Jen Kirkman - I Can Barely Take Care of Myself

“I think some Greek yogurt that hopefully won’t expire over the weekend?”

“Girl,” he said, “Greek yogurt don’t keep you warm at night.”

True. In fact, Greek yogurt will not keep me warm at night but it most certainly will keep me up at night… with stomach cramps, because I’m lactose intolerant, but I refuse to acknowledge this fate. But when I’m tired and coming home from a business trip on a Sunday at midnight only to have to turn around and be at work by nine o’clock the next day—I would avoid both active cultures and tiny active human beings at all costs.

I WATCHED BABY Henry suck away at Eileen’s nipple and, just like I did at the eighth-grade dance after no boy asked me to dance during “Stairway to Heaven,” I felt uncomfortable and excused myself. “Well, Eileen. I’ll let you go. You seem busy.”

She ignored my hint and picked right up where she’d left off before the boob hijacking. Henry kept eating his lunch while I kept missing the passed plates of tea cookies.

“Well, Jen, having a baby is definitely something you can only plan so much. Nobody is really ever ready. There is no perfect time to try to have a baby. You just have to jump in and try.”

I’m sorry, what? You have to plan a baby. It’s the most important decision a human can make! I’m just some selfish woman with a lack of maternal instinct and even I know that you should at least try to plan for a baby. Buying a vintage Fonzie lunch box at a yard sale you just happened to walk by is something you can’t plan a perfect time to execute. Those are the only kinds of miracles that just happen.

“Well, okay, but I think the perfect time to try to have a baby should at least start with someone wanting a baby, which I don’t.”

She eyed me with that vaguely condescending mom look. “I know you love your cute figure and trust me you don’t get that back after you have a baby, but once you have kids you realize that there’s more to life than fitting into skinny pants.”

“Tell that to David Bowie,” I joked. “I mean, he’ll destroy his whole legacy if he starts walking around with side fat over his leather pants. Nobody wants Ziggy Stardust to turn into… Ziggy.”

Obviously if I wanted to have a baby, and I could have a baby, I would fucking have a baby! But I am never going to throw away my leather pants from 1997.

“Look,” I said, “my not wanting a baby has nothing to do with not wanting to gain weight. I just don’t want a kid. But even if I did want a kid, I’m really not the best person for the job.”

Baby Henry slapped his tiny-but-stronger-than-a-robotic-claw hand over Eileen’s mouth and held it there. He squealed with delight and for no apparent reason, one second later, burst into sobs. With Henry’s miniature fingers acting like a fleshy muzzle, Eileen mumbled out the best she could, “Jen, somewhere deep down, you want a baby, but you’re scared. I think you doth protest too much.”

I don’t know what’s worse: the fact that she talked only about her kid during an entire birthday party and that my saying I don’t want kids just opened me up to a half-hour psychoanalysis session—or the fact that it’s twenty-first-century America and she just said “doth.”

I wanted to join baby Henry in his tantrum. I don’t want to have a baby but sometimes I want to be a baby because it’s socially acceptable for them to cry and scream in public. I wanted to blurt out, “Oh yeah? Well, I think that you doth protest too much and you don’t diet enough! Somewhere, deep doth down, you want to go to Weight Watchers and fit into those skinny jeans again but you don’t have the stamina! You know you think about skinny pants as much as any other woman. You’re a female living in Los Angeles and I’m supposed to believe that you’re the only one without some kind of body image issue?”

Eileen was right about one thing. I was letting myself engage in this type of confrontation and get defensive again. I was “protesting too much.” I should have walked away the minute she said, “I think you’ll want a kid now that all of your friends are starting to have them, no?” If she were a lawyer, the judge would have slammed the gavel and said, “Please rephrase the question. Don’t presume that the witness wants to have a kid. You doth lead the witness.”

Next, Eileen did this thing that pregnant women and moms do; she started in with her war stories. (Some alcoholics do it too at parties when they notice you’re drinking and they can’t.) They pitch it like some kind of cautionary tale but really I think it’s just a way to brag that they’ve been through some hell that you haven’t and you still won’t be a real person until your body is physically altered by birth or you’ve woken up in an alley in Tijuana with a sore taint and a new pet donkey.

As though she were granting me just one tiny hint of validation, Eileen confessed, “Well, at least you don’t have to pee every five minutes. That’s one good thing about not having kids. All I do is pee. I think it permanently affected my bladder. I can’t believe it but I’ve even started having to wear one of those little maxi pads in my underwear even when I don’t have my period, just in case some urine falls out.”

Falls out?!

When I was in first grade we had a bathroom inside of our classroom. The door must have been made of something very soundproof because none of us six-year-olds were self-conscious about going pee-pee or poo-poo in the private bathroom during class, except for this one kid, Scott Nelson. Scott was obsessed with all things “bodily function.” He pressed his body up against that bathroom door anytime someone went inside. He cupped his hands to his ears and you could see the strain in his face as he tried to hear a note of a fart or the crescendo of a urine stream.

When Amanda Jones was out sick for a week with the measles, we were assigned to write her get-well cards. Scott’s card was a picture of a bum sitting on a toilet. He drew an arrow pointing at the butt hole with a very educational but not quite get-well message, POOP COMES OUT HERE. It seems like when a woman gets pregnant, her inner Scott Nelson takes over and suddenly sentiments like this become polite party conversation.

I guess because the pressure on a pregnant woman’s bladder is for the greater good of bringing life into the world, we should all just sit back and hear about how when they puke they pee and when they pee they fart and when they fart they actually shit their pants. Can’t pregnant moms just sit around and talk about civilized things like macaroon cookies—are the ones from Paris really the best? Or debate about their favorite Kennedy brother, or lament that because it’s not the 1970s it looks stupid to wear a hair scarf? Why do pregnant women want to tell me at parties that lately they are secreting a starchy white fluid about once a month that causes their underwear to crust? Especially when I’m trying to eat a cream cheese finger sandwich? Scott Nelson was a troubled probable future serial killer when he wanted to talk about what comes out of his butt—what’s your excuse?

Eileen’s exposed left nipple seemed to be a beacon of light for other mother ships at the tea lounge. Suddenly, I was surrounded by a handful of women breast-feeding their young and a handful of women still incubating theirs. One pregnant woman leaned over and said to Eileen in this ridiculous stage whisper, “You were right, girl. I’m horny all the time. ”

Listen, it is scientifically proven that pregnant women get super-horny because it helps them hold on to their mate who impregnated them. If they weren’t horny, their mate would just be living with an overweight pickle eater who stopped shaving her legs. Yet every pregnant woman tells anyone who will listen (I’m looking at you, Jessica Simpson) that she’s eight months pregnant and has never felt sexier or hornier! Guess what? If you didn’t feel sexy or horny during your eighth month of pregnancy—you’d be crying in a ball on the bedroom floor, clutching a snot-filled tissue and wearing your food-stained fleece pajama bottoms as your cheating husband walked out the door with your nonpregnant Pilates instructor. It is not interesting that you are horny when pregnant. If I want to watch women talk about sex openly, I’ll watch The Golden Girls episode where they go on a cruise and decide to buy condoms and Blanche makes that impassioned speech over the loudspeaker.