I Can Barely Take Care of Myself (26 page)

I’m not offended by what a toddler says to me. Her brain isn’t fully developed yet. And judging from the behavior of her mom, it probably never will be. But some parents
become so rude once they have kids. How about a simple teachable moment for little Marta? Could Ali not have said, “Honey, we don’t point out things we see on people’s faces unless we’re helping them.” For example, “You have something white and crusty on your chin, I think it’s
toothpaste. God, I hope it’s toothpaste.” (Dog owners are the same way, incidentally. They can’t stop their animals from
behaving badly and they never apologize for their little ones who can’t speak. Meanwhile, I’m left with an unwanted wet nose sniffing around my crotch in public.)

At this point I hadn’t been to a birthday party for a friend that started at two and ended promptly at five since
I
was a kid. If you’re going to have an afternoon birthday party to accommodate you and your friends’ new lifestyles as
parents—just go all out and have the damn thing at a park or a playground or something. There’s nothing fun about trying to drink a hot tea while toddlers crawl underneath me as though my legs are a jungle gym. (And speaking of jungle gyms, when I was a kid all I saw when I saw that thing on the playground was a death trap. Let’s get the kids all loaded up on sugar and send them outside to hurl
their bodies around some lead pipes! We’ll build it over some brain-busting concrete to catch their fall!)

SATURDAYS ARE MY day to write or run errands, and in Los Angeles if I time it just right, I can hit the dry cleaner and the grocery store—both only two miles from my house—and it only takes six hours with traffic. I had to basically lose a day, like some punishing form of daylight savings,
just to see my friend on his birthday. The mothers in the crowd were doing what they would be doing on a Saturday anyway, breast-feeding their babies and changing diapers—except they wouldn’t be doing it on a quaint café table for two in public. That’s the thing that happens when your friends and acquaintances start to have kids. You have to get on their schedule, like you’re a nurse working in
a hospice, or the friendship dies on a slow morphine drip—without the fun of a morphine drip.

By this point I felt self-conscious staying at this party without my boob hanging out. It reminded me of an after-hours party I went to in 1986, following Eileen Rosenstein’s bat mitzvah, when a bunch of girls retreated to Eileen’s room to show one another their burgeoning
breasts. Mine were yet to grow.
I actually got one boob at age twelve and the other one didn’t grow until age fifteen. Every year I went to my pediatrician and asked her what the hell was going on. She always told me that to have one boob grow at a time was normal. Every year I took exception. “Normal? Normal? Having one boob is normal? No. Every girl at school has either some or none but nobody has just one! Besides, if it’s
so ‘normal’ to have only one boob, why don’t they sell slings at Victoria’s Secret?”

At times like this, I feel like I don’t fit in with society. Both in the mideighties with my one boob and now with two very nice boobs that don’t offer sustenance to others, I don’t quite feel like a real woman. Even though I drive a nice car and have a job, a manager, a few agents, an accountant, an entertainment
and a divorce lawyer, and other “grown-up” things in my life, I still feel like a fraud. I’m always thinking that any day a policeman is going to stop me as I walk down the street and say, “Excuse me, little girl with the big purse? What are you doing? Shouldn’t you be in school right now? Where are your parents?”

I didn’t even feel like I was acting like a normal kid when I
was
a kid. In sixth
grade, the most popular girl in school, Meredith Renner, had a slumber party. Not just a slumber party—it was a costume party/slumber party. And she was rich. She lived in a mini-mansion before they were called McMansions. My mom never let me sleep over at my working-class friends’ houses—mainly because the working-class people always had one parent (usually Mom) working some kind of night shift,
leaving the other home to supervise. Everyone knows that kids could start a nuclear missile program in the basement while Dad snores away upstairs in front of an episode of
Nightline,
skillfully clutching a can of Bud Light that never spills.

I don’t know why Meredith invited me. I had friends but was not one of the “popular girls.” I wasn’t rich but I wasn’t a nerd. I had saved up some babysitting
money and purchased a Benetton T-shirt. I think that T-shirt caught her eye and she assumed I was one of them.

