I Can Barely Take Care of Myself (13 page)

Lucy continued by confiding in me that she and her husband were “trying” to get pregnant. I hate that expression: “We’re trying.” What that translates to is: “We’re fucking.” After someone tells me they’re “trying,”
I just get a visual of them having sex without birth control and I don’t want to picture other people having sex with or without birth control—unless they are superhot and I am very drunk and have an extra $19.99 to spend on a movie in a hotel room.

When someone tells me, “We’re trying,” I fantasize about having the following conversation:

“Oh, you’re trying? We’re trying too. Yeah. It’s hard.
If you ever need to talk, just call me. There’s strength in talking about it—it neutralizes the demons.”

“Jen, what are you talking about? I mean we’re trying to get pregnant.”

“Oh, I thought you meant you were trying not to kill yourselves.”

Lucy chomped away at her salad and talked with her mouth full
about how at one point her husband, Peter, didn’t want to bring kids into the world because
he had asthma and was allergic to beets and didn’t want to pass down his weak DNA. She said that once they got married their priorities suddenly changed and they wanted to raise children. Matt and I failed to see how our decision to not have kids would change after a ceremony and reception where we’d dance to Kool & the Gang’s “Celebration” with our closest friends and family.

Across the table,
Matt and Peter started talking and gesticulating wildly about movies—one of those in-depth conversations where guys suddenly sound like they have autism, there is so much attention to detail.

“Matt, you know lots of people think that Orson Welles was the first director to put the camera on the floor, but he borrowed the technique from John Ford, who originally used it in the movie
Stagecoach.
”

“Oh yeah, Peter, I knew that! Did you know that Orson Welles secretly watched
Stagecoach
forty times while he was making
Citizen Kane
?”

They couldn’t hear what Lucy and I were talking about. If an alien had landed at the table, he would have assumed that Peter and Matt were the married human couple, with the way they’d turned their chairs to completely face each other and how they playfully punched
each other in the arm every time the other dork made a really good point about twentieth-century cinema.

“I know you’re not even married yet,” Lucy lectured, “but at your age, you have to think about making a family
while
you’re planning the wedding.” Five minutes ago I was too young to know that I was going to change my mind and suddenly I’m too old to waste any time after my wedding to plan
on making a family. Which age bracket am I in? Young and stupid or old and barren? And “making a family” is another expression that grosses me out. I pictured Matt standing over me in a lab coat with a turkey baster.

Lucy took a big sip of her red wine, wiped her lip, and leaned
into me. She may have been a little drunk or a little dehydrated or a little both, because she had that dry “wine lip”
that looked like someone poured purple paint in the cracks of a sidewalk. She leaned in close and whispered, “What would you do if you accidentally got pregnant?” I didn’t even understand the question. “Oh, I would never cheat on Matt,” I answered. “No, Jen, I mean what if you got pregnant, by accident, with Matt’s baby?”

“Are you asking me, someone you barely know, at our friends’ wedding, if
I would have an
abortion
?”

“Well,” she said, “it’s something you have to think about if you don’t want kids. I mean, I personally think that abortion is something for teenagers who couldn’t possibly raise a child. But ever since I decided that I wanted to try to become a mother and I see how difficult it can be to get pregnant, I realize that it’s a gift to be pregnant and if a married couple
who are both employed accidentally get pregnant, I don’t see how you can give that up.”

A total stranger tried to small-talk me about abortion. I have never had an abortion. I never want to have an abortion. I also don’t want to have a baby. I fear how both procedures would impact my life and leave me full of regret. I didn’t lose my virginity until I was twenty. It’s not that I’m a prude; I
was one of those “I’ll do everything but . . .” girls—and no, I don’t mean that I did it in the butt. I’d given plenty of blow jobs, and many generous teenage boys had gone down on me on saggy couches in their moms’ basements.

