I Can Barely Take Care of Myself

Wire. It is just not a part of my life. I’m not trying to be cool or different. A Non– Wire Lover is not my identity. I just don’t even think about The Wire. And yet people continue, “It’s available on Netflix!” “I understand that it’s easy to get.” “You’ll love it.” “I won’t. I might. I don’t care.” “How can you not watch it? Well, what kind of shows do you watch?” What will happen to these people if I never see The Wire? Are they at home feeling a phantom pain in their abdomens and thinking, If Jen would only watch The Wire, this bad feeling would go away. And in the same way my Netflix queue remains Wire-free, people seem really agitated that my womb remains baby-free.

I took my therapist’s advice and started getting cagey with my answer. But once I started saying, “It’s not in my plans right now,” it was taken as, “Yes, I plan to have kids someday.” And then just to avoid arguments, I went through a phase of lying. “Yes. I want to have kids someday. I want to have kids right now. Anybody have a turkey baster? Let’s kick this party up a notch. I’m ovulating!” But I’m not going to lie anymore.

I’ve always been a little different. I was called a “freak” in high school because I wanted to be on a stage instead of on a lacrosse field. I went to a job interview at an office straight out of college wearing black tights, green nail polish, and clear jelly shoes. I got the job but my new boss took me aside to explain the office dress code. She asked me, “What were you trying to prove with that outfit? Why do you want to look weird?” I had honestly thought that this was a good outfit to wear. I wouldn’t even know how to try to be weird. It seems like too much effort. Just like trying to be normal—whatever that looks like—often seems more trouble than it’s worth. I mean, who really wants to wash her car in the driveway every Sunday (or even have a driveway)?

My favorite TV show when I was six was The Lawrence Welk Show. I wanted to grow up and live in a world of bubbles and polka music someday. I went to the most popular girl in school’s slumber party in the sixth grade dressed as Groucho Marx. (It didn’t go well—you’ll read all about it.)

It may not be filled with bubbles and polka (actually thank God for that, my aesthetic and musical tastes have changed), but I’ve found a community of weirdos in the comedy world. I moved by myself to New York City and Los Angeles. All of my family and my childhood friends live on the East Coast. I decided to wander the country in search of a career as a stand-up comedian. Fifteen years later and two comedy albums in, I’m doing just that for a living, in addition to writing and appearing on Chelsea Lately and playing the part of myself in the Chelsea Lately spin-off After Lately. My days consist of writing comedy and the occasional phone call to my sister to explain that the e-mail she just received from me saying “I’m pregnant, please call Mom” was really from Chelsea Handler, after she’d had her way with my computer.

My twelfth-grade teacher Mr. Bergen would be proud of me. He wrote me a card when I graduated from high school that said in big black letters, GET OUT OF THIS TOWN. GET OUT WHILE YOU CAN, and a lovely note on the inside that encouraged me to follow my dreams because he could tell that I wouldn’t be happy trying to conform on any level. Now, I don’t think having a child makes you a conformist and I don’t think that not having a child makes you a nonconformist—but I do think that following your heart no matter what other people have to say takes a real sense of self. My friend Shannon, who has two children, says that the judgment never ends. She had children—she did the supposed “normal” thing—and still people chastise her for not having six kids or for the fact that she doesn’t abide by the latest parenting trends. “What? You breast-feed before sunrise? Oh no. You’ll end up with a vampire.”

The bottom line is that the choices we make often make sense to us but can confuse others. Somebody is always going to be disappointed with your life choice, and my rule of thumb is that as long as I’m not the one who is disappointed, I can live with that. If you’ve ever been thought of as selfish and immature or told “you’ll change your mind” about anything, I hope this book can be your card from Mr. Bergen. “Get out while you can”—get out of that mentality that there is a “right” way to live. (Well, technically there is, I believe it’s called the Golden Rule, and you can find it either in the Bible or on a coffee mug, I forget.)

