I Can Barely Take Care of Myself (17 page)

That’s what I love about my mom ever since she’s entered her seventies. She’s still lucid but has the honesty of someone who’s lost her mind. I’m up to my neck in hearing my friends listing their reasons for having kids, how it’s all about “taking part in creating the next generation” and “carrying on the species” and “giving back.” I appreciate that my mom
admitted on behalf of all mothers that what drives procreation for the most part is the desire to see what the combined genes of you and your spouse would look like. If I want to see what another man and I could create, we’ll just take a walk down to the Venice Beach boardwalk and have someone draw our caricatures.

It took a year but I finally got my preburrito body back and lost thirty pounds.
It involved actually moving my limbs and walking and not eating four bagels every morning for breakfast—oh, and getting a divorce . . .

8. Faking It for George Clooney

Having children has had an enormous effect on me as a person, and creatively. When you have children you look at life differently. You have a much fuller sense of appreciation for the fragility of life, and how magical we all are as human beings.

—Madonna

Oh, Madonna. You claim to have had a cabdriver drop you off in Times Square with only fifty dollars in your
pocket when you first moved to New York City in the 1970s. Then you became the biggest pop star in the world. You married Sean Penn and you introduced us all to Vogueing. While you were doing all of that, I was so painfully aware of the fragility of life that I had to be put on Prozac to calm my anxiety. Now that my serotonin levels are evened out, I don’t need a kid to remind me again about the
fragility of this life. Also, I think you realized how magical life was before you had kids when you sang in “Like a Prayer,” “Life is a mystery / Everyone must stand alone / I hear you call my name / And it feels like home,” and then made out with that hot, black Jesus.

The nail salon is a place where small talk breeds like Michelle and Jim Bob Duggar. (His name is fucking
Jim Bob
and he has
nineteen kids. If I invented a character named Jim Bob who bred nineteen people, any television network executive or movie studio mogul would say, “That sounds a little clichéd. I mean is anybody
really
named Jim Bob? Even we hateful Hollywood writers can admit that’s a name that’s manufactured by the likes of us who still harbor contempt for our flyover-state hometowns.”)

At a nail salon, when
a woman whom you’ve never met looks over and asks, “What color is that you’re getting?” that’s one degree of separation away from, “Do you have children? Let’s talk about our kids!” It’s a strange phenomenon, but when mothers have an hour to spare, they want out of the house and away from their kids—and yet they can’t stop talking about them. Mom’s manicure is just going to get fucked up right when
she gets home, when Billy hands her an action figure wrapped in a hard-to-open plastic package and says, “Get this out for me, Mommy, or I will start screaming like Mel Gibson about the Jews and you’ll rue the day you left me at home and went to a nail salon!” But she wants out of the house anyway just so she doesn’t have to listen to inane cartoons or talk in a baby voice for sixty minutes. She
can sit down and have a real, adult conversation about . . . babies.

Women who have babies have these predictable hormones that make it impossible for them to talk about anything but babies. Just like every teenager has predictable hormones that make them so horny that they’ll dry-hump a throw pillow to orgasm.

New moms especially have that glazed-over Heaven’s Gate look in their I-had-to-stop-taking-Xanax-whi
le-breast-feeding eyes.

Remember when Katie Holmes started (contractually) dating her (benefactor) boyfriend Tom Cruise? She couldn’t stop saying, “Tom is amazing. Everything is amazing.” I’m sure everything
was
amazing for Katie at first—until she filed for divorce seven years later. I remember reading that on their first date, Tom flew Katie on a private jet to Paris for dinner. I’m not sure
whether he took control of her brain on board the flight or under the Eiffel Tower, but she definitely wasn’t in Dawson’s Creek anymore. Once Tom started having
Scientology minders follow Katie around (I know these things; I read
Star
magazine) and he changed her name to “Kate,” I’m sure there were moments when Katie/Kate/Mrs. Cruise thought,
Oh my God. What the fuck have I done? I’m not myself anymore. But I’m the one who wouldn’t shut the fuck up about how amazing everything was and I’ll look stupid if I suddenly change course now and say, “It was amazing but now it’s just like every other relationship, full of challenges and compromise and not all that glamorous.” Well, I’m just going to keep saying “amazing” because there’s no turning back. And every time I do literally turn back, there is someone on Tom’s payroll following me. It’s amazing!

