I Can Barely Take Care of Myself, Jen Kirkman [the false prince txt] 📗

to take the next natural step in life: getting nauseated at random scents that nobody else can smell, not being able to have more than one glass of prosecco on New Year’s Eve, and experiencing the near impossibility of a sex life for six weeks after the baby is born. Invalidating a woman’s life choices by saying things like, “Oh, but you’ll regret it if you don’t have kids,” or, “I didn’t think I wanted kids either until I had one,” is like me going to an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting and telling the newly sober that eventually when they grow old, they’ll want to take the edge off with a little gin and tonic and that if they could only just be mature enough to control themselves, they could go on a fun wine-tasting tour in the Napa Valley.

Ladies, if you have recognized yourself in this chapter, I have news for you: you are not the first person to say these things to us childfree-by-choice-ers and sadly you probably won’t be the last. These comments aren’t things that I can laugh off, like when your charming toddler tells me that I look fat. (Okay, nobody’s toddler said that, but it does sound like something a toddler could say.) You are forcing your values onto my life and I know that you don’t think you are doing that. I know you think you are saving me from a life of childfree loneliness by telling me what it’s like on the other side, but what you’re really doing is making me scared of you mom types. I will walk down a dark alley at night and not flinch at the sight of a shady man in a doorway—but if I see one of you coming toward me on the sidewalk in broad daylight while pushing a stroller, I will cross the street.

I BARELY KNOW Eileen. She’s a friend of my friend Derek and we were talking at his son’s daytime birthday party at Dr. Tea’s Tea Garden (a trendy tea shop in Los Angeles where you can order a frozen CapaTEAno). Wait, I’m sorry. I don’t want Oprah to yell at me about how I’ve exaggerated my memoir. Full disclosure: I was not talking with this woman. She was talking at me. Seemingly unprovoked, Eileen delivered a passionate monologue about how she thought that she never wanted kids until she and her husband accidentally got pregnant and now she can’t imagine her life without baby Henry.

“Once we got pregnant, we thought, This is a miracle! Having a baby is absolutely what we were supposed to do!”

Oh, Eileen, you say “miracle” . . . I say one drunken night your birth control pill rolled under the sink and you said, “Just come inside me. I don’t feel like wiping anything off my stomach afterward.”

It’s not a “miracle” that when you have unprotected sex in your thirties a baby gets made even though you always thought you didn’t want one. Babies are not analogous to your drunken cousin whom you didn’t expect to appear on your doorstep on Christmas Eve. (Except that they might be equally as needy.) And baby Henry did not show up like the Virgin Mary on a piece of toast. It’s science.

Also, would all couples kindly stop saying “we’re” pregnant? “We’re going to have a family” is fine. But only one person is actually pregnant, which is the medical term for “knocked up.” If her husband gets lung cancer in thirty years, is Eileen going to appropriate his physical condition as well? She’ll grab the elbow of her dear friends at holiday parties and whisper, “It’s stage three. We’re dying.” She accidentally got pregnant. Not her husband. If their failed birth control actually produced a growing fetus in her husband’s nonexistent womb, then they need to pitch a reality show ASAP. Episode one can probe this phenomenon and show how hard it is to raise two babies when both Mommy and Daddy have to recover from a C-section!

Eileen bounced baby Henry in his BabyBjörn. He spit up a little bit on her hand but she smiled and said to me, “It’s all worth it. Every minute.” Then asked, “So, when are you going to have kids?”

I wanted to answer, “It’s none of your business, but since you asked . . . ,” and tell Eileen that I didn’t really want to find myself strapped to a poop machine at an overpriced tea shop anytime in the near future, but in the interest of polite conversation I just said, “Actually, I don’t want kids.”

This is where that polite conversation should stop. It should be no different than her asking, “So, when are you buying a multimillion-dollar mansion?”

Me: “Actually, I don’t want to buy a multimillion-dollar mansion.”

Eileen: “Oh, no mansion? That’s cool. That’s your personal choice. So, how crazy was Mad Men last week? Boy, that Don Draper sure does like all kinds of midcentury modern pussy!”

BABY HENRY FIDGETED in his external cotton-womb, trying to unbutton his mom’s shirt. Eventually, like all men, Henry gave up trying to figure out how to work a hook and-eye clasp and just pulled Eileen’s shirt to the side, located her boob, and put his mouth right on her nipple. I felt like I was thirteen years old again and watching Alex the Burnout go up the shirt of Nicole the Skank on the dance floor during Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven.” And just like Nicole the Skank, Eileen the Mom let her date suck on her left one in front of all of her friends.

Eileen seemed sad. The breast that baby Henry’s mouth wasn’t attached to was kind of . . . leaking. It looked like her nipple had left a sweat stain on her nice afternoon tea party shirt. As she bounced, she let out a few farts that tooted along in perfect time with her rhythm. She didn’t acknowledge the farts so I didn’t either. Maybe that’s why Eileen wanted me to have a baby, even though she didn’t know me. Maybe once