I Can Barely Take Care of Myself (5 page)

It made me laugh out loud. So
I skipped my Nancy Reagan joke and I just told the audience that I was a college graduate who lived with my parents and my mother did not think I was funny. And then I started to impersonate my mom. I’d been imitating her since I was a kid around the house—but until now it never dawned on me to impersonate my mom in front of strangers. It was always more of an in-joke with my family.

I killed.
I’m not bragging. All comedians do really well the first time they do stand-up comedy. I don’t know what it is—some cosmic/karmic free pass because what you’re doing is hard enough. But when you’re just starting out, you don’t know that all comics kill their first time—that’s why we stay comics. We think we’re special.

A few months later, my parents came to see me perform. Let’s just say there
was another kitchen-table discussion—this time with my mom in tears. She didn’t understand why I was humiliating her in public and revealing family secrets. I tried to convince my mom that making jokes about how she pretends she’s not home when the annoying neighbor knocks on the door is not a “family secret.” My parents didn’t come back to see me perform and things were
definitely strained until
my mother saw the Margaret Cho movie
I’m the One That I Want.
Margaret had proven herself to be a successful and famous comedian who also imitated her mother. Just like she came to accept Lauren Bacall’s sex life, she saw via Margaret’s documentary that comedians are actually honoring the ones they love when they make fun of them in their act. My mother not only gave me her seal of approval but
also started to come to see me perform regularly so that she could watch the audiences laugh at . . .
her.
And just like Margaret’s mom, mine stuck around after the show to get attention from the crowds.

MY MOM HAS a really good singing voice. She’s part of a singing group—you may have heard of them, they’re called the Musettes. Oh, you haven’t heard of them? That’s probably because you don’t
live in a senior citizens’ home. That’s where they tour. My mom plays piano and sings with three other women and leads them in a rousing (for those settled-down seniors) rendition of “Oh, We Ain’t Got a Barrel of Money.”

One of my mom’s favorite stories is that when she was a teenager she met Patti Page. I’ll spare anyone under forty who is reading this book the trip to Wikipedia. Patti Page
is one of the biggest-selling female recording artists in history. She’s famous for songs like “Old Cape Cod” and “Mockin’ Bird Hill.” When my mom met Patti Page she told her that she wanted to be a singer like her someday, and Patti said to her, “You can be anything you want to be.”

That story always depressed me because by the time my mom relayed Patti’s words to me, I knew how it ended. Sure,
my mom could have been anything she wanted to be, but she didn’t become a professional, Grammy-winning, popular American singer. Instead, she had three kids and raised them in a time when you couldn’t really just strap your kid into a stroller and pursue your dream of becoming a singer.
American Idol
hadn’t been invented yet.

I can’t imagine dreaming of wanting to be a singer, meeting my
idol,
and getting her words of encouragement—and then getting married, having kids, and touring the blue-hair circuit. Luckily, my mom raised me using Patti Page’s insight “You can be anything you want to be,” and not “You can be anything you want to be but it probably won’t work out that way” or “You can be anything you want to be but also please still make time to be a mother and wife.”

Some of her
friends have accused her of living vicariously through my show business life. I don’t see it that way. She’s definitely not a stage mother. My mom just always knew how much my career meant to me and she’s a realist. She doesn’t just blindly say, “You can have it all!”

Life is like a closet full of clothes—you
can
have it all, but it doesn’t mean that you should. I
can
wear four cardigan sweaters
all at once with a pair of sweatpants over my jeans—but it doesn’t mean that I
should.

I credit my mom with giving me the delusional level of confidence I needed to think that I could actually make a living in show business. For example, she resented that in order to get accepted as a theater major at Emerson, I had to audition. She walked into the dean’s office, VHS tape in hand, and said, “Here
is a tape of Jennifah. She played Bonnie in
Anything Goes
in the high school musical. She can tap-dance, act, and sing and you want her to do two contrasting monologues for you to get into this college?”

