy
tea shop in Los Angeles where you can order a frozen CapaTEAno). Wait, I’m sorry. I don’t want Oprah to yell at me about how I’ve exaggerated my memoir. Full disclosure:
I
was not talking
with
this woman.
She
was talking
at
me. Seemingly unprovoked, Eileen delivered a passionate monologue about how she thought that she never wanted kids until she and her husband accidentally got pregnant and now
she can’t imagine her life without baby Henry.

“Once we
got
pregnant, we thought,
This is a miracle! Having a baby is absolutely what we were supposed to do!
”

Oh, Eileen, you say “miracle” . . . I say one drunken night your birth control pill rolled under the sink and you said, “Just come inside me. I don’t feel like wiping anything off my stomach afterward.”

It’s not a “miracle” that when
you have unprotected sex in your thirties a baby gets made even though you always thought you didn’t want one. Babies are not analogous to your drunken cousin whom you didn’t expect to appear on your doorstep on Christmas Eve. (Except that they might be equally as needy.) And baby Henry did not show up like the Virgin Mary on a piece of toast. It’s science.

Also, would all couples kindly stop
saying “we’re” pregnant? “We’re going to have a family” is fine. But only one person is actually pregnant, which is the medical term for “knocked up.” If her
husband gets lung cancer in thirty years, is Eileen going to appropriate his physical condition as well? She’ll grab the elbow of her dear friends at holiday parties and whisper, “It’s stage three. We’re dying.”
She
accidentally got pregnant.
Not her husband. If their failed birth control actually produced a growing fetus in her husband’s nonexistent womb, then they need to pitch a reality show ASAP. Episode one can probe this phenomenon and show how hard it is to raise two babies when both Mommy and Daddy have to recover from a C-section!

Eileen bounced baby Henry in his BabyBjörn. He spit up a little bit on her hand but she smiled
and said to me, “It’s all worth it. Every minute.” Then asked, “So, when are you going to have kids?”

I wanted to answer, “It’s none of your business, but since you asked . . . ,” and tell Eileen that I didn’t really want to find myself strapped to a poop machine at an overpriced tea shop anytime in the near future, but in the interest of polite conversation I just said, “Actually, I don’t want
kids.”

This is where that polite conversation should stop. It should be no different than her asking, “So, when are you buying a multimillion-dollar mansion?”

Me: “Actually, I don’t want to buy a multimillion-dollar mansion.”

Eileen: “Oh, no mansion? That’s cool. That’s your personal choice. So, how crazy was
Mad Men
last week? Boy, that Don Draper sure does like all kinds of midcentury modern
pussy!”

BABY HENRY FIDGETED in his external cotton-womb, trying to unbutton his mom’s shirt. Eventually, like all men, Henry gave up trying to figure out how to work a hook and-eye clasp and just pulled Eileen’s shirt to the side, located her boob, and put his mouth right on her nipple. I felt like I was thirteen years old again and watching
Alex the Burnout go up the shirt of Nicole the Skank
on the dance floor during Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven.” And just like Nicole the Skank, Eileen the Mom let her date suck on her left one in front of all of her friends.

Eileen seemed sad. The breast that baby Henry’s mouth wasn’t attached to was kind of . . . leaking. It looked like her nipple had left a sweat stain on her nice afternoon tea party shirt. As she bounced, she let out a few
farts that tooted along in perfect time with her rhythm. She didn’t acknowledge the farts so I didn’t either. Maybe that’s why Eileen wanted me to have a baby, even though she didn’t know me. Maybe once you’re at the point of having a boob that drips like a leaky faucet at parties, your instinct is to proselytize. You’d be more comfortable surrounded by women who are leaking and farting as well.
You can harmonize like the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. And then when you’re done harmonizing you can go door to door, extolling the virtues of multiple wives for one man who will give him at least a dozen children!

I know that nothing you love comes easy. There’s crying, flatulence, and wetness with anything that’s ultimately worthwhile. That’s how Eileen feels about raising baby Henry and how I
feel about spending all of my time working on my career. I wish I could spend less time on it, but I don’t make the rules about how much dedication it takes just to get a morsel of success in show business and stand-up comedy. Just like Eileen doesn’t make the rules about how much dedication it takes to keep baby Henry alive and happy. Eileen chose motherhood. I didn’t. And to me, that’s where the
conversation ends. That and when someone starts making toot noises out of her butt while I’m trying to eat a cupcake.

Even though I’m the one making this argument, I resent having to refer to my career as my baby in order to explain myself to parents. It suggests that as long as a woman has
something
she feels maternal toward, then she passes as a regular human being. She wants to swaddle her
career, so we’ll make an exception and give her a pass!

Women don’t have to have maternal urges to be women. My
career is not my surrogate baby just like my car is not my surrogate sex slave just because I turn it on and ride it. Men don’t call their careers their sons or daughters. A fireman without kids doesn’t have to pretend that his job is his baby replacement.
Oh, yeah, when I walk up those forty flights of stairs fighting back the burning and falling asbestos, I just cradle the hose in my arms and think,
This is my baby.

It’s a weird thing society puts on us women. They tell us that we can have careers (well, after they told us we could vote—they sort of said it would be okay if we wanted to have a career, as long as we agree to get paid less than a man for the same job), and then
they tell us that we aren’t real women if we have careers but no babies, and if we dare pick a career
over
a baby . . . we better at least talk about that career like it’s a baby in order to blend in and not call attention to the fact that we’re selfish women who are not carrying on the human race.

I don’t actually feel maternal about my career, although there are similarities to motherhood.
Sometimes my career has me out of bed at five in the morning and it doesn’t give a shit how much sleep I’ve had the night before. I have to constantly come up with new things to “play with” or my career gets bored. You’ll never see me breast-feeding my desk or taking its temperature rectally, although I am steadfast about wiping it down every day with antibacterial wipes. (Don’t worry. I use the environmentally
friendly, chemical-free wipes. I want to make a nice planet for other desks to grow up in.) But unlike with motherhood, I don’t feed my career. My
career
feeds
me,
and I can’t ignore my career because if I do, someone younger and funnier will give it the attention it needs and then she’ll get her own sitcom.

I WENT ON a business trip one weekend and the guy who drove the shuttle from the carport
to the airport said, “Where you headed?”

“New York City,” I told him.

He got all bright-eyed. “New York City. I’ve always wanted to go there. But I only know about it from
Sex and the City
repeats.”