Jen Kirkman - I Can Barely Take Care of Myself

Lucy pressed on. “So, why do you think you don’t want kids?” The salads were delivered at this point in the dinner conversation and I realized we had two more courses to go and there was a chance she wasn’t going to let up until the cake was cut. I was livid. I had never met her and she was implying in a condescending tone that I only think I don’t want children? Condescension is not the right tone for wedding small talk with strangers. Condescension is something that should be reserved for conversations with our loved ones or fights with our significant others. What if I was barren? What if this whole “we don’t want kids” thing was just a big cover-up because I was too ashamed to say to a total stranger, “My uterus is broken”? What if my fiancé had sperm made out of sawdust and he could never impregnate me? None of this was true, but Loudmouth Lucy didn’t know that as she kept poking and prodding away at the status of my uterus, which hurt more than the time that I was physically poked and prodded by my sadistic former gynecologist who insisted that putting two gloved fingers up my butt was now a standard part of my annual Pap smear.

Lucy continued by confiding in me that she and her husband were “trying” to get pregnant. I hate that expression: “We’re trying.” What that translates to is: “We’re fucking.” After someone tells me they’re “trying,” I just get a visual of them having sex without birth control and I don’t want to picture other people having sex with or without birth control—unless they are superhot and I am very drunk and have an extra $19.99 to spend on a movie in a hotel room.

When someone tells me, “We’re trying,” I fantasize about having the following conversation:

“Oh, you’re trying? We’re trying too. Yeah. It’s hard. If you ever need to talk, just call me. There’s strength in talking about it—it neutralizes the demons.”

“Jen, what are you talking about? I mean we’re trying to get pregnant.”

“Oh, I thought you meant you were trying not to kill yourselves.”

Lucy chomped away at her salad and talked with her mouth full about how at one point her husband, Peter, didn’t want to bring kids into the world because he had asthma and was allergic to beets and didn’t want to pass down his weak DNA. She said that once they got married their priorities suddenly changed and they wanted to raise children. Matt and I failed to see how our decision to not have kids would change after a ceremony and reception where we’d dance to Kool & the Gang’s “Celebration” with our closest friends and family.

Across the table, Matt and Peter started talking and gesticulating wildly about movies—one of those in-depth conversations where guys suddenly sound like they have autism, there is so much attention to detail.

“Matt, you know lots of people think that Orson Welles was the first director to put the camera on the floor, but he borrowed the technique from John Ford, who originally used it in the movie Stagecoach. ”

“Oh yeah, Peter, I knew that! Did you know that Orson Welles secretly watched Stagecoach forty times while he was making Citizen Kane ?”

They couldn’t hear what Lucy and I were talking about. If an alien had landed at the table, he would have assumed that Peter and Matt were the married human couple, with the way they’d turned their chairs to completely face each other and how they playfully punched each other in the arm every time the other dork made a really good point about twentieth-century cinema.

“I know you’re not even married yet,” Lucy lectured, “but at your age, you have to think about making a family while you’re planning the wedding.” Five minutes ago I was too young to know that I was going to change my mind and suddenly I’m too old to waste any time after my wedding to plan on making a family. Which age bracket am I in? Young and stupid or old and barren? And “making a family” is another expression that grosses me out. I pictured Matt standing over me in a lab coat with a turkey baster.

Lucy took a big sip of her red wine, wiped her lip, and leaned into me. She may have been a little drunk or a little dehydrated or a little both, because she had that dry “wine lip” that looked like someone poured purple paint in the cracks of a sidewalk. She leaned in close and whispered, “What would you do if you accidentally got pregnant?” I didn’t even understand the question. “Oh, I would never cheat on Matt,” I answered. “No, Jen, I mean what if you got pregnant, by accident, with Matt’s baby?”

“Are you asking me, someone you barely know, at our friends’ wedding, if I would have an abortion ?”

“Well,” she said, “it’s something you have to think about if you don’t want kids. I mean, I personally think that abortion is something for teenagers who couldn’t possibly raise a child. But ever since I decided that I wanted to try to become a mother and I see how difficult it can be to get pregnant, I realize that it’s a gift to be pregnant and if a married couple who are both employed accidentally get pregnant, I don’t see how you can give that up.”

A total stranger tried to small-talk me about abortion. I have never had an abortion. I never want to have an abortion. I also don’t want to have a baby. I fear how both procedures would impact my life and leave me full of regret. I didn’t lose my virginity until I was twenty. It’s not that I’m a prude; I was one of those “I’ll do everything but…” girls—and no, I don’t mean that I did it in the butt. I’d given plenty of blow jobs, and many generous teenage boys had gone down on me on saggy couches in their moms’ basements.

After every encounter with oral sex, I was panic-stricken and convinced that I was pregnant. For some reason, despite having taken sex ed class in fifth grade, my perception of how someone gets pregnant grew more and more skewed with each passing year. It got to the point where I was convinced that if I gave a guy a hand job, the sperm would then live on my finger, and since I had forgotten to wash my hands before I peed, the sperm would travel through the thin bathroom tissue when I wiped, jump from the outside of my vagina, and skip up my fallopian tubes. I had the kind of Catholic mom who, I suspected, might withdraw me from school if I got pregnant and make me go upstate, where I would carry the baby to term in some dilapidated mental institution and then give it away to some nice nuns to raise. But I didn’t want to leave school and my ballet lessons for nine months. I didn’t want to have an abortion either, because when I was sixteen and fearing I was pregnant, I made a promise to God.

I prayed, “God, if I ever get pregnant, I just have to have an abortion. I can’t raise a baby. But if I have an abortion, I promise I will become a nun.”

I figured I could spend my life being celibate and secretly pining away for boys, writing about them in my diary. It was how I spent my early teen years anyway. As long as nuns could listen to the Cure to help offset some of the loneliness and angst, I was convinced I could handle it. But I was not ready to answer a stranger at a wedding about how I’d handle an accidental pregnancy.

As I stammered and babbled my neurotic tales of teen angst to Lucy, I looked over at Matt and Peter, who were laughing and ordering more whiskey. Why wasn’t Matt getting grilled about his supposed immaturity? How was Matt not realizing that I’d been hijacked into a philosophical debate as middle-aged relatives of our friends were starting to drunkenly swipe their fingers through the frosting in the wedding cake? Couldn’t he see the SOS looks I was shooting him that said, “Help me. I’m being judged by a woman for an abortion I didn’t have!”?