I Can Barely Take Care of Myself (14 page)

I wanted to run after her and yell, “Hey, I wouldn’t have been here making you laugh tonight if I had a
baby, because comedians can’t take babies on the road!” I thought of adding, “How dare you call me selfish? You were probably at home and your baby threw up on your blouse and you had to change a few times and you said to your husband, ‘The girls and I are going out tonight. We just need to laugh!’ And I was the one who made you laugh! That’s my way of giving back!”

I kicked the tampon receptacle
in the stall out of frustration because I came up with the best comeback after she was long gone:
Oh yeah, lady? I’m selfish because I don’t have children? Oprah Winfrey doesn’t have children and you want to tell me that she’s selfish and doesn’t give back? She’s building schools in Africa and giving away refrigerators that have TVs in them to her audience! She handed Dr. Phil, Dr. Oz, and her best friend, Gayle, their careers and asked for nothing in return! (Except maybe a signed confidentiality agreement or two.) Oprah can afford to have kids and Stedman could stay at home and watch them and she still chooses not to procreate! Why aren’t you calling her selfish? And you know who else didn’t have kids? Jesus Christ himself! I win! I played the Jesus card! Jesus, the supposed human incarnation of God, who allegedly walked on water, did not have kids. Is
he
selfish? Didn’t he die for our sins or something?
(After fifteen years of going to church every Sunday as a kid, I still don’t quite get what that means, but it still sounds pretty unselfish to me.)

One of the casualties of doing stand-up comedy and then using the same bathroom as the audience is that people will talk to you about
your act. Sometimes if they like your act, it can be a more difficult conversation to have than if they simply say, “I didn’t like you that much.” (That happens a lot actually. I get it. I was shouting my opinions into a microphone for almost an hour. People want to tell me their opinions after and sometimes their opinion is that I suck.)

I have a stand-up routine I do about masturbation and
the unwanted thoughts that go through women’s heads when they put their hands under their sheets. I need a story to think about. I need a fantasy that makes sense. I can’t just finger myself and picture Johnny Depp’s face. It needs a sense of realism, like how did I meet Johnny Depp? He lives in France. I don’t have a work visa. Besides, he has children and I’ve made it quite clear that I don’t want
to be a mom and I don’t want to be a stepmom either. People love to talk to me about that and share their own tales, which are usually way more graphic than my act. This is part of a conversation that happened
between me and a stranger in a women’s bathroom at the Improv in Palm Beach, Florida:

Are you that comedian who was just up there? No way. I loved your bit about touching yourself. Oh my God, I call it finger blasting! One time I did it in the stall at work. I was so horny. I don’t know if it’s this new birth control I’m taking or the fact that my husband has been working late and our sex life is a little off. I actually like to rub myself over my underwear. Is that weird? You should put that in your act.

More power to the woman who finger blasts herself in the bathroom stall
at work and then drunkenly confesses it to me. She was just telling me what
she
does without passing any judgment on me, unlike the woman with the
Dynasty
bangs who told me that someday I would definitely want to stop what I do for a living and raise a child.

ONE DAY WHILE I was procrastinating writing this book (okay, looking up how to spell a big word), I was on Dictionary.com and the word
of the day was “selfish,” with this quote underneath it:

The passion of love is essentially selfish, while motherhood widens the circle of our feelings.
—Honoré de Balzac

Balzac is a big sack of balls. I know he was an important figure in French literature and some consider him the founder of realism but
fuck you, Balzac.
Is that real enough for you? He wrote this sometime between 1799 and 1850,
so becoming a mother was the only thing that women could do back then, unlike today, when women can live a very fulfilling life after making a sex tape, getting a reality TV show, and eventually becoming a human billboard.

The way I see it, becoming a mother makes a person selfless in
their feelings toward their kid(s) but in a very primal way. It’s not even a choice. If a coyote came charging
at me, I doubt many of my girlfriends would get on the ground in front of me and let themselves get mauled first, but that’s because they didn’t make me from their own DNA or adopt me from China after a yearlong process of paperwork and hope.

