I Can Barely Take Care of Myself (25 page)

I was delighted. I realized that my subtle streaks of racism had prevented me from ever assuming I’d get to talk about one of my favorite TV shows with a straight, middle-age black guy.

“Can I
ask you a question, Ms. New York? Now, let me guess, are you a Carrie, a Samantha, a Charlotte, or a Miranda? Let me see . . .” He took a look at the motorcycle boots I was wearing and said, “Damn, girl, according to those shoes, you ain’t any one of those ladies.”

I explained to him that it’s not comfortable to wear Manolo Blahniks on a red-eye flight and that it’s not financially comfortable
in general for me to wear shoes that cost a thousand dollars.

“So you’ll get to town and see your girlfriends and have some drinks, like a cosmo or even a lemon drop? That’s a new one I’ve heard of,” he said.

“Well, I land at five forty-five a.m. at JFK, so I’ll probably just try to find a yellow cab and avoid those guys with the duct tape on their 1988 BMWs who call themselves ‘independently
owned car services.’ But then yes, I will probably see my friends that night. I haven’t given any thought yet as to what type of drinks we’ll have.”

I was having fun with my driver, who looked like a world-weary older black guy but had the soul of a 1980s teenage club kid heading to the Limelight. That is, until he said, “Your husband and kids okay with you taking off for this girls’ weekend?”

“Well, actually it’s not a girls’ weekend. I have a business meeting. Anyway, I’m not married and I don’t have kids.”

“Girl! What you waiting for! You’re attractive! You can find a man!”

I’m not sure why this myth exists that only attractive people get married. Have you ever googled “Cracker Barrel weddings”? I told him that I had once had a husband, that that husband and I did not work out,
and that I’m very happy because I get to do things like get on a red-eye without asking anyone’s permission. Suddenly it seemed like I was slowly falling into the trap of needing the approval of the guy driving the shuttle from my car to the airport.

“But you wanna have a kid, right?” he asked (I was no longer fooled
by the wide-eyed club-kid persona). I told him no. He said, “Hell, what? I have
six kids. It’s hard to afford them these days and they are a pain in my ass. They have minds of their own, but I love them. They are the light of my life when I go home. What’s waiting for you when you go home from New York City?”

“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.

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!