I Can Barely Take Care of Myself (20 page)

As Grace and Christopher told us the story of what the last eight weeks of pregnancy had been like, I remembered a conversation I’d had with Grace recently.
I realized now that she’d been trying to tell me that she’d changed her mind about having kids a few weeks earlier when she asked, “Did you see the YouTube video of that chimpanzee that just gave birth?”

“No. Gross. I’m sorry you had to see that,” I answered.

“No, Jen. The mother and baby were bonding. She just instinctively licked her wounds and tended to her baby. It was so natural.”

“Well,
of course it’s natural. All monkeys do is fuck and have babies, right?”

“It got me thinking, even though I’m worried about bringing a child into the world, I’m still an animal with normal urges and I can’t intellectualize that sense of hope I feel.”

I completely missed out on what she was probably trying to tell me and dismissed her with, “Well, thank God we’re not monkeys!
We can take birth
control! Speaking of primal urges, have you ever fantasized about having sex with a twentysomething painter?”

On the drive home (we didn’t get drunk enough to warrant that spare room sleepover) I said to Matt, “Once that baby is born we are never going to see them again.” I knew what was coming—this wasn’t my first baby rodeo. (Sidebar: Even I can admit that a baby rodeo would be very cute—although
stressful. You don’t want to fall off a horse when you still have that soft spot on your skull.) As usual, Matt thought I was being dramatic (I was). He explained to me that when two people love each other very much and want to make a baby—they can still hang out with their friends just like always, except there will be a baby in the room. I explained to
him
that everybody knows your dumb friends
coming over to order Chinese food can interrupt the bonding process between mother and father and child. Even doctors say you need at least three months of constant bonding to make a healthy relationship with your baby. But I am like a baby, and if I lose three months of bonding with my girlfriends, my development is affected and I start peeing myself just to get some goddamned attention.

Nobody
gets babysitters anymore, do they? That’s so eighties. If we want to see our friends, we’ll have to go to their house all the time and have whisper-around-the-table-because-the-baby-is-sleeping early dinners. I feared that Grace and Christopher would turn into the type of parents I’d lost touch with because their kids became their entire life:

“So . . . seen any good movies lately?”

“We don’t
have time to go to movies anymore.”

“Oh, that’s right. We forgot. So . . . seen any good TV shows lately?”

“No. We don’t want to zone out on our kid—so as a family the only entertainment we partake in is playing with organic wooden blocks.”

“So . . . read any interesting newspaper articles lately?”

“No. With the baby, I don’t even have time to shower, so I just rub a newspaper all over my
body to soak up the oil and sweat. After that it’s unreadable and I’m covered in ink.”

Then there’s always that awkward silence and your girlfriend will ask, “So . . . how’s your mom? Didn’t you say she was going to get a suspicious mole checked out?”

“Oh, yes. Actually we had a little bit of a scare. My mom got her test results back and they were—” The baby cries.

“Oh, I’m sorry,” she’ll say,
“I can’t go and pick up the baby because he has to learn how to just cry, but I want to stand within twelve feet of him so that he can smell my pheromones and moisturizer. Hold that thought. I’ll be right back.”

The baby is eventually lulled back to sleep and Mom comes back only to
not
pick up where she left off, because the 7:30 p.m. yawning has commenced. She’ll never hear what I was going
to say about my mom’s melanoma because she’s desperate for everyone to leave so she and her husband can sleep for two hours before their baby wakes up to practice crying and going to sleep without being picked up.

“Jen,” Matt said. “Your mom doesn’t have cancer and Grace and Christopher’s baby hasn’t even been born.”

“I know that! But I’m saying if she did—our friends with kids would not have
time to console me. This is a real concern, Matt. We have to brace ourselves in the event that we lose Grace and Christopher to the other side.”

I envisioned the next phase of losing my friends to their children, which is when the people with kids realize that their childfree friends don’t have any handy tips for them based on their own experience. I have no idea whether they should switch from
breast milk to formula after a month or whether organic cotton is better on their baby’s bottom than recycled hemp cotton. So parents naturally gravitate toward other parents and they start to speak their own language. Nobody needs a childfree person there—it wastes too much time to try to translate.

