Jen Kirkman - I Can Barely Take Care of Myself

But straying from Catholicism makes my mom nervous because her superstition kicks in. I’ll never forget when I told her that I’d started going to Buddhist lectures in Los Angeles. “Jennifah, you can’t do that. You were baptized in the Catholic Church. There’s an invisible mark on you that says, ‘Catholic.’ You can’t go get stamped with other religions. God doesn’t know what to make of it and you don’t end up in heaven.”

For such an all-powerful dude, God, as my mom sees him, is easily confused. I did have to go to church every Sunday, although we didn’t pray or read the Bible at home during the week or anything like that. My mom’s philosophy was: “God is busy. He doesn’t need to hear that you’re thankful for every shit and fart.” I always thought that expression should be embroidered on a pillow.

Ultimately I decided Buddhism wasn’t for me either. You still have to get up on Sunday mornings and you have to sit twice as still for twice as long. My mom also has given up going to church. She thinks the pastors are too old and out of touch. She and my dad have found the church of Foxwoods Casino in Connecticut, where they are devoted to the worship of the slot machines. Another of my mom’s philosophies is: “Well, at least the church I’m not going to is the right one.”

But like all good Catholic families, ours just keeps getting bigger. I’ve come to realize that my relatives apparently like to have lots of unprotected sex. The annual Kirkman Christmas party is getting so enormous and overwhelming that I’ve had to start my own tradition for that day—have a phone-therapy session with my shrink in the morning while trying to mask the fact that I’m sipping a 10:00 a.m. glass of Riesling.

Every party is the same. I say about two sentences to a cousin and then their daughter, whatsherface, is off and running across the room to put her finger in a light socket to see whether she’ll light up like the Christmas tree. The fact that I don’t want to have kids of my own doesn’t mean I want to watch someone else’s die a painful death by electrocution, so I gracefully bow out of the conversation. “No, it’s fine. You go chase her. We’ll catch up later.”

My extended family are a bunch of hospitable, sweet souls. Anyone who walks through the door is considered family. But sometimes I’m still self-conscious at the family Christmas party because I am childless. My sister Violet is childless too but she has three cats and three horses. She gets up at the crack of dawn to feed them, so people feel less bad for her. It seems like as long as you’re cleaning up some living thing’s poop after age thirty, family members really respect that lifestyle choice. My uncle Will, a stout Italian man with a white beard, plays Santa Claus every year at the party. Kirkman Christmas takes place a week before Actual Christmas, but the kids are naturally able to suspend their disbelief and accept that Santa Claus comes to Auntie Violet’s a week early to honor the fact that it’s easier to get all of the Kirkmans together on that day. Also, when you’re a kid, I guess it’s just called “believing in Santa” and not “suspension of disbelief.”

At dusk, Uncle Will heads out to my sister’s barn and changes into his red Santa suit, complete with fake white beard, even though he has a real one underneath. He brings in a sackful of presents and doles them out to more than thirty screaming, shrieking children who are freaking out harder than preteen girls and creepy older men at a Justin Bieber concert.

I stand back with the adults while the kids trample one another for a front-row seat at the Santa concert, and once they’re down, I watch them go into a trance. At no point do they seem to realize that Santa, unlike any other man, has whiskers made of cotton. Or maybe they do notice but don’t seem to care? I never thought that any of the Santas I met as a kid was the Santa.

My mom always told me that the Santa Claus at the mall was a Santa look-alike who was also from the North Pole and definitely sanctioned by Santa. So I never went in with expectations and I always felt a little superior to the other kids because I knew that this wasn’t Santa and I was in on it with him. I’d sit on his lap and play the game and tell him what I wanted, knowing that he would pass it on to the real Santa but that the chump whose lap I was sitting on was not the guy who was going to be coming down our chimney.

Actually, nobody was coming down our chimney. We didn’t have a fireplace. My mom told me that Santa came in through a vent on the roof and climbed down our attic stairs (which doubled as a cleaning supplies closet). I was always very impressed with how, every Christmas morning, the cleaning supplies looked untouched. Santa got extra points in my book for being so diligent about putting things back where they belonged.

But every kid at Kirkman Christmas was told that this was the Santa Claus. And they were buying the taped-on eyebrows that Uncle Will was selling.

By the time Will/Santa comes on the scene, the shrieking gets out of control. I don’t remember my mother and father ever letting me shriek at high decibels in other people’s homes—even family members’ homes. I’ve never grabbed someone’s Christmas gift out of his or her hands. (Then again, I never wanted the same kind of presents that other kids got. As a kid, every Christmas I asked Santa Claus for one of those “furry clips that high school girls hang off their purses.” Santa never delivered. I learned later in life that those are known as “roach clips” and they are not just purse decorations, like some pinecone ornament on a Christmas tree. They hold your roach—aka the tiny little pile of ash and rolling papers that a joint has been reduced to after a round of puffing and passing.)

At last year’s Kirkman Christmas party, with my divorce still a secret and it being no secret that I was beyond my peak egg health, I thought it would be a good strategy to seem “normal” and “into children.” When Santa had given out his last gift and the kids’ voices were hoarse from wailing, I decided to flex my maternal side. Everybody was always telling me I’d be such a great mom and the third glass of Riesling had given me the courage to try. Santa Will walked quickly toward the front door with his empty bag. Once he was out of their eye line, the kids had already forgotten about Santa. They were playing with their toys and almost knocking over the Christmas tree. The front door shut and I ran to the group of kids and said, “You guys! Santa is leaving! Let’s all run to the window and watch his sleigh with his reindeers fly away!” The kids looked at me in stunned silence. They had never considered that the sleigh and eight tiny reindeer were outside. I was a genius. Here I had been for thirty-seven years, thinking that I wasn’t good with kids just because I didn’t want a child of my own, and it turns out I possessed, at minimum, the creativity of a cool kindergarten teacher.

The kids screamed in unison, “ Rudolph! ” and ran to the window. They pushed one another from side to side, trying to get the best view, just as I realized that the view they were getting was a behind-the-curtain glimpse of Uncle Will going to his truck to drop off his empty bag and walking into the barn to change back into his plain red fleece KISS THE COOK sweatshirt—an outfit not becoming of Rachael Ray, let alone a magic man like Santa.

Some kids saw Santa Will walk into the barn and the kids who didn’t were crying because they’d missed the sleigh flying away. The rest of them couldn’t figure out what the hell was going on, so they just started to cry in utter confusion. It was like watching a bunch of women having dinner together and one of them starts to get choked up. But before she has a chance to explain why she’s about to start sobbing the others join in—partly due to an instinct to sympathize and partly due to the competitive instinct to steal the sympathy spotlight. I am the most upset! Look at me!