After every encounter with oral sex, I was panic-stricken and convinced that I was pregnant. For some reason, despite having taken sex ed class in fifth grade, my perception
of how someone gets pregnant grew more and more skewed with each passing year. It got to the point where I was convinced that if I gave a guy a hand job, the sperm would then live on my finger, and since I had forgotten to wash my hands before I peed, the sperm would travel through the thin bathroom tissue when I wiped, jump from the outside of my vagina, and skip up my fallopian tubes. I had
the kind of Catholic mom who, I suspected, might withdraw me from school if I got
pregnant and make me go upstate, where I would carry the baby to term in some dilapidated mental institution and then give it away to some nice nuns to raise. But I didn’t want to leave school and my ballet lessons for nine months. I didn’t want to have an abortion either, because when I was sixteen and fearing I
was pregnant, I made a promise to God.

I prayed, “God, if I ever get pregnant, I just have to have an abortion. I can’t raise a baby. But if I have an abortion, I promise I will become a nun.”

I figured I could spend my life being celibate and secretly pining away for boys, writing about them in my diary. It was how I spent my early teen years anyway. As long as nuns could listen to the Cure
to help offset some of the loneliness and angst, I was convinced I could handle it. But I was not ready to answer a stranger at a wedding about how I’d handle an accidental pregnancy.

As I stammered and babbled my neurotic tales of teen angst to Lucy, I looked over at Matt and Peter, who were laughing and ordering more whiskey. Why wasn’t Matt getting grilled about his supposed immaturity? How
was Matt not realizing that I’d been hijacked into a philosophical debate as middle-aged relatives of our friends were starting to drunkenly swipe their fingers through the frosting in the wedding cake? Couldn’t he see the SOS looks I was shooting him that said, “Help me. I’m being judged by a woman for an abortion I didn’t have!”?

I went to the bathroom and just grabbed on to the sink until
my heart stopped racing. I fought back tears. How had I allowed a total stranger to bully me at a fucking wedding? I let the tears fall. Goddamn it! Isn’t this why people get engaged, so they don’t have to spend Saturday nights crying in bathrooms anymore?

On the drive home Matt and I caught up on the two different conversations we’d had at the wedding.

“Jen, I’m sorry I didn’t check in with
you. You were talking with your hands and you had plenty of wine in front of you. It seemed like you were having fun.”

“Matt, she asked us if we wanted children and then she started whispering at me! What did you think we were talking about?”

“I didn’t think about what you were talking about. I was talking to Peter.”

“Why can’t men think about more than one thing at once? I was talking to Lucy
and
thinking about
your
conversation.”

“You win, Jen. You win.”

I started talking to Matt like I was his military superior. “Matt, we can’t fight. We’re on the same side and we have to stay vigilant. This is our new world. People are going to start having kids and I’m not taking the brunt of the pressure. You know what? You need to start lying and saying that you’ve had a vasectomy.”

“I’m not
going to lie about things I didn’t do to my penis, Jen.”

“But that’s our trump card! I can say, ‘My husband can’t make sperm! He paid a doctor to take a knife to his balls! Take that! We
can’t
change our minds!”

I thought for sure that once I was in my thirties, people would stop telling me that I was young and that I’d change my mind about not wanting to have children. Someone my age in colonial
times would be dead by now, probably from childbirth. “I’m in my thirties” always seemed like a way to say you’re in a nice, tidy adult age bracket where you might not yet own a home but you definitely know what you want out of life. I always thought that thirty was that magical age where, just like from Brownies to Girl Scouts, you cross that bridge into the land of Being Taken Seriously as
an Adult. I thought that getting married at age thirty-five to a man who also didn’t want children would ensure that I finally “won” my own argument. I’m not having children. I was right. Ha. Ha. I didn’t change my mind. My eggs are drying up and probably damaged anyway. Even if I did change my mind and wanted to get pregnant at this age, there’s a good chance that something would go wrong in the
DNA and my baby could end up a Tea Party wacko.

I don’t want to wish my life away, but I’m starting to think that life is going to get really sweet when I’m seventy, and people will
finally have to accept that I’m old enough to manage my own mind. Although I wouldn’t be surprised if someone said, “You say you don’t want children but you have early-onset dementia. You only think you don’t want
kids and you only think that you are presiding over a conversation between your oxygen tank and your St. Francis of Assisi figurine. You’ll change your mind.”

