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

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