This is what new moms remind me of. (Although on a side note, I have to admit, even though I’m convinced that she’s part robot, I’m completely taken with Suri Cruise. She wears high heels and lipstick and walks around Manhattan carrying a Starbucks cup and she’s six years old. She doesn’t play with other kids and although that sounds
sad on paper, think of all the germs she’s avoiding. You never see a picture of Suri Cruise with a summer cold. If I had to have a kid, I’d want Suri Cruise. She could totally get me in to see all of the cool shows at Fashion Week and I’d probably get a pretty sick allowance.)

New moms love to start conversations with strangers like the one I had with my manicurist “Tammy” when I was still married.
I didn’t put her name in quotations to protect her identity. The tag was too small for, “We all know this woman’s name is something you could never pronounce and she doesn’t want to hear you butchering her native tongue, so she picked one of your boring American names so that you people can address her. You happy?
Tammy
.”

Tammy noticed my wedding ring as she removed my chipped nail polish and
asked, “Do you and your husband have children?”

That day I replied no with confidence. I used to answer that question, “Naaaaww,” with a song in my voice because I was trying to sound pleasant and not like some emotionally closed-off Anti-mother Monster who stomps through neighborhoods, lifting roofs off homes, grabbing children out of their cribs, and actually gnawing
off their cheeks and toes,
unlike most adults, who just jokingly threaten to do so.

I’m not an emotionally closed-off Antimother Monster but that seems to be how people with kids see me, so I used to say, “Naaaaww,” hoping that it would read as, “Awwww, I just don’t want kids but I’m supersweet and I’m happy to hear your stories about kids. I think it’s funny, for example, when a toddler’s first words are ‘Goddamn it.’
You have kids. I don’t. Different strokes for different folks! What a wonderful world! Awwww. Naaaaww.”

But despite my best efforts, never once has answering, “Naaaaww,” ever been met with a simple, “Oh. Okay.”

So this time when I answered no, I didn’t smile. I didn’t maintain eye contact. I did nothing to indicate that this topic—or any topic for that matter, Tammy—was on the table for dissection.
I put my nose back into my book. But I might as well have chucked the book into my bucket of foot-soak, pulled out an accordion, played a tune, and sung, “Ask me anything!” because Tammy didn’t pick up on my social cues.

She stopped filing my nails. She grabbed my hand and forced my eyes to meet hers. She said, “In my country, it is against the family and your husband to not want to give them
a child. It is a sin.”

I wanted to say, “Well, that sounds oppressive. So aren’t you glad you’re no longer living in that country with your no-fun family?” Instead, I said, “Well, my relatives and my husband are fine with my decision.” Tammy admonished me, “When it’s too late you will want one and then you will have no eggs left.” Oh, okay, I didn’t realize that it was Buy One Manicure, Get a
Fucked-Up Fortune of Doom Day.

I regularly tip more than 20 percent in cash at this place and in my humble opinion that means that I should not have to be lectured about adopting the sexist rules of a third world country that I never intend to eat food from, let alone visit. It’s bad enough that during my manicure I have to inhale the acrylic nail fumes from the Real Housewife of the Cheaper
Neighborhood Five Miles from
Beverly Hills who’s sitting next to me, incense from the Buddha shrine in the doorway, and unattended burnt rice from the Crock-Pot in the bathroom. Besides, when someone is rubbing lotion on my feet and legs as if they’re trying to seduce and make love to me—I don’t think there should be any conversation at all. Focus!

I WENT BACK to that nail salon recently with
two fewer accessories: my wedding and engagement rings. I walked in and Tammy, who had once casually informed me that I was dishonoring my mother and father, smiled and greeted me with, “We missed you! Welcome back.” Either I’d made quite the good impression on her last year despite my failure as a woman, or she thinks that all white girls look alike.

I took a seat and held an
Us Weekly
magazine
in front of my face. I don’t know what’s worse: being told by a manicurist that in her country not becoming a mother is a pox on the family, or having my intelligence insulted with the term “baby bump.” When a woman is pregnant and her belly protrudes—what you’re seeing is a baby. Not a baby bump. A baby bump is a worrisome growth on your baby that needs to be surgically removed. I remember that
when celebrities used to talk about “bumps,” they were whispering in the bathroom at the Chateau Marmont on the Sunset Strip about doing a little cocaine. Actually, I don’t personally remember that. I’ve never been a celebrity, a drug user, or a bathroom attendant at the Chateau. But now, “bump” no longer refers to a thing that makes you stay up all night and talk fast. “Bump” refers to a thing
that makes you stay up all night and breast-feed.