To be fair, I don’t think my mom’s unrealized dreams of becoming a singer plagued her the way that I have to assume I’d be plagued if I weren’t earning a living and continuing to pursue a life
in the world of comedy. Back in my mom’s world, in Massachusetts in 1950-something, you could have a dream but you understood your reality, which was that the nice guy named Ronnie from high school wanted to marry you and your father approved of him and so you went to secretarial school during the engagement. Once married, it was time to start making those babies. It’s amazing to me that my parents
have been married for over fifty years. They were high school sweethearts. I was raised by two people who, because they
were getting along so well in homeroom, decided to get married and make other people.

If I’d married my high school sweetheart—well, there was more than one—but if I’d married the one who inspired me to write poems in my diary, I’d now be living with him in his mom’s basement.
(Before you judge, he does have a job and he pays his mom rent. So he’s got one foot in the real world and he’s now bald—which gives him the appearance of being very wise.)

Anyway, pretty soon someone else besides my mom started to sneak around my comedy shows. Blake was back. I think he was mostly curious that I hadn’t called him in months, begging him to leave Anne in her attic and come back
to me. We had one last one-night stand after one of my gigs. He was a college graduate at this point and he was even paying for his own tuna fish. He told me he wanted to move somewhere like Los Angeles to become an actor but he also wanted to retire young, move back to Boston to live near his family, be a sports announcer for the Red Sox, and . . . have kids. I felt uncomfortable in Blake’s bed
after he said that—and that wasn’t just because his worn-out futon mattress made me feel like I was sleeping on the bench of a dry sauna. Some instinct was rolling around inside of me—I didn’t want to be the woman to give Blake children.

I remembered that when we were dating, Blake would call his three-year-old nephew and talk to him like he was an adult. He’d ask, “Hey, buddy, are you lookin’
smooth today?” It always seemed so foreign to me that Blake was so good with children. It made me uncomfortable. I told one of my girlfriends about it at the time and she laughed and said, “Jen, you should be so happy that he’s going to be a good father!” Then she armchair-analyzed me and said that I was just jealous of the attention that Blake was giving his nephew, that we were newly in love and
I wanted him all to myself.

I was so attracted to my feathered-haired ex-boyfriend that I was tempted to beg him to get back together with me. But I could not unknow what I knew. He wanted different things for his future than
I did. Blake didn’t seem like such a free spirit to me anymore. The guy who rolled over in the morning and relit a joint before breakfast . . . wanted to be a father? And
he was already sure of that? I tried to picture myself pregnant in our kitchen together. I had no ability to envision a future where it even seemed possible that I’d want a baby. It made me want to cross my legs and board up my vagina.

I mourned Blake for months but I stuck with the comedy. Eventually things started looking up. After twenty-two years, my mom finally let me install my very own
private landline with a separate phone number in my bedroom. There was nothing to eavesdrop on anymore—I was letting it all hang out and doing just what Patti Page had advised. I was being whatever I wanted to be. And let me tell you, the other silver lining is that for a girl who doesn’t want babies, living with your parents in your early twenties is the best free birth control around.

2. Misadventures in Babysitting

Most of my friends who have kids insist that they won’t make the same mistakes their parents made. They read books and take classes. My friend Shannon is on a one-woman personal crusade via Facebook updates to get all toxic toys off the market. She’s not going to let her baby put plastic products in his mouth like she did. My friend Tracy doesn’t say no in a stern
voice to her toddler. Instead, when he goes toward a light socket with his wet finger, she stops him and asks, “Is that the right choice?” (And it works!) Maybe we can prevent our kids from hating us for the same reasons that we hated our parents, but I have a feeling that they’ll just end up hating us for a whole new set of reasons—which is why I want no part of this cycle.

I’m the youngest
out of three girls in my family. There’s this myth out there that parents are pretty lenient with their youngest kid. I always heard things like “Oh, by the time I came around my parents loosened up. When I was a kid I didn’t have a bedtime. I didn’t even have a bedroom. I had my own apartment down the street from my parents.” Not me. My parents were the most strict with me, their innocent theater-geek
baby girl whose only real desire in life was to wear all black and star in Needham High School’s version of
The Crucible.

