Jen Kirkman - I Can Barely Take Care of Myself

Eventually he walked me to my car because he is a gentleman and because my car was right next to his.

We started talking and talking… and talking, because it was easier than one of us making the awkward first move. I offered super-smoothly, “Hey, so, if we’re going to keep talking, we might as well sit in my car. It’s cold.” It wasn’t cold. Matt got in the front seat and I immediately pounced on him. He flinched. When we talked about it later he said that it just seemed like I was about to hit him. To be fair, I do have a lot of testosterone and I did come at him like a flying squirrel, but I landed like a butterfly and found myself having my first kiss with the man who would become my husband. (I mean, not that night, although there was a ceremony of sorts when Matt had to pee in between our cars.)

The whole next day I tried to remember what song he had sung at karaoke so I could buy it, but I didn’t want to ask him what the song was because I knew that if you asked a guy what song he sang at karaoke, he would know you’re planning to buy it and listen to it over and over while reimagining your first kiss. I was thirty, but I was not naive.

Matt and I spent the next week fucking off at our day jobs and e-mailing each other all day instead—those types of stories that you’ve told a million times and can’t wait to have a new audience for. He told me his favorite childhood memory about the time his middle school gym teacher murdered his wife and claimed that the blood on the walls was marinara sauce. I reminisced about the time that a priest at our church wore a lavaliere microphone and ranted in his Sunday sermon about how gay people were destroying parades because they throw condoms off floats and into the street, and he let out a fart under his robe that was amplified through the speakers that hung next to the stations of the cross on the sides of the church.

I don’t know why that happens—that when you’re hanging out with someone you know you’re going to fall in love with, you just don’t know where to begin and you start picking up pieces of your life as though they’re old photos randomly gathered in a box and handing them over to a virtual stranger for safekeeping. It’s like saying, “Here. I’m excited and hopeful and I don’t know where to begin but I think one day we’ll eventually have enough time to unpack this thing and make some sense of it all.”

When the Red Sox won the World Series in October 2004, I felt like I had reversed my curse too. I wanted to tell Matt that I loved him but I didn’t want to overwhelm us. (We were already crying like a couple of postmenopausal women who had just won bingo on a seniors cruise.) I liked a boy who liked me back. He wasn’t a creep who only wanted a one-night stand. He didn’t find me more attractive the more unavailable I was. We were grown-ups.

Except for one thing. He was renting a bedroom in the very nice house owned by his always-home-and-hogging-the-living-room friend. I was sleeping on a borrowed (stolen) futon from a(n) (ex-)friend while renting a small apartment the size of a Cracker Jack box that was across from an actual crack house with my constantly suicidal and oft wailing friend Krista. Without our own places and living in neighborhoods we either couldn’t afford on our own or couldn’t afford to move out of, Matt and I were not grown-ups. We were grown-up-adjacent.

BECAUSE I’M A stand-up comedian and I talk honestly about my life onstage, and because he was obviously lurking around my gigs all the time, waiting for me to forget I’d met him, Matt knew intimate details about my life before he and I ever had our first conversation. One of the first sentences Matt ever heard me utter was a joke that goes, “When I’m in love with someone it doesn’t dawn on me to want to have their baby. I just don’t think I’ve ever had that urge to… ruin our lives.” So by the time we went on our first date, we’d already had an important (albeit one-sided) discussion about me not wanting to have children.

Matt knew what he was getting into with me—or what he was not getting into, like late-night feedings (except for my two-in-the-morning burrito cravings). After we finally said “I love you” and realized that our thing was going somewhere, because neither of us was looking to go anywhere (else), I revisited the kids topic with Matt almost monthly—and not just when my period was late.

I was very concerned with making certain that Matt was absolutely sure that he didn’t want children. I didn’t want him to just go along with what I was saying simply because his current circumstances led him to not even be able to fathom what having a kid would be like. I wanted Matt to picture himself coming home at night to a pregnant me, lying on the couch in my elastic-waist jeans, yelling for him to bring me a diet ginger ale and then screaming when he brought it to me because he did it wrong. I wanted it in a glass with lots of ice. He had to start thinking like a girl, obsessing over the future and daydreaming about our childfree life together. I know guys don’t normally picture anything beyond the next pair of boobs they might be seeing naked.

Matt and I had a State of Our Union a few times a year, not just to talk about how we felt about kids (they should be banned from airplanes and not allowed to touch every single elevator button with their germ-laced fingers) but also to talk about what we wanted out of life. We both agreed that what was most important was the freedom to do what we wanted, whenever we wanted, whether that meant pick up and travel, move, change jobs, quit jobs, take four jobs—things that require the freedom of not having a family to provide for. I did not want to be one of those women who were willing to travel as long as they had the time to squeeze all of their breast milk into many three-ounce travel-size bottles. Matt sometimes worked on projects that had him sleeping all day and staying up all night, which is not conducive to child rearing unless you are a vampire. And I know vampires are considered sexy by groups of misguided tween girls who are taught to love men who could potentially kill them, but the reality is that vampires make bad dads and shitty husbands. They hibernate all day and then disappear at sunset—never able to tuck their own kids in at night.

For Matt, it was a decision not to be a dad, rather than a non-feeling. He said he didn’t make the decision in a day—it was just a shift from ambivalence to “no fucking way” over time. He likes how unscheduled his life can be. In his own words he says, “I can spend time alone if I want. I can make career decisions without restriction.” And perhaps the best reason of all: “Kids? What the fuck am I going to do with a kid?”

WE HAD A dream engagement. He proposed to me on a hot summer night in July under a full white moon from our private balcony at a small bed-and-breakfast in Malibu. After I said yes, we went to a restaurant and sat on the romantic beachfront patio right next to another couple and their three screaming children.

I can’t blame the kids. It’s fun to scream on a semideserted beach on a summer night. I screamed when Matt proposed and I promptly ran into the ocean in my dress. I didn’t know that salt water would cause it to disintegrate. The couple with their three screaming children probably wondered why this man was taking this hobo woman in a shredded lace maxidress to dinner and why she couldn’t get through any bites of her food without crying and saying, “No. No. These are happy tears. We’re engaged!”

I realized that what made it possible for this couple to keep the romance alive was taking their kids to local paradises like Malibu instead of a Chuck E. Cheese’s in a strip mall. At least once the kids were asleep, they could listen to the waves crash against the rocks, snuggle, and talk shit while digesting a four-star dinner: “What the fuck is wrong with them? Why do they scream in public? Why do we do this to ourselves?” I imagine going to bed with your husband after your kids have ruined your nice dinner out to be similar to the time that Matt and I bonded over his psycho ex-girlfriend showing up at a party just to yell at him for not liking her anymore.