At least one double-page spread in any celebrity gossip magazine is dedicated to baby bumps (real ones or false-alarm celebrity bloating). I did some pretty intense research on the origin of the term “baby bump.” I typed “baby bump origin” into Google and clicked on the first result. According to a
Washington Post
article from 2008, “the term
appears to be
British in origin and in use.” I’m mad at Britain now. They gave my parents the Beatles but their export for my generation is the expression “baby bump”?

There’s a Baby Bump Watch in most issues of
In Touch, Us Weekly,
and
InStyle
magazines. Photographers and editors are on the case! No pregnant celebrity will be able to wait the requisite twelve weeks to announce her pregnancy
anymore! The Baby Bump Watch Patrol will make sure that every time you leave the house holding your purse suspiciously at uterus level, wear an empire-waisted-dress, or have yet to digest a high-carb lunch, you will be up for the very public debate of “Is She or Isn’t She?”

I’m just waiting for there to be an Adoption Papers Bump Watch that analyzes photos of celebrity women who carry overstuffed
attachés filled with what seem to be reams of legal documents. “Is She Adopting or Is She Working Part-Time as a Paralegal?”

While I waited for Tammy to start in on my manicure, I read about how January Jones eats her own placenta. I removed the spoonful of vanilla frozen yogurt from my mouth and pushed the cup aside.

January Jones informs us: “Our placenta gets dehydrated and made into vitamins.
It’s something I was very hesitant about, but we’re the only mammals who don’t ingest our own placentas.” We’re also the only mammals who can pay doctors to throw our placentas in human wastebins and then walk to a pharmacy and pick up bottles of vitamins that produce the same health benefits as our human postbaby slime.

The idea of someone eating her own placenta makes me think of a woman with
a lobster bib around her neck, picking up a sloppy, goopy, jellyfish mound of wetness. It falls through her fingers and she tries to quickly shove it into her mouth. Ironically January Jones plays Betty Draper on
Mad Men
—a housewife from the 1960s who would not even be allowed to say the word “pregnant” if she were a character on a TV show. (In the 1950s, the CBS network wouldn’t allow Lucille
Ball’s character, Lucy, to refer to herself as pregnant and so in the episodes where she was carrying Little Ricky, the network censors insisted that she say “expecting.”)

I don’t want to go back to the days when “pregnancy” was a bad word, but maybe we can agree that while I’m trying to relax and eat some frozen yogurt at the nail salon, I don’t need to read about Hollywood stars ingesting their
own placentas? That’s what online fetish websites are for—people who want to think about goo on an actress’s face in the privacy of their own home.

Granted, placenta is probably great for your health. Like colonics. Sometimes I get colonics but I’d never take to a magazine to let everyone know that one time my fecal matter was shaped like a hook, preventing it from passing through my intestines
properly. When I lay in that bed and saw my hooklike poop swim through the colonic machine, I never felt so in touch with my body. Do you know we are the only mammals who need to pay people to stick tubes up our asses and flush us with water to help us shit? We are! It’s such a miracle!

See? How do you like it? It’s gross. You owe me a frozen yogurt, January Jones.

IT REALLY SEEMS like over
the past few years babies have replaced pashminas as the hot new accessory to drape your arms around. Maybe my resistance to having a baby has something to do with my natural resistance to look like everyone else or to do what the magazines dictate. My mom didn’t allow me to wear Guess jeans in 1986. “Jennifah, all the girls wear those. Why do you want to look like everyone else?” Instead, she just
outfitted me in the Wrangler version of Guess jeans so that I could look like the slightly worse-off version of everyone else. Now that I think of it, I’m sure my mom knew full well she was just trying to save money but realized she could couch her thriftiness in a morality lesson. I don’t think her main aim was to cultivate in me a sense of individuality, because when I started wearing thrift-store
black dresses, ripped tights, and combat boots and dyeing my hair jet black, her tune changed to, “Jennifah, why can’t you wear some color? It’s very much in style right now. You look like a witch with shoe polish on her head.”