I know some people think that not wanting kids means I’m cold, but I’m not totally without baby urges. I felt something when I saw my friend Grace’s baby all swaddled in a blanket on the couch. She looked like a yawning peanut. She was just a content little lump, drooling and going in and out of sleep. And I got that feeling deep down inside that almost brought tears to my eyes. I got an urge and I thought, Oh my God. I want to… be a baby.

1. Welcome Back, Kirkman

After graduating from Boston’s Emerson College in June 1996 with a bachelor of fine arts in “theater arts,” I moved back into my parents’ house. (There are few to no well-paying jobs available to a girl who minored in rolling around on the floor collecting dust bunnies on her sweatpants—otherwise known as “modern dance.”) I wish I’d had a really good reason for moving back home, like my friend Jayson from freshman year in college. It was rumored that Jayson took too much acid and also became possessed by the devil on the same night—this rumor started because he dropped two tabs while doing a seance around a pentagram that Mick, his practicing Satanist roommate, had burned into their dorm room rug. After the devil possessed him and/or the bad trip never wore off, folklore has it that Jayson was forever unable to speak but couldn’t stop laughing—like some kind of demonic hyena. Jayson left school during his first semester and moved into his mom’s basement, where he sat staring at the wall and listening to Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon most of the day, except for the time he spent at his part-time job at his hometown library. I know that story sounds implausible—what library would employ a loud laugher?

Anyway, I didn’t have an excuse for moving back home that I could pin on my mom and dad either, such as: it turned out that my mom wasn’t just a hypochondriac and she actually did have a fatal heart murmur and it was her dying wish for me to move back into my childhood bedroom that was still covered with floral psychedelic wallpaper from the 1970s. That would have been a good one (except for the fatal heart murmur part).

It’s not like I hadn’t made plans for my postcollege life. I had. My plan was to become a famous television actress, the type who could play younger, because as a twenty-one-year-old, I still looked sixteen, just like everyone on Beverly Hills 90210 (well, except for Andrea). Always a realist, I also had a backup plan and that was to become a famous actress on Broadway. I’d certainly put in some semiquality time training to be an actress. I spent every morning in acting class, putting my hand on my solar plexus to find my emotion and then breathing from my diaphragm. I usually found only a cough when I breathed deeply from my diaphragm because I’d developed a pack-a-day habit of smoking Camel Lights. I inhaled the acting class air like a young, hopeful girl, then hacked and wheezed out phlegm like a longshoreman whose emphysema gets exacerbated by his seasonal pneumonia.

I was convinced that simply because I attended college and majored in acting, I would walk out of the not- a-serious-acting-conservatory Emerson College and straight into my own trailer in Hollywood or some backstage door on Forty-second Street. The details were not mine to work out! That’s what acting professors were for! This was before I realized that my acting professors were themselves actors who also thought at one point in their misguided youth that they’d be famous. I don’t think any of them ever got offered a role in The Godfather and told Coppola, “Thanks for thinking of me, but I’m going to have to turn this role down. My real passion is to wake up every morning and teach a bunch of hungover college kids the concept of sense memory.”

In all my years of college, I never really sat down and got to thinking, Okay, so how do I take this class where I do monologues from Equus and turn it into a career? I was usually busy thinking about the cute Kurt Cobain look-alike who was always sitting alone in the cafeteria near the cereal. (Turns out that the reason he looked so much like Kurt Cobain was that he was also a heroin addict. I recently looked him up on Facebook and now he’s a chubby, short-haired, button-up-shirt-wearing computer programmer—married, with two kids. I mourn this outcome more than if he had OD’d.)

In the back of my mind I just assumed that there existed a special red phone in the dean’s office at Emerson. In my limited knowledge of how the world actually worked, I decided that this phone I made up in my head existed solely for placing and receiving calls to and from Hollywood. I pictured a kingmaker with a Santa Claus–esque