I Can Barely Take Care of Myself (27 page)

When I was growing up my parents would have been embarrassed to have bumper stickers on their car that announced their love for their kid. Also they hated bumper stickers. “Jennifah, those are so hard to get off and they immediately decrease the value of the cah.
Do
not
go putting one of those Wham! bumpah stickahs on there. When you get your own cah you can deface it any way you like.”

Congratulations. You are proud of your Cub Scout. I assume that if you have kids, you’re proud of them, so if you keep talking about how proud of them you are . . . maybe
you
doth protest too much? And by the way—while you’re busy picking out bumper stickers about Troop
79, make sure your son still wants to be in the Cub Scouts. Maybe he wants to do something else like be a brooding
drama club kid or take tap dance lessons after school. Cub Scouts is kind of queer.

UNLIKE THE LOVELY pissed-off Sharon, some friends of mine (and professionals whom I pay to hear me whine) ask me whether I couldn’t just humor the moms like you do with Scientologists to get them
to leave you alone. Couldn’t I just tell them, “Sure, maybe I will have kids/consider the dangers of never getting ‘clear’ by not accepting Xenu as my lord and savior,” and then move on?

What if I were gay and someone said to me, “You’ll change your mind”? Would you agree and suggest that I say, “You’re right; I will probably stop being gay once I get this immature loving-the-same-sex thing out
of my system”?

Sounds stupid, right? Can’t people with children accept that we childfree people know ourselves? Why should I have to give in just to make them comfortable? The worst part is I tried that tactic. I’ve said, “Yeah, maybe,” and guess what? They don’t stop. The floodgates open and the next thing I know they’ve set a date for my baby shower. I can never, ever win. Except for the fact
that my stomach doesn’t look like a deflated balloon. Although it will soon since I keep skipping my Pilates lessons.

It’s time for the bullying from breeders to stop. Are children the only thing you guys can talk about? When you’re not talking about your own pregnancy you’re talking about how everyone else should be pregnant. Did you forget that you used to have interests and hobbies and opinions
about things other than my uterus? We childfree ladies are tired of defending our positions on something that doesn’t need defending. It’s not like we’re starting a new chapter of the KKK and telling your kids that instead of dressing up like a regular ghost this Halloween—why not make a cute pointy hat with that white bedsheet?

I’m not trying to be dramatic. Sometimes I really do feel bullied
by parents. (Not by all parents. Just the ones who tell me that
I should have children after I tell them that I’m too selfish/skinny/tight-vagina’d to do so.)

I know that we’re all grown-ups and no one is pulling my hair (well, some people are but that’s not your business) or calling me fat on Facebook or threatening to beat me up. I was bullied in elementary school. I’m not making light of the
word “bullied.” I fell into a puddle on the playground at recess one day and my clothes were soaking wet so I had to go to the school nurse to get cleaned up. She left me alone in her office to undress. On the cot she’d laid out one of those scratchy gray blankets I’m assuming were donated to American elementary schools from war-torn third world countries.

As I was wrapping this afghan-size Brillo
pad around my body, my personal bully, Greg, appeared in the doorway. Short, big-eared, gravelly voiced, Greg saw my naked body just moments before it was covered. He said the worst thing that anyone has ever said to me upon seeing me naked (at least out loud). “Ewwww, gross.”

Now, he wasn’t wrong. I probably was gross. I had spotty new pubic hair and little nubs instead of boobs. Never having
seen a spray-tan booth and it being the dead of winter in Massachusetts, I was most likely a special shade of practically clear pale. But it’s still not nice when an eleven-year-old girl stands naked in front of her archnemesis and he says, “Ewwww, gross.” And that’s how I feel every time a woman I know or don’t know says to me, “You’ll change your mind,” or, “You’re selfish.” I feel exposed and
judged for my totally natural self. And just like Greg—who went on to say, “Ewwww, gross,” about three more times, even after I’d put the blanket around me and shrieked, “Get out of here!”—these women continue to stand in front of me and relentlessly repeat their insulting observations. To their credit, at least they don’t usually end their bullying monologues with, “Jen, you ah wicked retahded.”