Our assignment was to bring a gift for Meredith and to come dressed up as our favorite celebrity for the big event of the party—the costume contest. I came dressed as Groucho Marx. Now, I was not some eccentric kid who watched Marx Brothers movies. (I’m not even an eccentric adult who
watches Marx Brothers movies.) I didn’t know the difference between Groucho, Karl, and Richard Marx. I thought Groucho was the stork from the Vlasic Pickles commercial (“That’s the best-tasting pickle I ever hoid.”) My mom had explained to me that the stork was based on Groucho Marx, a very famous comedian. I figured if he was very famous, then everyone at Meredith Renner’s twelfth birthday party
would know him. My mom said, “Your father has an old suit that would be perfect for this.” I wore a wig and a pair of those Groucho glasses with the fake nose and mustache attached. Now you know why they sell those in novelty stores. It’s a hot item for tween girls on their way to the birthday party of the year.

The Popular Girls were not wearing costumes when I arrived in full Marx mode. I only
brought pajamas. I had no in-between clothes. I didn’t win the costume contest. The prize went to Kayley, who revealed that up the sleeve of her Esprit top she had on ten rubber bracelets. This was her Madonna costume. Meredith got a stomachache right before it was time to blow out the candles on her birthday cake and she said that everybody had to go home. Then she said, “Jen, you call your mom
first.” I was dumb enough to believe that the slumber party really ended until I found out on Monday that after “some girl who came dressed as a guy” left—the real fun began. The Popular Boys were invited over for cake and everybody watched the movie
Girls Just Want to Have Fun.

I learned something that day. If you put any effort into anything you do and have a strong sense of self to the point
where you don’t even question your choices before you walk out of the house—you’re a fucking weirdo. You’ll have a better time at parties if you look and act just like all the other kids—or else you’re going to have to call your mother for a ride, or twenty years later if you’re still in
the wrong costume, you call your friend Sharon to go out for dollar tacos.

Since kids seem to be the only
legitimate excuse that adults get to give for leaving parties, weddings, and work early, I had to make up something plausible to get myself out of Exposed-Breast World. I said that I just realized I’d locked myself out of my apartment and my friend had the keys, but she had to give them to me in the next five minutes or else a secret bomb would explode the world.

I felt slightly self-righteous
about the fact that the parking lot was full of SUVs with car seats in the back. Not
one
Toyota Prius or van fueled by cornstarch and weed. Every mother at that party was
sooooo
concerned with her child’s future (We have to breast-feed or else their immune systems will be compromised!), and so concerned with my unborn children’s future (You aren’t having kids? But if people don’t have kids, how
will the human race survive?), yet none of them cared enough to drive a car that didn’t pollute the air that their precious little Martas would breathe once they were old enough to know better about calling me out on my adult acne.

I personally don’t believe that the world needs any more people. We are overpopulated as it is and since the advent of the Doritos Locos Tacos Supreme, many folks
in our population are the size of two people. But I’m not trying to act like some environmentalist hero just because I don’t have a kid. It is not why I’m making the decision, it just happens to be a nice perk of my decision. I did read, however, that even if you do drive a Prius, you are in no way balancing out the carbon footprint that having a kid leaves on this planet. I either read that or I
just believe that. Who cares? I’m probably right. Anyway, apart from being the person who turns the switch in the toxic plastics factory with the deregulated smokestack to “on”—having a kid is the worst thing you can do to the environment. Still, I’d never tell someone that at a party because I am a polite adult, not a self-righteous thirteen-year-old (anymore). I was that cashier at Roche Bros. grocery
store who rolled her eyes when forced to ask, “Paper or plastic?” I used to stomp my Doc-Martened foot and yell
at my boss, “But if we don’t give them an option and just give them paper, we could save this world!” I was also that cashier who let out an audible sigh and uttered, “Oh, that’s
real responsible,
” under her breath after the customer chose plastic.

I like to leave that inner thirteen-year-old
girl at home when I go to sophisticated tea parties. She’s even more of a buzzkill than a circle of mommies who, instead of asking, “Would you prefer paper or plastic,” ask, “Would you prefer a baby or a lifetime of never knowing real love?”

