Jen Kirkman - I Can Barely Take Care of Myself

I wanted to run after her and yell, “Hey, I wouldn’t have been here making you laugh tonight if I had a baby, because comedians can’t take babies on the road!” I thought of adding, “How dare you call me selfish? You were probably at home and your baby threw up on your blouse and you had to change a few times and you said to your husband, ‘The girls and I are going out tonight. We just need to laugh!’ And I was the one who made you laugh! That’s my way of giving back!”

I kicked the tampon receptacle in the stall out of frustration because I came up with the best comeback after she was long gone: Oh yeah, lady? I’m selfish because I don’t have children? Oprah Winfrey doesn’t have children and you want to tell me that she’s selfish and doesn’t give back? She’s building schools in Africa and giving away refrigerators that have TVs in them to her audience! She handed Dr. Phil, Dr. Oz, and her best friend, Gayle, their careers and asked for nothing in return! (Except maybe a signed confidentiality agreement or two.) Oprah can afford to have kids and Stedman could stay at home and watch them and she still chooses not to procreate! Why aren’t you calling her selfish? And you know who else didn’t have kids? Jesus Christ himself! I win! I played the Jesus card! Jesus, the supposed human incarnation of God, who allegedly walked on water, did not have kids. Is he selfish? Didn’t he die for our sins or something? (After fifteen years of going to church every Sunday as a kid, I still don’t quite get what that means, but it still sounds pretty unselfish to me.)

One of the casualties of doing stand-up comedy and then using the same bathroom as the audience is that people will talk to you about your act. Sometimes if they like your act, it can be a more difficult conversation to have than if they simply say, “I didn’t like you that much.” (That happens a lot actually. I get it. I was shouting my opinions into a microphone for almost an hour. People want to tell me their opinions after and sometimes their opinion is that I suck.)

I have a stand-up routine I do about masturbation and the unwanted thoughts that go through women’s heads when they put their hands under their sheets. I need a story to think about. I need a fantasy that makes sense. I can’t just finger myself and picture Johnny Depp’s face. It needs a sense of realism, like how did I meet Johnny Depp? He lives in France. I don’t have a work visa. Besides, he has children and I’ve made it quite clear that I don’t want to be a mom and I don’t want to be a stepmom either. People love to talk to me about that and share their own tales, which are usually way more graphic than my act. This is part of a conversation that happened between me and a stranger in a women’s bathroom at the Improv in Palm Beach, Florida:

Are you that comedian who was just up there? No way. I loved your bit about touching yourself. Oh my God, I call it finger blasting! One time I did it in the stall at work. I was so horny. I don’t know if it’s this new birth control I’m taking or the fact that my husband has been working late and our sex life is a little off. I actually like to rub myself over my underwear. Is that weird? You should put that in your act.

More power to the woman who finger blasts herself in the bathroom stall at work and then drunkenly confesses it to me. She was just telling me what she does without passing any judgment on me, unlike the woman with the Dynasty bangs who told me that someday I would definitely want to stop what I do for a living and raise a child.

ONE DAY WHILE I was procrastinating writing this book (okay, looking up how to spell a big word), I was on Dictionary.com and the word of the day was “selfish,” with this quote underneath it:

The passion of love is essentially selfish, while motherhood widens the circle of our feelings.

Balzac is a big sack of balls. I know he was an important figure in French literature and some consider him the founder of realism but fuck you, Balzac. Is that real enough for you? He wrote this sometime between 1799 and 1850, so becoming a mother was the only thing that women could do back then, unlike today, when women can live a very fulfilling life after making a sex tape, getting a reality TV show, and eventually becoming a human billboard.

The way I see it, becoming a mother makes a person selfless in their feelings toward their kid(s) but in a very primal way. It’s not even a choice. If a coyote came charging at me, I doubt many of my girlfriends would get on the ground in front of me and let themselves get mauled first, but that’s because they didn’t make me from their own DNA or adopt me from China after a yearlong process of paperwork and hope.

I’m no Balzac, so what do I know about motherhood? But if a mother’s love is selfless, does it mean that all mothers are selfless people toward all of humanity? There’s a big difference.

A lot of my friends who had kids in 2008 said that because they were getting no sleep with their new babies, they had no time to pay attention to politics. If someone as seemingly lobotomized as Michele Bachmann can have five children and raise twenty-three foster children while running for president, surely my friends can have one kid and still take the time to make sure that someone like Michele Bachmann never becomes president. Frankly, I think that once you have a child, you should take some time out of your day to find out what the people governing our country are planning on doing (or what they say they’re planning on doing as opposed to what they are actually doing). How did those pioneer women raise kids and forge across America in caravans in order to start a new life? I don’t remember reading in the history books that these women decided that they didn’t have time to be part of settling the West because they had to mash up some organic carrots for the baby.

I had other friends who were in a hormonal trance after giving birth and said they just “see things differently now,” and with regard to the future of our nation, they put their hands over their ears and sang a chorus of “I can’t hear you” because they didn’t want to get involved with anything “negative.” By the way, I also have friends who say the same thing after doing Ecstasy. Any adjustment to your hormones is going to make you see things differently. Just try to care about global warming after getting fucked really, really good twice in one night.

Becoming a mother doesn’t automatically make you a selfless person. May I present the jury with the following evidence? Kate Moss, Jaid Barrymore, and Brooke Mueller are all mothers. I know, I’m being a little judgmental toward these ladies, but at least I’m not calling them selfish to their faces in a public bathroom! Of course, most people on that list, if they were in a public bathroom, would be bent over the toilet at four in the morning, so it’d be hard to say anything to their faces.

It’s simple, really. The urge that most people feel to have kids is the exact same as the urge that I have to not have kids. I don’t want to have kids and so I am not going to have kids. People who want kids are going to have kids. I’m doing what I want to do and people who want kids are doing what they want to do. What about this scenario makes me selfish? If you did not want to have a baby and yet you found one on your doorstep with a note that said TAKE CARE OF THIS BABY, USING WHATEVER RESOURCES YOU CURRENTLY HAVE, OR EVERYONE ON EARTH DIES, and you chose to sacrifice your life as you knew it so that nobody died, I’d say, “Wow, you are the definition of selfless. Not even Balzac can argue against that.”