I’m just going to come out and say it: this is the real reason lots
of people end up changing
their minds and having kids. They don’t want to lose their friends. It’s just like drugs. Peer pressure eventually gets to everyone. No one wants to be the narc or someone who is harshing everyone’s illegal substance– or pregnancy hormone–induced good vibe. This is exactly what happened to Keith Richards.

Have I mentioned I am the baby of the family? Still, whenever someone asks me why I don’t
want to have kids, I think about how abandoned I feel when my friends get pregnant and that’s usually the last little tiny little hint of a feeling that pushes me into the maybe territory—I just want my life to stay the same and keep my friends. Then I remember that losing sleep, picking boogers out of a child’s nose, and having said booger maker wake me up every day at five thirty is not worth
my bringing a human life into the world just because I could
probably
mimic the other parent chimps in the wild and manage to raise a kid without killing it. (Do chimps sometimes eat their kids? I should look that up but I’m too lazy. I wouldn’t even be a good researcher, let alone mom. I’m just not curious enough.)

People say this to me a lot, that I would be such a good mom. I’m not even that
good of an aunt. Ask my nieces and nephews. I missed both of their high school graduations and one college graduation because I was stuck in a casino for the weekend. Fine, I wasn’t on a wine spritzer and bingo bender—I was doing stand-up comedy for tables of bachelorette parties with penis hats on their heads.

In fact, if I’m being honest, the person who drove the biggest wedge between Shannon
and Tracy and me—was
me.
I moved thousands of miles away from Massachusetts to California. If I lived on the East Coast, I would see my childhood friends all of the time; we’d call bomb threats in to one another’s places of business just so that we could take long lunches together, we’d use our health insurance and check into an inpatient “exhaustion rehab center” for a week as a way to get a
free spa experience, and we’d go walk around all of the many prestigious Boston college and university campuses just to see whether we look young enough to get hit on. But they’ve moved on to the next phase in their lives and I have in mine—although I never
would have predicted that my next phase would involve my marriage ending, not my friendships.

My fears about Grace and Christopher were completely
unfounded. They didn’t change once they had their baby. They have a babysitter. We hang out. And I’m the one who whispers around the dinner table when they’ve never asked me to. I just didn’t feel comfortable saying things like, “We were sleeping together, it was never serious. He has kind of a crooked penis, which is no problem but I think it makes him self-conscious,” at normal volume
in front of their infant—I don’t know what kids these days pick up on!

When I see Shannon with her sons I feel like I’m watching her star in a play called
The Good Mom.
The play opened Off Broadway and people didn’t notice it at first, but the reviews were so good once the critics realized that they had a capable and competent ingenue who could deliver a tour-de-force performance without seeming
tired and without one beautiful blond hair falling out of place. She’s a parent and it makes her really happy. And just like somebody’s mother would, I still see her as a little girl. And because she and Tracy are my little girls—I absolutely love their children. I want to take their toddlers aside and tell them stories about all of the bad poetry Shannon wrote and how when you are fresh to your
aunt Tracy it breaks my heart because she’s supercool—she holds the high score among our friends in Super Mario Bros. and she used to dye her hair purple.

I know I wouldn’t be a good mom but I’m a pretty good gift-buyer for my mommy friends. I bought Richard Scarry’s
Best Storybook Ever
for Shannon’s son Ben, and years later he still asks her to read it to him every night. Every freaking night!
I always hated reading to kids because you’re never
really
reading. They’re so young and don’t have a grasp of the English language yet; they just want you to point at the pictures and they completely ignore the narrative, and when you’re getting to the good part they grab the corner of the book and try to put it in their mouth. If I had a kid of my own, I’d be pissed.
Hey, what makes you think you should put this in your mouth? It’s not on a plate hot out of the oven. This is a
book. B-o-o-k,
not
food. F-o-o-d.
God. Is my kid going to be a nincompoop? He is eating a book instead of reading it. I think I need to return him. I hope he’s covered under the manufacturer’s warranty.

