Jen Kirkman - I Can Barely Take Care of Myself

When I go hiking, I want to look straight ahead and listen to a Dr. Wayne Dyer self-help podcast. I want to get contemplative or listen to Madonna and pretend that I’m in a music video. I have no time to stop and let my pet/kid off its leash so it can run to the edge of the woods and start playing with body parts. I’m not going to wear a fanny pack just so that I can carry hand sanitizer on the off chance that I have to wipe crime-scene DNA off my toddler’s tiny hands.

If you’re married or have kids, that doesn’t mean you won’t die alone. You could be groggy from last night’s Ambien and mistake a white paper napkin on your counter for a slice of cheese pizza. A few bites in and you start to choke. You collapse to the floor, gasping for breath; the sink is so far away and all you need is some water to wash it down. You eventually give in to the comfort of the white light that you see in front of your eyes. You lay your head down and die, holding on to shards of a half-eaten napkin… all of this can happen when your husband is driving the kids to school.

No matter how many assurances you think you might have that you’ll be surrounded by and cared for by your children at your last breath, that kitchen floor awaits, ready to take you before your time. I’m safeguarding my home and saving my life by not bringing children into it who will be so messy that I’m required to keep lots of napkins on our countertops. And I take other precautions around the house: I don’t engage in any antics like shower dancing or autoerotic asphyxiation. Ultimately, I am afraid of pulling a Mrs. Sanders. That’s another reason I don’t have a dog. If I do fall to my death while changing a lightbulb, I don’t want my face to be licked off before somebody comes to find me.

Feel free to skip this chapter if you’ve ever been at a cocktail party and asked someone whether he or she wanted to have children, and after that person said no, you pressed on and either told the person what to do (have a change of heart and have a child) or asked follow-up questions such as: “Well, are you open to adoption?” and “What does your husband/mother/father/sister/brother/psychic/proctologist/mailman say about your selfish refusal to pass on your DNA and contribute to the excessive number of double-wide strollers on narrow city sidewalks, not to mention the selfish preservation of the sanctity of your bedroom by not adding a crib and doing whatever you want with your free time?”

I’ve worked myself up into a bit of a frenzy and am admittedly heated. So, warning: This chapter might not be for you if you’ve ever asked someone whether he or she wants to have children and after that person says no, you’ve tried to guess why , didn’t listen to the answer, and instead offered unsolicited advice on how to still make it work, such as:

“Don’t worry about the money now. Just get pregnant and it will all work itself out.”

“You should freeze your eggs because if you’re feeling like an empty soulless husk as you get older, it will be too late.”

“Not everyone shits in the hospital bed when they deliver a baby. If you poop before you go to the hospital, you’ll be fine.”

Most people who don’t want kids also don’t want to be cornered by strangers at parties who launch an informal investigation into our psyches and backgrounds and decision-making capabilities. It’s been proven that vice presidential hopeful Sarah Palin wasn’t vetted as extensively as I have been in the company of women who are searching for a yet-to-be-discovered “good reason” why I don’t want to have children.

Because a woman might have reached a certain age (at which her eggs are rotting in her abdominal refrigerator) or wears a wedding ring (signifying her clear willingness to settle down with one sexual partner for life and gain some permanent weight around her midriff), people seem to think that it’s high time to encourage her to take the next natural step in life: getting nauseated at random scents that nobody else can smell, not being able to have more than one glass of prosecco on New Year’s Eve, and experiencing the near impossibility of a sex life for six weeks after the baby is born. Invalidating a woman’s life choices by saying things like, “Oh, but you’ll regret it if you don’t have kids,” or, “I didn’t think I wanted kids either until I had one,” is like me going to an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting and telling the newly sober that eventually when they grow old, they’ll want to take the edge off with a little gin and tonic and that if they could only just be mature enough to control themselves, they could go on a fun wine-tasting tour in the Napa Valley.

Ladies, if you have recognized yourself in this chapter, I have news for you: you are not the first person to say these things to us childfree-by-choice-ers and sadly you probably won’t be the last. These comments aren’t things that I can laugh off, like when your charming toddler tells me that I look fat. (Okay, nobody’s toddler said that, but it does sound like something a toddler could say.) You are forcing your values onto my life and I know that you don’t think you are doing that. I know you think you are saving me from a life of childfree loneliness by telling me what it’s like on the other side, but what you’re really doing is making me scared of you mom types. I will walk down a dark alley at night and not flinch at the sight of a shady man in a doorway—but if I see one of you coming toward me on the sidewalk in broad daylight while pushing a stroller, I will cross the street.

I BARELY KNOW Eileen. She’s a friend of my friend Derek and we were talking at his son’s daytime birthday party at Dr. Tea’s Tea Garden (a trendy tea shop in Los Angeles where you can order a frozen CapaTEAno). Wait, I’m sorry. I don’t want Oprah to yell at me about how I’ve exaggerated my memoir. Full disclosure: I was not talking with this woman. She was talking at me. Seemingly unprovoked, Eileen delivered a passionate monologue about how she thought that she never wanted kids until she and her husband accidentally got pregnant and now she can’t imagine her life without baby Henry.

“Once we got pregnant, we thought, This is a miracle! Having a baby is absolutely what we were supposed to do! ”

Oh, Eileen, you say “miracle”… I say one drunken night your birth control pill rolled under the sink and you said, “Just come inside me. I don’t feel like wiping anything off my stomach afterward.”

It’s not a “miracle” that when you have unprotected sex in your thirties a baby gets made even though you always thought you didn’t want one. Babies are not analogous to your drunken cousin whom you didn’t expect to appear on your doorstep on Christmas Eve. (Except that they might be equally as needy.) And baby Henry did not show up like the Virgin Mary on a piece of toast. It’s science.

Also, would all couples kindly stop saying “we’re” pregnant? “We’re going to have a family” is fine. But only one person is actually pregnant, which is the medical term for “knocked up.” If her husband gets lung cancer in thirty years, is Eileen going to appropriate his physical condition as well? She’ll grab the elbow of her dear friends at holiday parties and whisper, “It’s stage three. We’re dying.” She accidentally got pregnant. Not her husband. If their failed birth control actually produced a growing fetus in her husband’s nonexistent womb, then they need to pitch a reality show ASAP. Episode one can probe this phenomenon and show how hard it is to raise two babies when both Mommy and Daddy have to recover from a C-section!