Jen Kirkman - I Can Barely Take Care of Myself

Nobody gets babysitters anymore, do they? That’s so eighties. If we want to see our friends, we’ll have to go to their house all the time and have whisper-around-the-table-because-the-baby-is-sleeping early dinners. I feared that Grace and Christopher would turn into the type of parents I’d lost touch with because their kids became their entire life:

“So… seen any good movies lately?”

“We don’t have time to go to movies anymore.”

“Oh, that’s right. We forgot. So… seen any good TV shows lately?”

“No. We don’t want to zone out on our kid—so as a family the only entertainment we partake in is playing with organic wooden blocks.”

“So… read any interesting newspaper articles lately?”

“No. With the baby, I don’t even have time to shower, so I just rub a newspaper all over my body to soak up the oil and sweat. After that it’s unreadable and I’m covered in ink.”

Then there’s always that awkward silence and your girlfriend will ask, “So… how’s your mom? Didn’t you say she was going to get a suspicious mole checked out?”

“Oh, yes. Actually we had a little bit of a scare. My mom got her test results back and they were—” The baby cries.

“Oh, I’m sorry,” she’ll say, “I can’t go and pick up the baby because he has to learn how to just cry, but I want to stand within twelve feet of him so that he can smell my pheromones and moisturizer. Hold that thought. I’ll be right back.”

The baby is eventually lulled back to sleep and Mom comes back only to not pick up where she left off, because the 7:30 p.m. yawning has commenced. She’ll never hear what I was going to say about my mom’s melanoma because she’s desperate for everyone to leave so she and her husband can sleep for two hours before their baby wakes up to practice crying and going to sleep without being picked up.

“Jen,” Matt said. “Your mom doesn’t have cancer and Grace and Christopher’s baby hasn’t even been born.”

“I know that! But I’m saying if she did—our friends with kids would not have time to console me. This is a real concern, Matt. We have to brace ourselves in the event that we lose Grace and Christopher to the other side.”

I envisioned the next phase of losing my friends to their children, which is when the people with kids realize that their childfree friends don’t have any handy tips for them based on their own experience. I have no idea whether they should switch from breast milk to formula after a month or whether organic cotton is better on their baby’s bottom than recycled hemp cotton. So parents naturally gravitate toward other parents and they start to speak their own language. Nobody needs a childfree person there—it wastes too much time to try to translate.

I’m just going to come out and say it: this is the real reason lots of people end up changing their minds and having kids. They don’t want to lose their friends. It’s just like drugs. Peer pressure eventually gets to everyone. No one wants to be the narc or someone who is harshing everyone’s illegal substance– or pregnancy hormone–induced good vibe. This is exactly what happened to Keith Richards.

Have I mentioned I am the baby of the family? Still, whenever someone asks me why I don’t want to have kids, I think about how abandoned I feel when my friends get pregnant and that’s usually the last little tiny little hint of a feeling that pushes me into the maybe territory—I just want my life to stay the same and keep my friends. Then I remember that losing sleep, picking boogers out of a child’s nose, and having said booger maker wake me up every day at five thirty is not worth my bringing a human life into the world just because I could probably mimic the other parent chimps in the wild and manage to raise a kid without killing it. (Do chimps sometimes eat their kids? I should look that up but I’m too lazy. I wouldn’t even be a good researcher, let alone mom. I’m just not curious enough.)

People say this to me a lot, that I would be such a good mom. I’m not even that good of an aunt. Ask my nieces and nephews. I missed both of their high school graduations and one college graduation because I was stuck in a casino for the weekend. Fine, I wasn’t on a wine spritzer and bingo bender—I was doing stand-up comedy for tables of bachelorette parties with penis hats on their heads.

In fact, if I’m being honest, the person who drove the biggest wedge between Shannon and Tracy and me—was me. I moved thousands of miles away from Massachusetts to California. If I lived on the East Coast, I would see my childhood friends all of the time; we’d call bomb threats in to one another’s places of business just so that we could take long lunches together, we’d use our health insurance and check into an inpatient “exhaustion rehab center” for a week as a way to get a free spa experience, and we’d go walk around all of the many prestigious Boston college and university campuses just to see whether we look young enough to get hit on. But they’ve moved on to the next phase in their lives and I have in mine—although I never would have predicted that my next phase would involve my marriage ending, not my friendships.

My fears about Grace and Christopher were completely unfounded. They didn’t change once they had their baby. They have a babysitter. We hang out. And I’m the one who whispers around the dinner table when they’ve never asked me to. I just didn’t feel comfortable saying things like, “We were sleeping together, it was never serious. He has kind of a crooked penis, which is no problem but I think it makes him self-conscious,” at normal volume in front of their infant—I don’t know what kids these days pick up on!

When I see Shannon with her sons I feel like I’m watching her star in a play called The Good Mom. The play opened Off Broadway and people didn’t notice it at first, but the reviews were so good once the critics realized that they had a capable and competent ingenue who could deliver a tour-de-force performance without seeming tired and without one beautiful blond hair falling out of place. She’s a parent and it makes her really happy. And just like somebody’s mother would, I still see her as a little girl. And because she and Tracy are my little girls—I absolutely love their children. I want to take their toddlers aside and tell them stories about all of the bad poetry Shannon wrote and how when you are fresh to your aunt Tracy it breaks my heart because she’s supercool—she holds the high score among our friends in Super Mario Bros. and she used to dye her hair purple.

I know I wouldn’t be a good mom but I’m a pretty good gift-buyer for my mommy friends. I bought Richard Scarry’s Best Storybook Ever for Shannon’s son Ben, and years later he still asks her to read it to him every night. Every freaking night! I always hated reading to kids because you’re never really reading. They’re so young and don’t have a grasp of the English language yet; they just want you to point at the pictures and they completely ignore the narrative, and when you’re getting to the good part they grab the corner of the book and try to put it in their mouth. If I had a kid of my own, I’d be pissed. Hey, what makes you think you should put this in your mouth? It’s not on a plate hot out of the oven. This is a book. B-o-o-k, not food. F-o-o-d. God. Is my kid going to be a nincompoop? He is eating a book instead of reading it. I think I need to return him. I hope he’s covered under the manufacturer’s warranty.

When I was interviewing Grace for this book, her sixteen-month-old daughter, Delia, fell face-first on the porch right in front of me as I was taking a bite of my sandwich. I threw the sandwich down, spit up my bites, and screamed. “Ohmygod! Ohmygod! Grace!! Grace!! She fell! ” My instinct was to flee like I do in other uncomfortable backyard situations, involving wasps and small talk with neighbors who pop in unexpectedly. Delia just looked at me, utterly confused. Her lip curled like Elvis’s and she seemed to be thinking, Uh-oh. I’m not equipped to deal with this woman’s impending breakdown. Then she got back up like nothing happened and continued pushing her little cart filled with her favorite things: a doll, a purse, some blocks, and a napkin.