When I was interviewing Grace for this book, her sixteen-month-old daughter, Delia, fell face-first on the
porch right in front of me as I was taking a bite of my sandwich. I threw the sandwich down, spit up my bites, and screamed. “Ohmygod! Ohmygod! Grace!! Grace!!
She fell!
” My instinct was to flee like I do in other uncomfortable backyard situations, involving wasps and small talk with neighbors who pop in unexpectedly. Delia just looked at me, utterly confused. Her lip curled like Elvis’s and she
seemed to be thinking,
Uh-oh. I’m not equipped to deal with this woman’s impending breakdown.
Then she got back up like nothing happened and continued pushing her little cart filled with her favorite things: a doll, a purse, some blocks, and a napkin.

Grace explained that unlike our parents—Mommy kissed your boo-boo only after she said, “Oh, Jesus Christ, you made me spill my drink,” or she panicked,
cried, and wondered out loud in front of you whether she needed to call 911 and whether you would die in your sleep during naptime after what was obviously a concussion—today’s parents don’t show their hand. Today’s parents don’t react emotionally in front of their kids. It scares the kid to hear you scream, “Oh my God—I wanted you to live to see your second birthday!” And it hurts your kids’
feelings to act like you are inconvenienced by the fact that they are just learning how to balance on their own two feet in this world filled with gravity. It’s genius, really. I would try it if I ever wanted to be a good mom, which I don’t.

Grace also told me she was learning that kids are scientists—not assholes who are trying to fuck with you. So when they do try to eat dirt for the second
time, after you told them the first time that it’s not the best idea, don’t take it personally and tell them how stupid they are. Simply see them as scientists who need to keep testing their dirt-eating hypothesis over and over. (I don’t know whether
this theory also comes in handy later, when a teenage girl keeps dating alcoholics. I know that if I were a parent, I wouldn’t want to watch Billy
tear through the driveway with a six-pack in his Camaro and tell myself that my teenage daughter is just being a scientist and that this ingrate Billy is her “lab partner.”)

Every second spent with Grace’s kid warms my heart. She and Christopher made a person and they are in love with this little person. And I’m in love with love when I’m around them. And then when I get home and lie on the couch
I am so happy that there aren’t any little scientists of my own running around and falling down and courting concussions and bad-news boyfriends.

Grace once described loving Delia like this: “I feel like when I see her walking around, that my heart has been removed from my chest and it’s just running around on a stick.” That’s actually beautiful if you think about it and I get what she means.
I just have no interest in my heart being on a stick. It could be the fact that I’m a vegetarian. I’ve never been a fan of satay.

WHEN WE WERE married, Matt and I often told people that we were a family, just the two of us. That sentiment felt secure and it was true. We were legally a family. But people who had kids usually just looked at us with pity—the kind of pity I reserve for people who
are folding and unfolding strollers and clumsily walking into a restaurant.

I knew that people stared at us and thought,
But you can’t have a two-person family. What if one of you falls off a boat when you’re on vacation? Then what? A family of
one
? What good is a family of one? If you’re the only one in your family, then who do you blame for all of your mistakes? No, it’s
your
fault that I dropped the carton of orange juice that I was drinking from while standing in front of the open refrigerator, because you walked into the kitchen on your tiptoes. You
know
that when you try to walk quietly it scares me more than if you just walked normally. Also, I had a bad day at work and I blame you because if it weren’t for you, I’d have more free time to meet the heir to an oil empire and if
he
married me—I’d never have to work again! I’m not feeling good about myself but I’m too afraid to look within, so I’m just going to fixate on the fact that your toothbrush is on the top of our toilet tank.

I imagine that if Matt had come home every night and said to me, “Oh, Jen, but you’d be such a good cook,” our marriage would have broken up a lot faster than it did.

It’s not that I can’t cook.
I just don’t enjoy cooking. It takes too long and you have to stand there monitoring everything, which doesn’t work well for me and my ADHD. The times that I’ve cooked something elaborate in my kitchen, I’ve packed for the event like I’m going on a long plane ride. I make sure I have my laptop, BlackBerry, iPod, a book, and some magazines at arm’s length.