It’s not like I don’t understand where Greg was coming from. He had his own insecurities. Maybe he hated being short or having big ears or a shitty father. I have no idea why he zeroed in on me to pick on. It could have been because I came to school dressed up
as Mozart one day for no reason, or the time I wanted to interrupt class to read a poem about a lighthouse that ended up sounding really
phallic: “A lighthouse grows between two rocks on a cliff, straight and tall, nice and stiff.” That
is
pretty retahded. My very existence confused Greg and pushed some of his buttons. He didn’t yet have the communication tools to ask me,
“Why did you cut your own widow’s peak on your hairline? Why do you wear bell-bottoms from the 1970s in 1985 and not seem to care that you’re out of style? Why doesn’t Jen care what I think of her? Does Jen judge
me
? Oh, I don’t want to be judged. I better preemptively strike. Now, where’s that snowball?”

Maybe I need to cut moms a little slack. Maybe the Eileens and Alis of the world stare at me and think,
Why did she get that Joan Jett haircut at age thirty-seven? Why does she wear bell-bottoms and not seem to care that it looks costumey at our age? Why doesn’t she want to have a baby? If Jen doesn’t want to have a baby—does that mean that she judges me for having one? I’d better preemptively strike. She’s not leaving this party until she’s as uncomfortable as me—a woman with toddler drool on her tits, a busted bladder, a hot fart coming down the pipe, and a maxi pad in her granny panties.

Hey, it’s none of your business, but since you asked
 . . .

12. Becoming Miriam

When my sister Violet had stage three breast cancer she didn’t become a medical marijuana–smoking, mellow, sleepy little patient. The chemotherapy turned her into a superhero—whose superpower was finding household projects that absolutely needed to be done. (They didn’t need to be done.) It’s hard to wrestle a hammer out of the hands of a determined woman with steroids in her
bloodstream and try to tell her that the oil painting of her cat that a friend made does not need to be hung up above her fireplace at this very moment—or ever. (Just so you don’t think I’m a total monster—she made a full recovery and she still has her original boobs.) I stood behind Violet while she surveyed the plaster in her wall. I thought of taking a bronze candlestick to her head—just one
sharp blow that would either sedate her into a silly grin like a cartoon character or perhaps injure her enough to go to the ER, where she could get some drugs that would ease her pain and get her to calm the fuck down.

I left the house to walk down her long driveway to check the mail. “Jennifah, I told you the mail doesn’t come until aftah two o’clock. There’s no point in walkin’ down there.”
Oh, there’s a point. To get a few minutes’ respite from the chemically created Bob Vila–Womanzilla—even if it was a failed mission.

Even though Violet was doing things like telling me to rip the
lettuce for her salad more quietly, I felt such compassion for her. The chemo didn’t make her nauseated like most patients, it made her irritable. I imagine it was like having a rush-hour Friday traffic
jam, a screaming baby on a red-eye, and a fly that won’t stop buzzing around your head all pumping through your veins at the same time. What’s worse is that she was surrounded by a bunch of friends and family who loved her, but they did not have cancer. She was alone in a sea of smiling faces that couldn’t stop asking questions in order to make
themselves
more comfortable. Do you want to lie down?
How about soup? Do you think that you need to see a specialist in the city? Have you tried drinking fresh-squeezed orange juice? You should really lie down. Have you thought of joining a support group? Are you nauseous? Will you be nauseous later? Can you spell “nauseous”? There are two
u
s in that word, right?

My sister, who had divorced a year earlier and lived alone, had to suffer through the
most annoying question of all during her recovery: “Do you regret not having kids?”

One afternoon Violet and I sat on her couch and watched
Elf
for the second time that day even though it was the middle of July. Our favorite scene is when Will Ferrell is in the waiting room at the pediatrician’s and he says to a cute little girl, “I’m a human—raised by elves.” And the little girl says in a sweet
voice, “I’m a human—raised by humans.” We always tear up and say to each other, “Oh, she is
sooo
cute and so sweet. She’s just full of wonder and joy because it’s almost Christmas. She’s so innocent and pure—she doesn’t judge Will Ferrell’s character, Buddy, for wearing an elf costume because she hasn’t even learned how to judge others yet.” That’s about where our maternal instinct stops. By the
next scene we’re grossed out by all of the kids who are touching things all over the store and we realize just how many germs we encounter when Christmas shopping.

