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

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.”

After convincing my mom that it wasn’t anything she did that made me no longer want to be married, she finally concluded, “Well, Jen, this is very Hollywood. It’s very hard to stay together in show business. Look at Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton. They married, divorced, and then remarried! Their relationship couldn’t take the scrutiny of the public eye.”

“Mom,” I told her, “Matt and I weren’t in the public eye. I’ve never been chased by a paparazzo.” She then consoled me, not about the divorce but about my celebrity standing. “Oh, Jen, you will be there shortly. I always run into people who say that they love watching you on Chelsea Lately.”

I was sitting in my divorce lawyer’s office, thinking, I have a divorce lawyer. This is something that grown-ups have. Well, not every grown-up, but still. I feel like a war veteran. I have been through some shit that not everyone is strong enough to go through. Some people stay married when they’re not in love. Some people don’t even demand that lots of love exist in their marriage—it’s a partnership, a way to raise kids and join incomes. But hey, I’m not a victim. I’m not a hero. I’m just a grizzled old vet who fought for his country/woman getting a divorce.

Then I caught my grandiose train of thought and abruptly changed gears. Jen, what are you, five years old, thinking that putting a divorce lawyer on a five-thousand-dollar retainer makes you a grown-up? And speaking of retainers, you wear one at age thirty-seven. Where is it? Your orthodontist told you that you have to wear the Invisalign twenty-two hours a day for one year if you ever want to see that incisor on your top row of teeth move or else it will stick straight out just like your grandmother’s. A crooked tooth is fine for her—she lives alone in a nursing home—but you’re about to get out there and have meaningless postmarriage sex with young musicians.

My lawyer took me through the basic questions as he filled out the paperwork for me. Homeowners? No. Age? Thirty-seven. His Age? Thirty-three. Kids? No. Mr. Legal Marriage Ender dropped his pen and looked me in the eye. “No kids?” No. “Did you want kids?” No. “Did he want kids?” No. “Well, if he changes his mind, at least he’s young, right?”

I always wondered whether Matt would change his mind about kids if he weren’t married to me. I know he said he didn’t want kids, and he never had a visible paternal instinct. He cringed even more around babies than he did around cats—and he’s allergic to cats. I always predicted that if I died before Matt, in some kind of tragic stand-up comedy accident on the road—like if too much in-flight Klonopin caused me to trip over my carry-on bag as I shimmied out of my seat toward the bathroom and I used the emergency exit door handle to break my fall, causing me to get sucked out of the plane, where I’d free-fall for a bit and have a heart attack in midair, and my lifeless body would flop to its final resting place in someone’s backyard in Oklahoma—he would remarry a much younger woman who really wanted a baby. She would have family money and neither she nor Matt would ever have to work again, nor would they have to take care of their own child. Matt agreed with my assessment. The only way he could see himself becoming a father would be after my untimely death and his union with a hot twentysomething and her trust fund.

Mr. Legal Marriage Ender said,