The restrictions placed on my teenage life read like a really fucked-up rule board:

• No boyfriends allowed! It’s not called date rape for nothing!

• Talking to a boy on the phone is allowed only during daylight hours and in a room where you can’t shut the door! And
no whispering
!

• If you go to Dunkin’ Donuts instead of church on Sundays—you’re not fooling God! That’s an automatic purgatory sentence!

• Diaries will be randomly searched! You shouldn’t be writing about secrets anyway!

• You can only go to your friends’ houses at night when a parent is home. Even then I’m not happy about it because your friends’ mothers are pushovers!

• Sleepovers at girlfriends’ houses
are strictly forbidden! Are you really just “sleeping”?

• Curfew is at 10:30 p.m.! No exceptions. Except to come home earlier.

• No driving a car unless one of your parents is in the front seat. And even then—where do you think you’re going?

Once I’d successfully survived my teen years by following their foolproof guidelines, my mom sent me to college, having saved every penny she’d earned.
Her dad had told her that women didn’t go to college, so she and all the other moms of her generation raised their daughters to aspire to college. And I think my mom telling me not to be so boy-crazy was more than a subtle hint that the priorities of a new era of women were emerging (that and she really didn’t want me to end up enduring a teenage pregnancy).

But each generation makes new mistakes.
For example, I know that I wouldn’t feed the son that I’m never going to have white bread or processed cheese, but I wouldn’t have the answer if he couldn’t sleep and called out to me in the night, “Mommy, Mommy, there’s a monster under my bed!” I believe in monsters and if he were telling
me that in the next room there was a monster on the loose? I’d yell back, “Of course there’s a monster under
your bed, honey, that’s where they live!”

I’ve
already tried
to influence kids by doing things differently than my parents and I’ll tell you right now, it didn’t work. Most Saturday nights from 1988 to 1992, you could find me at the Reinhardts’ house, babysitting their four-year-old son, Eli. I fell into babysitting for Eli through a friend. I substituted for Eileen one day and after that fateful
afternoon, Eli started saying, “Don’t want Eileen. Want Jen to play.” And from then on, my Saturday nights belonged to a four-year-old. That was the only time I ever stole a man from another woman.

I still think it’s weird that adults would leave a toddler with a fourteen-year-old, whom they barely know, especially in a house filled with sharp-edged glass coffee tables. It makes me feel old,
like I grew up in some kind of 1940s
It’s a Wonderful Life
world where everyone knew one another and Eli wasn’t in any real danger because an angel was watching our every move and the townspeople would come over with baskets of money in case of emergency.

When I interviewed with Mr. Reinhardt for the position of babysitter (or, what I think is a more accurate job description, “Person in Charge
of Making Sure Someone’s Kids Don’t Die While They’re Out Seeing a Movie”), he asked me, “So, do you like kids?” I was stumped. Like kids? I never thought about kids. I was the youngest and basically an only child. I didn’t have any experience in playing with kids younger than I was. I don’t even remember playing well with others when I
was
a kid. My friends enjoyed things like sledding, which
involved too much prep for my taste, plus putting on long underwear, a few more layers over that, and a big, puffy Michelin Man coat—only to have snow find its way into your sock. I hate being cold and spending ten minutes walking up a snowbank just to spend two seconds sliding down. I always wanted to skip to the good part—going back inside, having hot chocolate, and watching Richard Dawson host
Family Feud.

“Name something that most kids like doing, except for little Jen Kirkman. Survey says? Having fun!”

I didn’t know what to tell Mr. Reinhardt. I didn’t
hate
kids. I just never thought about them. Kids evoked an “eh” emotion in me at best. But I wasn’t going to make eight dollars an hour sitting at home with my parents on a Saturday night, so I told my first but most definitely not
my last white lie on the subject: “Yes. I love kids. I’m great with them.”