Jen Kirkman - I Can Barely Take Care of Myself

When did toilet talk become acceptable daytime party chitchat? When I was on ADHD medication I was so constipated that I had to shove a suppository up my ass. I didn’t tell the girls at the stupid fucking tea party this fact. In fact, I have never told anyone that. Now I’m just telling you to brag about how I’ve never told anyone. Is this what Stockholm syndrome feels like?

Another semiacquaintance, Ali, said to me, “Jen, you’re getting the perfect training for motherhood at this party!”

Eileen fielded that one. “Oh, hah, Jen doesn’t think she wants children.”

Ali looked confused. “Why don’t you think you want children?”

“I… actually… I know that I don’t want children,” I said.

Ali shifted her bundle of joy to her other boob. “Well, I mean, can you physically not have children?”

Oh, that’s a polite party question! Are you barren? Maybe I am barren. I don’t know. I’ve never taken a test. I have taken an AIDS test twelve times because I really care whether I have AIDS. I have never taken a fertility test because I really don’t care whether I am fertile. I told Ali that I assume I am perfectly able to carry a child, especially since my childbearing hips kept me from becoming a professional ballerina, but I wasn’t planning to test them out.

Ali and the other mothers exchanged a look. “But, so… you’ll adopt, right?” She seemed pleased to have solved my problem without a pesky series of IVF treatments.

Adoption is a wonderful thing. Especially if you’re Madonna or Angelina Jolie and you can take a private jet along with some private paparazzi to a third world country and pick out a beautiful baby while wearing designer aviator shades and couture khaki pants. What I don’t understand is that when I tell people that I don’t want to have kids—they immediately think I mean I physically can’t give birth. I don’t know how to be more clear about this. I do not want to make a child nor do I want to pick out a child like I’m at a cabbage patch or a Cabbage Patch Kids convention. It’s just this simple: I do not want to raise a child.

Ali warned me in a whisper, “But you could… regret that decision.” She seemed horrified, like if someone whom she is six degrees of friendship separated from ever regrets not having a baby, she’ll be personally affected and have to go on Prozac to deal with her feelings.

“Look,” I said, “I’ve been through worse things than regret and I think I’m old enough to have a pretty good hypothesis on this one. I’d rather regret not having a child than having one.”

Ali interrupted, “Oh, but you wouldn’t regret having one!” That’s when her little girl Marta pointed at my face and said, “Why do you have ugly red dots on your cheek?” Ali and the Mommies shared a mutual chuckle. Ali acted as if her child pointing out my acne was just the revelation I needed to change my mind. She said, “See? Kids keep ya honest and grounded.”

Honest? Her kid pointed out my PMS breakout. That’s rude, not honest. And I don’t need a kid to “keep me grounded” when I have adult acne itself to do that. Oh, boy! Just imagine how much worse off I’d be without kids—I’d be walking around feeling good about myself at a party!

I’m not offended by what a toddler says to me. Her brain isn’t fully developed yet. And judging from the behavior of her mom, it probably never will be. But some parents become so rude once they have kids. How about a simple teachable moment for little Marta? Could Ali not have said, “Honey, we don’t point out things we see on people’s faces unless we’re helping them.” For example, “You have something white and crusty on your chin, I think it’s toothpaste. God, I hope it’s toothpaste.” (Dog owners are the same way, incidentally. They can’t stop their animals from behaving badly and they never apologize for their little ones who can’t speak. Meanwhile, I’m left with an unwanted wet nose sniffing around my crotch in public.)

At this point I hadn’t been to a birthday party for a friend that started at two and ended promptly at five since I was a kid. If you’re going to have an afternoon birthday party to accommodate you and your friends’ new lifestyles as parents—just go all out and have the damn thing at a park or a playground or something. There’s nothing fun about trying to drink a hot tea while toddlers crawl underneath me as though my legs are a jungle gym. (And speaking of jungle gyms, when I was a kid all I saw when I saw that thing on the playground was a death trap. Let’s get the kids all loaded up on sugar and send them outside to hurl their bodies around some lead pipes! We’ll build it over some brain-busting concrete to catch their fall!)

SATURDAYS ARE MY day to write or run errands, and in Los Angeles if I time it just right, I can hit the dry cleaner and the grocery store—both only two miles from my house—and it only takes six hours with traffic. I had to basically lose a day, like some punishing form of daylight savings, just to see my friend on his birthday. The mothers in the crowd were doing what they would be doing on a Saturday anyway, breast-feeding their babies and changing diapers—except they wouldn’t be doing it on a quaint café table for two in public. That’s the thing that happens when your friends and acquaintances start to have kids. You have to get on their schedule, like you’re a nurse working in a hospice, or the friendship dies on a slow morphine drip—without the fun of a morphine drip.

By this point I felt self-conscious staying at this party without my boob hanging out. It reminded me of an after-hours party I went to in 1986, following Eileen Rosenstein’s bat mitzvah, when a bunch of girls retreated to Eileen’s room to show one another their burgeoning breasts. Mine were yet to grow. I actually got one boob at age twelve and the other one didn’t grow until age fifteen. Every year I went to my pediatrician and asked her what the hell was going on. She always told me that to have one boob grow at a time was normal. Every year I took exception. “Normal? Normal? Having one boob is normal? No. Every girl at school has either some or none but nobody has just one! Besides, if it’s so ‘normal’ to have only one boob, why don’t they sell slings at Victoria’s Secret?”

At times like this, I feel like I don’t fit in with society. Both in the mideighties with my one boob and now with two very nice boobs that don’t offer sustenance to others, I don’t quite feel like a real woman. Even though I drive a nice car and have a job, a manager, a few agents, an accountant, an entertainment and a divorce lawyer, and other “grown-up” things in my life, I still feel like a fraud. I’m always thinking that any day a policeman is going to stop me as I walk down the street and say, “Excuse me, little girl with the big purse? What are you doing? Shouldn’t you be in school right now? Where are your parents?”

I didn’t even feel like I was acting like a normal kid when I was a kid. In sixth grade, the most popular girl in school, Meredith Renner, had a slumber party. Not just a slumber party—it was a costume party/slumber party. And she was rich. She lived in a mini-mansion before they were called McMansions. My mom never let me sleep over at my working-class friends’ houses—mainly because the working-class people always had one parent (usually Mom) working some kind of night shift, leaving the other home to supervise. Everyone knows that kids could start a nuclear missile program in the basement while Dad snores away upstairs in front of an episode of Nightline, skillfully clutching a can of Bud Light that never spills.

I don’t know why Meredith invited me. I had friends but was not one of the “popular girls.” I wasn’t rich but I wasn’t a nerd. I had saved up some babysitting money and purchased a Benetton T-shirt. I think that T-shirt caught her eye and she assumed I was one of them.