Sharon met me at a new Mexican restaurant in town where the seats hang from the ceiling—like hammocks for one. The waiter kept telling us it was “really
chill” but it wasn’t that chill, because if you talk with your hands, you start spinning around and it feels like you’re a potted plant in a macramé ceiling holder. (If you grew up in the 1970s, you’ll know what I mean.)

The waiter tried to flirt with us but we let him know that we were more in the mood for bitching and maybe some crying on the side.

“They make me feel so bad about my decision,”
I sniffled, and worked up to a nice bawling sob. “Not because I have any regrets about not having kids, but I feel like my life [sob] would be easier [snuffle, heave] if I could just [gulping breaths] fit in with everybody else.”

Sharon was already pissed on my behalf. She’s this tiny little four-foot-eleven comedian who doesn’t want kids either and she was pissed on her behalf too. “You don’t
have to fit in with them in order for them to be able to talk to you. You should have said, ‘Fine, why don’t
you
have another kid for me if you want another kid on this earth so bad?’ ”

“I’m just so sick of feeling like such an outsider!” I twirled angrily in my chair-hammock.

Sharon tried to talk me down by getting all “angry
Wendy Williams Show
audience member.” “This bitch Eileen is miserable
and she knows it. Misery loves company. She wants you pregnant because when she sees that you’re not—she forgets that she had options and
it makes her question her decision. You’re gonna have some hot guy sucking on your tits later instead of some baby, okay?” Sharon tried to give me a snap, but her hand got caught in the web of her seat.

“Sharon, no hot guy is sucking on my anything tonight.
I just want to go to bed.”

Suddenly I had an inspiration. “It’s like the word ‘queer,’ you know?”

Sharon agreed wholeheartedly. “Yeahhh. Totally. It’s just like that. Wait. How? I don’t get it.”

“Well, I used to use the word ‘queer’ because I’m from Boston and we used to say that word, meaning ‘stupid’ or like ‘someone who likes being in the church choir instead of smoking cigarettes in back
of the rectory.’ But my gay friends said that word offended them and so I stopped. They said to me, ‘Why is it so important to you to be able to use that word?’ And guess what?”

“What?”

“I realized that it’s
not
important for me to use that word. And I want to say to these women with kids, ‘Why is it so important for you that I have a kid? Why is it so important for you to spend your time at
a party questioning my life choice?’ ”

My voice started to break. I was so tired from pretending not to be offended at the party. I was holding back tears. If it’s not socially acceptable to not have a baby—it’s definitely not socially acceptable to cry like one in your refried beans.

Sharon comforted me. “Jen, it’s okay to cry. Wait. Wait. Not yet. Wait until the waiter circles back. You want
him to see that you’re upset. He might bring us more chips.”

I decided it didn’t matter that there were no chips left and ate some guacamole with a spoon.

My tears turned to indignant passion. I made a declaration. “Sharon, I think that childfree by choice is the new gay. We’re the new disenfranchised group. People think we’re irresponsible, immoral sluts and that our lifestyle is up for debate.”

Sharon agreed. “That’s genius, Jen. Genius!” She started writing
on a napkin. It was so wet it ripped. “Ah, fuck it. I’ll remember what you said. Something, something . . . the new gay.”

We burst into laughter and then let the tears stream down our faces. Sharon said, “I don’t want to make you more upset but I have something to tell you.”

“What?”

“I saw a
BABY ON BOARD
decal on a car today.
I was trying to pull up beside her but she wasn’t noticing. I had my window rolled down. I was all ready to say, ‘Hey. This isn’t 1985 and nobody gives a fuck.’ ”

Sharon knew this was something that I loved to hate, including those cars that have the decals that indicate Mommy, Daddy, Timmy, Jill, and the family dog. I also can’t stand
MY CHILD IS AN HONOR STUDENT
bumper stickers.

I’m glad your
kid won a spelling bee or gets good grades or that you love being a soccer mom or that you’re proud of your kids. Do you really have to put it in bumper-sticker form? Is any kid going to be on a therapist’s couch years from now saying, “My parents clothed me, fed me, tucked me in at night, and read me bedtime stories, they paid for my college education, but there is a bumper-sticker-size void
in my psyche and a decal-size hole in my heart. I wanted everyone who drove by us on the 10 freeway to know that my mom loved me!”