Jen Kirkman - I Can Barely Take Care of Myself

Aretha Franklin sang, “I didn’t know just what was wrong with me / Till your kiss helped me name it / Now I’m no longer doubtful of what I’m living for / ’Cause if I make you happy I don’t need no more / ’Cause you make me feel, you make me feel like a natural woman.”

That song is not about having a baby, and do you think that anyone dared to get in Aretha’s face and tell her that love and kisses are nice but she’s not really a natural woman until she pops one out?

I cry. I get manicures and pedicures. I am the sole employee and president of my own corporation. I get my period. I get PMS. I get bloated. I get horny around hot guys. I get horny around quirky-looking guys. I change my hair color and style about four times a year. I think that if I were a lesbian, I’d be a “lipstick” one or I’d like the Hilary Swank–in– Boys Don’t Cry type. I live alone and am thus the head of my own household. I’ve had my heart broken. I’ve broken hearts. Sometimes I feel like I don’t have a heart. I’ve had sex for love and I’ve had sex for sex. I’m still unsure of my exact bra size. I like how my stomach seems flat in the morning and hate by the end of the day that it resembles a semi-blown-up beach ball half. I have varicose veins that I just don’t look at because they’re on the backs of my legs. I squeal and clap my hands if a song comes on the radio that I like—even if I’ve heard it ten thousand times in my life. I do karaoke. I get drunk at weddings. I listen to Madonna. I listen to the Sex Pistols. I’ve been in therapy for ten years straight. I love my parents and I talk to them on the phone. I yell at my parents when we’re on the phone and I just don’t have the patience to answer the same question over and over. All of these things make me a woman. I feel pretty natural about it. I don’t even own a push-up bra, that’s how natural I am. Yet there are people who have tried to invalidate my womanhood because I refuse to do this one thing—grow another person inside my belly.

They act like my not having kids spells the end of the human race. Look, plenty of other women can take care of this. I’d start to get nervous if men were the ones who had to have the babies— that would be the end of humanity. My dad cried once because he accidentally used my toothbrush. He hates germs and couldn’t fathom how to go on with his life for a good five minutes after the incident. He’s a sensitive soul who spends his days trying to avoid physical pain, and using someone’s toothbrush could lead to catching a cold, which could lead to a painful sinus headache. So, while I love that women are the ones who got the “people-making equipment,” I just don’t want to use mine, much like that juicer I have that’s still in the box. I simply don’t have the urge to make a fresh-squeezed fetus in my lady-blender.

I’m sure squatting in a hole to go number two is actually more natural and the way God intended us to expel our waste—rather than sitting on a porcelain chair and reading the National Enquirer. But I’m fine with being unnatural about my bathroom habits. I’m comfortable. Coincidentally, my body is very comfortable not being pregnant. I have some small stretch marks on my inner thigh and I don’t know where they’re from. I’ve had them since I was a teenager. I do not write blogs or do interviews with magazines about them, or show them off on TV. There’s this cultural fad around women who have stretch marks from pregnancy, claiming that the marks are beautiful and the women are “proud of them.” I am not proud of mine. They confuse me. When did I stretch?

Unless your stretch marks have solved a water-shortage crisis or found a way to cap greenhouse gas emissions, let’s go easy on the word “proud.” Your skin got stretched out because your body went through some changes. There shouldn’t be pride in the natural cycle of life. My parents didn’t teach me to be overly proud of myself. It’s a Catholic thing. (It’s also a Massachusetts thing. There’s no shortage of people in your family to say, “You think you-ah so great or somethin’? So what you can Hula-Hoop? I saw a boy on TV do it for a wicked long time.”) It happens whether we worked hard for our stretch marks or not. And besides, we all know that given the choice, most people would choose to not have stretch marks, unless the reward was sleeping with 1960s Robert Redford. And then you’re fucked because he’s not going to sleep with you again after he sees those puppies. So let’s stop acting like stretch marks are God’s greatest gift to women, shall we?

Here’s a list of things that don’t appeal to me, physically speaking:

• Dying a slow, drawn-out death as the result of an accidental subway incident where I’m trapped between the platform and the train.

• Having any kind of liquid come out of my nipples.

• Having someone bite, tug, chew, and suck on my nipple.

• Shitting in a bed in front of doctors and family.

• Having water break out of my crotch and spill all over the floor.

• Passing a human through my vagina. Or, in an emergency, having a human being cut out of my stomach.

Most of these things can be avoided right now and are within my control. I know that when I’m elderly there will be bed shitting. I’ll deal with that when I get there. Maybe they’ll invent a Craftmatic Adjustable Bed Toilet by then. The trapped-between-a-train-and-a-subway-platform thing is something I plan to avoid, but a lunatic could always shove me. The other things are totally avoidable. I know it all sounds very base when I reduce bringing human life into the world into a series of awkward moments involving bodily secretions, but I can’t help it. I’m slightly immature and I often look at things I don’t want to do in stark black-and-white terms. It’s the most natural thing that a comedian can do.

AFTER MY FIRST year of marriage I gained forty pounds.

I shouldn’t say it that way, like I’m blaming the marriage, but everyone I know credited the marriage for my weight gain… in a positive way. Friends said, “Well, you found someone and you’re happy and you guys are sitting around eating all the time.” Or, “Something just happens after you get married; your body starts nesting and just putting on weight.” Really? I thought it was because I was eating a block of cheese with my bare hands like a sandwich in front of the TV every night and washing it down with two glasses of pinot noir.

My husband and I had lived together for years before we got married. We’d already gone through our phase of sitting around drinking wine at home together, ordering in, eating out. I didn’t gain a single pound. But something about that piece of paper and that ceremony, it’s like you’re hosting a ritualistic event that you think means one thing, but in fact you’re involuntarily letting society—first cousins; friends of your dad’s from the Elks Lodge; scheming, jealous, unmarried bridesmaids—put their own spin on it. People always say things like, “I wish I could meet someone so I could have someone to grow old with in forty years.” But when you actually get married, they treat you like it’s time to start growing old now. It’s time to gain forty pounds in a year and not even question it. I swear that people were comfortable with my weight gain because it was the closest I was going to get to a baby. Even though I wanted to crawl out of my skin—my friends, family, and total strangers were welcoming me into it. “You’re just settling down.”

The weight gain snuck up on me. I’m really lucky because when I gain weight I gain it in proportion. I’m glad I didn’t inherit my dad’s body. He has chicken legs but the stomach of a woman in her third trimester. I don’t have a lot of “hangover” on my pants (although I had a lot of hangovers from the pinot noir). I didn’t even really notice that I’d gained weight until the first twenty pounds had found their home on my stomach, thighs, and butt. In every photo that I was tagged in on Facebook, it looked like someone had Photoshopped an extra face around my face. I could still button my pants but none of them were fitting in the crotch anymore. That area went beyond looking like I had camel toe—it looked like one of those Pillsbury Crescent rolls that during its baking period starts to explode and grow a deformed bread buddy that rides sidecar on the original. I wondered, Did nobody tell me that after age thirty-five a woman’s balls drop? I started saying things about those pants that I could no longer pull up (“They don’t make them like they used to!”), even though I’d had the pants for years and at one time they fit perfectly. It’s not like a pack of tailor-elves had been coming into my room at night, saying, “Hey, they’re not making pants like they used to! The store sent us here to change the inseam.”