with grandchildren are acting like Joe Francis, the mastermind behind
Second, my mom essentially confirmed that the camera had added its magical ten pounds to the twenty pounds that I’d added to myself and I looked like a human water balloon.
I stood outside of a Starbucks, shouting into my BlackBerry, “Mom, don’t worry, I’m not pregnant!” as people stared while making awkward attempts to hold the door for me. It was like the opposite of the conversation that Madonna had in her song “Papa Don’t Preach.” I wasn’t in trouble deep and I was not going to keep my baby— because there wasn’t one.
I’M NOT MAKING fun of my mom and I’m not just saying that because she’s going to read this. I wouldn’t have it any other way. I love having a mom who, if I were pregnant, would automatically ask, “But what about your career?”
There’s an article tacked to my corkboard that my mom ripped out of a magazine. The headline is “Child-Free by Choice” and the byline is “Not sure motherhood’s for you? You’re not alone.” My mom wrote on a Post-it note:
This is from an old magazine that I found in a drawer. However, I think it’s still relevant.
The note is written in her perfect Catholic school–taught cursive handwriting. In addition to writing in perfect cursive, my mom is the last of a generation who still clips articles and sends them via snail mail when she could just e-mail them to me. I appreciate it, though, because my e-mail account is already clogged up with friends from high school who have turned ultraconservative and send me forwards about how illegal immigrants are bringing down the economic system and stealing all of our jobs.
My mom is really supportive of my decision/instinct not to have a kid. Part of me thinks the fact that I’m publishing a book about it makes her even more supportive. Even though I know her support is genuine, I think that if I decided to become a Wiccan transsexual poet, the acceptance of that would come easier if there was a promise of a book display at Barnes and Noble stores nationwide of
She told me recently that I never played with baby dolls as a kid.
“In fact, Jennifah, you took the clothes off a baby doll I bought you and instead dressed up the cat like a woman and then did a photo shoot. You had a Cabbage Patch doll named Ramona whom you loved, but I think it was because she was named aftah those books you liked. And Cabbage Patch was more of a status symbol anyway. You usually carried her by the arm and let her yahn hair drag on the floor.”
(This further supports my theory that the childhood signs that you have no instinct to mother
My mom kept interrupting the stories about me to tell me about herself: “Jennifah, I never thought to say, ‘Why don’t you be a moth-ah when you grow up?’ I thought it would take away from what you were showing me you wanted to do. All you did was talk about show business. When you weren’t at ballet and tap school you were putting on shows in the living room for nobody. Everywhere I took you, you asked people if you could tap-dance for them.”
To be honest, it sounds like I was an annoying kid. Thirty years later, whenever I’m drunk, if there is a DJ in the vicinity, I request “Thriller” and I do an interpretative dance. (This half-serious dance is to distract from the fact that I can’t quite nail those Michael Jackson/zombie moves.) A lot of people, when they drink, their hometown accents come out. When I drink, my inner child comes out and all I want to do is dance for you. Thank God this (usually) happens when I’m hanging out with other drunken people who hopefully just think that I’m standing still and it’s the room that’s spinning.
At the end of our phone call outside Starbucks, my mom finally believed that I was not pregnant and that I wouldn’t be having an abortion or a baby. But she also reminded me that no matter what happened—if I did end up having a baby sometime—she would support me and not judge.
My mom’s only regret about my plan not to have children has to do with her desire to look at potentially beautiful people. When I interviewed her for this book, she said to me, “Jennifah, I think your children would be beautiful and it sometimes makes me sad that I won’t get to look at attractive children who you made. That’s what moth-ahs think. Don’t let anyone tell you differently. It’s not always some altruistic thing. Sometimes you just think your children are so good-looking that you want to see more of them.”
That’s what I love about my mom ever since she’s entered her seventies. She’s still lucid but has the honesty of someone who’s lost her mind. I’m up to my neck in hearing my friends listing their reasons for having kids, how it’s all about “taking part in creating the next generation” and “carrying on the species” and “giving back.” I appreciate that my mom admitted on behalf of all mothers that what drives procreation for the most part is the desire to see what the combined genes of you and your spouse would look like. If I want to see what another man and I could create, we’ll just take a walk down to the Venice Beach boardwalk and have someone draw our caricatures.
It took a year but I finally got my preburrito body back and lost thirty pounds. It involved actually moving my limbs and walking and not eating four bagels every morning for breakfast—oh, and getting a divorce…
8. Faking It for George Clooney
Having children has had an enormous effect on me as a person, and creatively. When you have children you look at life differently. You have a much fuller sense of appreciation for the fragility of life, and how magical we all are as human beings.
Oh, Madonna. You claim to have had a cabdriver drop you off in Times Square with only fifty dollars in your pocket when you first moved to New York City in the 1970s. Then you became the biggest pop star in the world. You married Sean Penn and you introduced us all to Vogueing. While you were doing all of that, I was so painfully aware of the fragility of life that I had to be put on Prozac to calm my anxiety. Now that my serotonin levels are evened out, I don’t need a kid to remind me again about the fragility of this life. Also, I think you realized how magical life was before you had kids when you sang in “Like a Prayer,” “Life is a mystery / Everyone must stand alone / I hear you call my name / And it feels like home,” and then made out with that hot, black Jesus.
The nail salon is a place where small talk breeds like Michelle and Jim Bob Duggar. (His name is fucking
At a nail salon, when a woman whom you’ve never met looks over and asks, “What color is that you’re getting?” that’s one degree of separation away from, “Do you have children? Let’s talk about our kids!” It’s a strange phenomenon, but when mothers have an hour to spare, they want out of the house and away from their kids—and yet they can’t stop talking about them. Mom’s manicure is just going to get fucked up right when she gets home, when Billy hands her an action figure wrapped in a hard-to-open plastic package and says, “Get this out for