Violet and I never talk that much about how we both don’t want kids. We don’t need to, because we both accept and respect each other’s decision and we don’t need to ask nosy questions we already know the answers to. Plus we’re usually
too busy quoting lines from
Caddyshack
or talking to her tuxedo cat, Miss Mitty. But we definitely bonded over our collective outrage at how people turned her cancer into an opportunity to give her a sideways glance about being childfree at age forty. When my sister told me that some of her friends and even
random people in the waiting room at the hospital
had said some version of, “It’s too bad
you don’t have children to help you through this,” I got as angry as a cancer victim who had to suffer the injustice of her little sister making a salad too loudly.

Look, you want to badger a normal, healthy woman about whether she realizes that if she doesn’t fix that biological clock, she could run the risk of never having C-section scars or her floppy post-childbirth vagina sewn up in episiotomy
surgery like a real woman—that’s one thing. But to suggest to a cancer victim that she might suddenly regret not having children, when there is so much else to think about, like oh, I don’t know . . .
Am I going to die?
Do I have to stop eating Twinkies? Why
can’t
I use this free time off work to hang a paint-by-numbers replica of a cat in the most prominent place in my living room?

What kind
of person would seriously wish for a cancer-ridden single woman to add motherhood to her to-do list? Not to mention wish for a child to exist in the world and have to watch her mother lose all of her hair. And oh, what a shame, Violet didn’t get to test out her cancer genes on a new generation. Bummer that her daughter won’t grow up to maybe also get breast cancer someday! My poor sister—I mean,
she had to get in her car and go to chemotherapy without having to strap a child into a car seat. She must have been so
not
put upon by another human who needed her for life sustenance,
and
she had to take naps during the day—because she was too tired to even check her Facebook page to see whether any cute guys from high school were divorced yet—without worrying about a tiny helpless being screaming
in the next room. It’s morbid but we joked that if she had died, people would be saying, “It’s such a shame, there are no kids at this funeral to lighten the mood.”

Since Violet was full of vim and vigor and anger-inducing chemo,
she actually answered people with things like, “I have cancer. I’d hate for my kids to see me like this and I’d hate to not be able to take care of them because I have
to sleep all the time. Besides, I can’t even have a lot of visitors because I have a shitty immune system at the moment and kids, being the little germ machines that they are, could possibly kill me right now. So, I’m sorry that you’re sorry, but I’m not sorry. Besides, I never wanted kids and having cancer hasn’t changed that.”

Luckily, my sister Lynne is a mother of three
grown
children and
so she had the freedom and time to visit from Vermont to help out and get told by Violet that she wasn’t making toast correctly. My guitar-strumming, folk-singing sister Lynne has never questioned her sisters’ choices not to have kids. Mainly because she’d rather work in the garden in her backyard, deep in the woods and high in the mountains of Vermont, than bother telling anyone how to live her
life. (She knows how complicated it is for us just being aunts. You want to bum a cigarette off your seventeen-year-old niece and ask your nephew in college if he has any pot, but you know it’s inappropriate. Just kidding, Lynne!)

Violet confessed that even though she felt sick all of the time from the chemo, she kind of enjoyed the time off from taking care of four horses and working full-time
at a brokerage firm. She was tired. (Yes! People without kids also get tired!) And she had enough to deal with—our dad was at her house every day asking the same questions over and over: “Where do you keep your paper towels?” And my mother was saying things like: “Your hospital bills are high, are you sure you want to start buying organic vegetables?”

WHEN I TOLD my parents Matt and I were splitting
up, my mom said, “Jennifah, my other two daughters are divorced and now you’re getting a divorce? I have to ask you. Was it something your father and I did?”

Most kids worry that their parents’ divorce was their fault, but in
my world, my parents worried that my divorce was their fault. The divorce was nobody’s fault. It was amicable. “Amicable” when used for breakups means: “It’s not really
your business and this whole thing sucks but I wasn’t dumped, so don’t pity me.”