6. Jesus Never Changed Diapers

Years ago, I was in the women’s bathroom at a comedy club in Addison, Texas, after I’d come offstage. (I’m sorry to brag about performing in the suburbs of Texas and using the same bathroom as the audience.) Anyway, I was washing my hands at the sink and a woman came out of the stall. She had seen my set and referenced the part in my act where I talk about how I
don’t want to have kids, saying she loved my joke that goes: “My husband and I don’t want kids. We can’t have a third person running around the house who is more helpless than the two of us.”

She washed her hands and started to fix her hair in the mirror. “But you want kids someday, right?” she asked.

“Oh! No. I was totally serious. We’re . . . childfree by choice,” I said, trying to make it
sound official, like it was some club I’d joined with a nonrefundable deposit.

She continued to casually fix her hair, reaching into her purse for a trial-size bottle of hairspray and going to work on her Texas bangs. Her gaze remained on herself in the mirror but she said to me, “Really? No kids? So it’s just going to be the two of you? Isn’t that selfish?”

Do people think that saying the words
“Isn’t that” in front of “selfish” masks the fact that they just blatantly called me selfish to
my face? It’s like when people say, “No offense, but,” before saying something offensive. Or when someone says, “I don’t mean to be racist,” and then tells you that they think Puerto Rican people smell like burnt hamburgers.

Isn’t that selfish?
She’d said it so casually! I’d rather she pulled a combination
comb-switchblade out of the back pocket of her jeans, held it up to my neck, and said, “You wanna rumble, you selfish non-child-having bitch? You think you can just go onstage and make jokes and then tell me in a bathroom that you’re not interested in bringing a baby into this world? Huh?”

If she were actually
mad
at me about not wanting to have a baby, it would make more sense. I’d know this
was just her hot-button issue—she wants everyone to procreate. And I would simply choose to not engage, just like I do with my angry atheist friends who talk about God more than people who believe in one:

“There is no God! It’s just something people believe in because they’re afraid of death!”

“Okay. So there might not be a God and we’re all afraid of death. Well, you’ve figured that one out.
Can we have lunch now?”

“But, Jen, you have to pick a side. You can’t just be agnostic. It’s as silly as saying you don’t know if there’s a Santa Claus!”

“Got it. There is no proof of God and it’s the parents who put the presents under the Christmas tree. Can we have lunch
now
?”

But it was the way that this woman cemented her bangs to her forehead while she coolly tossed off a judgment about
my person that made me realize that whether she was even aware of it or not, somewhere in her core she just assumed that everyone wants to have children, and to
not
want children indicates some sort of factory malfunction. She made me feel like not wanting kids was a character flaw on my part, because I wasn’t paying attention in nursery school when we were learning how to share blocks. She could
have said any other
s
word. She could have asked, “No kids? Really? Isn’t that . . . sexy?” Or, “Isn’t that . . . shrewd?” I wouldn’t even have bristled so much at being asked, “Isn’t that . . . shitty?”

She finished shellacking the top of her head and turned to me to say, “Well, maybe you don’t want kids now, but when you’re done with all this . . . you might want to give back.” And when she
said “done with all this,” she pointed all five of her fingers at me, like a lazy, droopy version of “talk to the hand.” She wiggled her fingers as if to indicate that my career as a stand-up comic, what she called “all this,” was something she could lift from me, like a reverse spell.

“It can’t be just about you forever, Jen. Trust me. My husband and I couldn’t
not
have kids. After a few years
of just us, we felt that we were being too . . . selfish. Now I can’t even imagine not having brought my daughter into the world. Who was I to keep it from her? Anyway, you’re really funny. Good luck with everything!”

And with that unsolicited advice, she matter-of-factly tucked her hairspray back into her purse and walked out of the bathroom, leaving me to stew in the airborne taste of aerosol
and that word: “selfish.”

I went into a stall and just hid there for a bit, hoping that I wouldn’t run into any more women who felt compelled to tell me how funny and how selfish I was. I had to wrap my head around the concept that this woman thought that not bringing her daughter into the world was keeping the world from her daughter. So, every woman who doesn’t choose to give birth is leaving
some poor kid hanging out there in some kind of limbo? There’s a semiexistent child right now holding on to a lottery ticket and he has no idea that his number is never going to come up because he’s been assigned to selfish me? Fuck. How do you
stop
having kids with that guilt on your head?