I’m no Balzac, so what do I know about motherhood? But if a mother’s love is selfless, does it mean that all mothers are selfless people toward all of humanity?
There’s a big difference.

A lot of my friends who had kids in 2008 said that because they were getting no sleep with their new babies, they had no time to pay attention to politics. If someone as seemingly lobotomized as Michele Bachmann can have five children and raise twenty-three foster children while running for president, surely my friends can have one kid and still take the time to make
sure that someone like Michele Bachmann never becomes president. Frankly, I think that once you have a child, you
should
take some time out of your day to find out what the people governing our country are planning on doing (or what they say they’re planning on doing as opposed to what they are actually doing). How did those pioneer women raise kids and forge across America in caravans in order
to start a new life? I don’t remember reading in the history books that these women decided that they didn’t have time to be part of settling the West because they had to mash up some organic carrots for the baby.

I had other friends who were in a hormonal trance after giving birth and said they just “see things differently now,” and with regard to the future of our nation, they put their hands
over their ears and sang a chorus of “I can’t hear you” because they didn’t want to get involved with anything “negative.” By the way, I also have friends who say the same thing after doing Ecstasy. Any adjustment to your hormones is going to make you see things differently. Just try to care about global warming after getting fucked really, really good twice in one night.

Becoming a mother doesn’t
automatically make you a selfless
person. May I present the jury with the following evidence? Kate Moss, Jaid Barrymore, and Brooke Mueller are all mothers. I know, I’m being a little judgmental toward these ladies, but at least I’m not calling them selfish to their faces in a public bathroom! Of course, most people on that list, if they were in a public bathroom, would be bent over the toilet
at four in the morning, so it’d be hard to say anything to their faces.

It’s simple, really. The urge that most people feel to have kids is the exact same as the urge that I have to
not
have kids. I don’t want to have kids and so I am not going to have kids. People who
want
kids are going to
have
kids. I’m doing what I want to do and people who want kids are doing what
they want to do.
What about
this scenario makes me selfish? If you did not want to have a baby and yet you found one on your doorstep with a note that said
TAKE CARE OF THIS BABY, USING WHATEVER RESOURCES YOU CURRENTLY HAVE, OR EVERYONE ON EARTH DIES
, and you chose to sacrifice your life as you knew it so that nobody died, I’d say, “Wow, you are the definition of selfless. Not even Balzac can argue against that.”

But if
you have enough money to have a kid and you’re partnered up with the love of your life and you two want to have children—am I supposed to think that you’re doing something more altruistic than I am? It’s what you want. It’s fun for you. I know that parents skimp on sleep because their kids don’t sleep through the night and they need to be fed. I know that some parents work a forty-hour-a-week job
in addition to parenting, which is already a more-than-full-time job. Again, no one is making them do it—so I have to assume that the struggle is commensurate with the reward.

My career as a writer, stand-up comedian, and actor is a more-than-full-time job too. Sure, with my jobs, I can take a day off here and there and nobody dies, unlike a parent should she decide, “Nah, I’m not gonna watch
my toddler today. I’ll check in with him tomorrow if he’s around.” That doesn’t mean that I don’t sacrifice or that I’m not sleep deprived, but it’s worth it because it’s what I want to do to the exclusion of anything else. I do not love the thought of
being a mother enough (read: at all) to have a child
and
do what I do for a living. I don’t want my spare time, which is an hour here and a weekend
there, to be taken up with the making and raising of a person—and I feel like that’s the most unselfish thing I can do. I know enough to know what I can’t handle—which is a child tugging on my T-shirt and saying, “Feed me,” when I walk in my front door. Because usually I’m rushing to the bathroom to pee and you know what? A lot of times I don’t make it to the toilet in time and I pee a little
bit in my pants. I have my own diapers to change.

I don’t go up to parents and say, “You know what you guys should do in addition to what you’re already doing? You should start a small charity that helps birds that can’t read. What do you mean you don’t want to do that? How come you don’t want to add that to your schedule? Isn’t that selfish?”

