Jen Kirkman - I Can Barely Take Care of Myself

I went to the bathroom and just grabbed on to the sink until my heart stopped racing. I fought back tears. How had I allowed a total stranger to bully me at a fucking wedding? I let the tears fall. Goddamn it! Isn’t this why people get engaged, so they don’t have to spend Saturday nights crying in bathrooms anymore?

On the drive home Matt and I caught up on the two different conversations we’d had at the wedding.

“Jen, I’m sorry I didn’t check in with you. You were talking with your hands and you had plenty of wine in front of you. It seemed like you were having fun.”

“Matt, she asked us if we wanted children and then she started whispering at me! What did you think we were talking about?”

“I didn’t think about what you were talking about. I was talking to Peter.”

“Why can’t men think about more than one thing at once? I was talking to Lucy and thinking about your conversation.”

“You win, Jen. You win.”

I started talking to Matt like I was his military superior. “Matt, we can’t fight. We’re on the same side and we have to stay vigilant. This is our new world. People are going to start having kids and I’m not taking the brunt of the pressure. You know what? You need to start lying and saying that you’ve had a vasectomy.”

“I’m not going to lie about things I didn’t do to my penis, Jen.”

“But that’s our trump card! I can say, ‘My husband can’t make sperm! He paid a doctor to take a knife to his balls! Take that! We can’t change our minds!”

I thought for sure that once I was in my thirties, people would stop telling me that I was young and that I’d change my mind about not wanting to have children. Someone my age in colonial times would be dead by now, probably from childbirth. “I’m in my thirties” always seemed like a way to say you’re in a nice, tidy adult age bracket where you might not yet own a home but you definitely know what you want out of life. I always thought that thirty was that magical age where, just like from Brownies to Girl Scouts, you cross that bridge into the land of Being Taken Seriously as an Adult. I thought that getting married at age thirty-five to a man who also didn’t want children would ensure that I finally “won” my own argument. I’m not having children. I was right. Ha. Ha. I didn’t change my mind. My eggs are drying up and probably damaged anyway. Even if I did change my mind and wanted to get pregnant at this age, there’s a good chance that something would go wrong in the DNA and my baby could end up a Tea Party wacko.

I don’t want to wish my life away, but I’m starting to think that life is going to get really sweet when I’m seventy, and people will finally have to accept that I’m old enough to manage my own mind. Although I wouldn’t be surprised if someone said, “You say you don’t want children but you have early-onset dementia. You only think you don’t want kids and you only think that you are presiding over a conversation between your oxygen tank and your St. Francis of Assisi figurine. You’ll change your mind.”

Years ago, I was in the women’s bathroom at a comedy club in Addison, Texas, after I’d come offstage. (I’m sorry to brag about performing in the suburbs of Texas and using the same bathroom as the audience.) Anyway, I was washing my hands at the sink and a woman came out of the stall. She had seen my set and referenced the part in my act where I talk about how I don’t want to have kids, saying she loved my joke that goes: “My husband and I don’t want kids. We can’t have a third person running around the house who is more helpless than the two of us.”

She washed her hands and started to fix her hair in the mirror. “But you want kids someday, right?” she asked.

“Oh! No. I was totally serious. We’re… childfree by choice,” I said, trying to make it sound official, like it was some club I’d joined with a nonrefundable deposit.

She continued to casually fix her hair, reaching into her purse for a trial-size bottle of hairspray and going to work on her Texas bangs. Her gaze remained on herself in the mirror but she said to me, “Really? No kids? So it’s just going to be the two of you? Isn’t that selfish?”

Do people think that saying the words “Isn’t that” in front of “selfish” masks the fact that they just blatantly called me selfish to my face? It’s like when people say, “No offense, but,” before saying something offensive. Or when someone says, “I don’t mean to be racist,” and then tells you that they think Puerto Rican people smell like burnt hamburgers.

Isn’t that selfish? She’d said it so casually! I’d rather she pulled a combination comb-switchblade out of the back pocket of her jeans, held it up to my neck, and said, “You wanna rumble, you selfish non-child-having bitch? You think you can just go onstage and make jokes and then tell me in a bathroom that you’re not interested in bringing a baby into this world? Huh?”

If she were actually mad at me about not wanting to have a baby, it would make more sense. I’d know this was just her hot-button issue—she wants everyone to procreate. And I would simply choose to not engage, just like I do with my angry atheist friends who talk about God more than people who believe in one:

“There is no God! It’s just something people believe in because they’re afraid of death!”

“Okay. So there might not be a God and we’re all afraid of death. Well, you’ve figured that one out. Can we have lunch now?”

“But, Jen, you have to pick a side. You can’t just be agnostic. It’s as silly as saying you don’t know if there’s a Santa Claus!”

“Got it. There is no proof of God and it’s the parents who put the presents under the Christmas tree. Can we have lunch now ?”

But it was the way that this woman cemented her bangs to her forehead while she coolly tossed off a judgment about my person that made me realize that whether she was even aware of it or not, somewhere in her core she just assumed that everyone wants to have children, and to not want children indicates some sort of factory malfunction. She made me feel like not wanting kids was a character flaw on my part, because I wasn’t paying attention in nursery school when we were learning how to share blocks. She could have said any other s word. She could have asked, “No kids? Really? Isn’t that… sexy?” Or, “Isn’t that… shrewd?” I wouldn’t even have bristled so much at being asked, “Isn’t that… shitty?”

She finished shellacking the top of her head and turned to me to say, “Well, maybe you don’t want kids now, but when you’re done with all this… you might want to give back.” And when she said “done with all this,” she pointed all five of her fingers at me, like a lazy, droopy version of “talk to the hand.” She wiggled her fingers as if to indicate that my career as a stand-up comic, what she called “all this,” was something she could lift from me, like a reverse spell.

“It can’t be just about you forever, Jen. Trust me. My husband and I couldn’t not have kids. After a few years of just us, we felt that we were being too… selfish. Now I can’t even imagine not having brought my daughter into the world. Who was I to keep it from her? Anyway, you’re really funny. Good luck with everything!”

And with that unsolicited advice, she matter-of-factly tucked her hairspray back into her purse and walked out of the bathroom, leaving me to stew in the airborne taste of aerosol and that word: “selfish.”

I went into a stall and just hid there for a bit, hoping that I wouldn’t run into any more women who felt compelled to tell me how funny and how selfish I was. I had to wrap my head around the concept that this woman thought that not bringing her daughter into the world was keeping the world from her daughter. So, every woman who doesn’t choose to give birth is leaving some poor kid hanging out there in some kind of limbo? There’s a semiexistent child right now holding on to a lottery ticket and he has no idea that his number is never going to come up because he’s been assigned to selfish me? Fuck. How do you stop having kids with that guilt on your head?