I WAS AT a Starbucks on Melrose Avenue in Los Angeles,
waiting in line to order an Americano. The woman in front of me had already ordered her coffee but was holding the barista hostage as she and her toddler daughter decided on what the little girl wanted to eat.

“Do you want . . . a cookie? How about a . . . blueberry muffin? Oooh, what about . . . some fruit!”

The toddler, overwhelmed with choices, screamed, “
Nooooooooo!
” to everything. The mom
said to the barista, “I’m sorry. Do you have any of those miniscones in the back?” I had about two minutes left on my personal clock to order and get the coffee, otherwise I was going to have to turn around and leave. I didn’t want to be late for work. But I’m a pretty patient person for someone who is a complete spaz in all other areas of life and I know that bringing a kid with you into a store
with shelves full of goodies turns the simple task of ordering a coffee into an ordeal worthy of rebuilding a community after a devastating hurricane. It involves a lot of bending over, picking things up, and putting them back in their place (reason no. 425 that I don’t want kids). The mom turned to me and said, “I’m sorry.”
I said, “Oh, it’s okay.” And then I added, “Being a couple of minutes
late for work is worth it for some coffee.” I don’t know why I said that. I was trying to be funny in that “Hey, we’re making jokes about work and coffee” way.

I immediately went into damage control and sputtered, “I didn’t mean—”

She cut me off with a look of vague disgust and said, “You don’t have kids, do you?” I shook my head no, like I was a toddler who knew I was in trouble and about to
get scolded. With a little sneer she said, “It must be nice not having to be responsible for anyone.”

Admittedly, I had been silently judging this mom for asking her toddler what she wanted instead of just ordering something, not to mention for her fifteen-hundred-dollar stroller that was more expensive than the first car I drove when I got to L.A. Then I remembered that when I was that girl’s
age, I sat in my dad’s lap and watched TV with him while he puffed on Marlboro Reds. He’d let me play with the smoke swirls. I grew up in the 1970s, before raising kids was thought of as a series of “teachable moments.” I’m well aware that I don’t know the first thing about how to parent a toddler, but it did seem kind of selfish of this mom to hold up the ever-increasing line.

Once she left
Starbucks the guy behind me said, “Hey, we’re putting money into the economy and paying taxes that will pay for her kid’s public schooling someday.” Yes!
Good comeback.
I pay taxes! I do lots of selfless things for other people. In fact, just moments after the whole passive-aggressive joke incident, I tipped the barista one dollar on a two-dollar coffee. That is a 50 percent tip!

I don’t understand
how busy parents even have two seconds to look over the fence and notice what I’m doing. I couldn’t care less what anyone else does about their monthly egg-drop. Have kids. Don’t have kids. Be one of those weird adults who like to sleep in a crib and drink from a bottle, pretending they are a kid—whatever gets you through life, as long as you’re not harming others, be my guest. It’s not like
I’m raising babies on a farm and then slaughtering them for food. I’m just not making any babies to start with.

I like to think I’m using all my empathy for good—instead of wasting it on one kid my whole life, I perform selfless, random acts of kindness pretty often for lots of different people. I care about my fellow man and woman and I didn’t even birth them! I donate to charities that help
children in third world countries get vitamins. I donate to charities that help the environment (your kids can thank me for their clean air once they learn how to talk). I send books to libraries in poor parts of the country. I help support my local food bank with money and canned food. I sign petitions and I call my senators and congresspeople to tell them to stop all of these silly wars that your
kids are being forced to fight. I donate clothing to Goodwill every month (without getting a receipt for a tax write-off; you’re welcome, America). I actually must be one of the most selfless people on earth because I have no reason to be nice to anyone. I’m not on drugs and I have no maternal hormones pumping through my . . . veins? Brain waves? Arteries? (Where do hormones live?)

One afternoon
at CVS, when the woman in front of me realized at the checkout that she’d forgotten her wallet, I purchased the tampons she was trying to buy. I gave my friend a Klonopin once because she wanted to make sure she got some sleep on a flight. No, I’m not a doctor and I guess it’s not “legal” to share prescription medication, but my empathy couldn’t be stopped. Who doesn’t relate to wanting to sleep
on a flight?