I Can Barely Take Care of Myself

Santa Will walked quickly toward the front door with his empty bag. Once he was out of their eye line, the kids had already forgotten about Santa. They were playing with their toys and almost knocking over the Christmas tree. The front door shut and I ran to the group of kids and said, “You guys! Santa is leaving! Let’s all run to the window and watch his sleigh with his reindeers fly away!” The kids looked at me in stunned silence. They had never considered that the sleigh and eight tiny reindeer were outside. I was a genius. Here I had been for thirty-seven years, thinking that I wasn’t good with kids just because I didn’t want a child of my own, and it turns out I possessed, at minimum, the creativity of a cool kindergarten teacher.

The kids screamed in unison, “Rudolph!” and ran to the window. They pushed one another from side to side, trying to get the best view, just as I realized that the view they were getting was a behind-the-curtain glimpse of Uncle Will going to his truck to drop off his empty bag and walking into the barn to change back into his plain red fleece KISS THE COOK sweatshirt—an outfit not becoming of Rachael Ray, let alone a magic man like Santa.

Some kids saw Santa Will walk into the barn and the kids who didn’t were crying because they’d missed the sleigh flying away. The rest of them couldn’t figure out what the hell was going on, so they just started to cry in utter confusion. It was like watching a bunch of women having dinner together and one of them starts to get choked up. But before she has a chance to explain why she’s about to start sobbing the others join in—partly due to an instinct to sympathize and partly due to the competitive instinct to steal the sympathy spotlight. I am the most upset! Look at me!

My aunt Gina turned to me and said, “Here’s a tip. When dealing with children, you don’t have to act like a child. You just have to tell them to believe in Santa Claus but don’t exhaust yourself running around acting like you believe in him too.”

Maybe that’s a good reason to tell people why I’m not having kids. Part of being a good mom is suspension of disbelief, trusting your kids will grow up to be awesome instead of jobless burnouts, trusting that they won’t get bullied or that at least you’ll know what to do if they do, trusting you won’t lose all of your friends and you’ll get your boobs back. I’m not really equipped to tell someone to believe in something that I can’t believe in too. And I don’t want to raise someone so blindly trusting of me that he or she actually thinks a fat guy who probably can’t catch his own breath has the energy to oversee an entire workforce of elves three hundred and sixty-five days a year, and that somehow with no workouts or training he can keep his arms flapping on those reins all night long on a sleigh that holds enough toys for all of the children in the world—except for the Jewish and Muslim kids.

If I had a kid, I already know that I would totally break her trust later in life when I go into her room and read her diary. That’s why I’m folding now.

10. I’m Gonna Die Alone (and I Feel Fine)

Mrs. Sanders, the ninety-two-year-old lady who lived across the street from me when I was a little kid, died alone trying to change a bulb in the Tiffany light fixture on her kitchen ceiling. In what should be documented as the biggest “are you fucking kidding me” in the history of bad timing, she had a heart attack while standing on the chair and fell backward, and only the kitchen floor was there to break her fall and her brittle bones. She was found on her back, clutching a sixty-watt bulb, next to a tipped-over chair, while her apparently necrophiliac poodle, Mimi, licked her face. She had a “kid”—a seventy-two-year-old son named Donny who didn’t live with her. He wasn’t there to take charge and say, “Mom, I’ll change the lightbulb for you. Please, don’t climb that chair. You could fall to your death on the floor, where I will find you in a day with your housedress over your head and your knee-high panty hose exposed.”

I think of Mrs. Sanders whenever somebody says to me, “If you don’t have kids, you won’t have anyone to take care of you when you’re old.” Mrs. Sanders sacrificed her best years in metabolism—her twenties and thirties —to raise Donny, and she still ended up changing her own lightbulb, which led to her taking her last breath alone in the dark on some cold linoleum. Donny came by every week to help his mom grocery shop and to weed her flower garden, but he wasn’t there on the night that he could have been most helpful. According to the logic of bearing children in order to have built-in caretaker insurance, if Mrs. Sanders birthed Donny only so she could get some help around the house in her twilight years, she wasted her life.

Obviously I realize that having a kid who doesn’t end up changing your lightbulb one time and therefore not preventing your untimely death doesn’t necessarily mean your life was wasted. But she could have just skipped the whole “raising Donny” thing and been a swinging-single flapper, swilling gin at speakeasies. Sure, she still might have died on the kitchen floor, but it could have been because she was being taken by a handsome gentleman with a jaunty fedora and due to the strong gin, she tilted backward in ecstasy, hitting her head and falling to her death on the floor in the throes of passion—her last words of “Oh, God!” left up to interpretation.

WE ALL KNOW we’re going to die, right? That’s why a lot of us either find religion or fear religion. Knowing we’re going to die is why some of us take medication or self- medicate. Knowing that you’re going to die might make you indulge in eating comfort foods or want instant gratification or combine the two as you sit in the car and open a pint of Ben & Jerry’s you just bought at the grocery store, holding it in front of the dashboard’s heat vent until the AmeriCone Dream is no longer totally frozen, and then taking a bite out of the top without a spoon. “Who cares that I’m eating ice cream with my bare hands? I’m going to die alone,” you say to yourself as you drive with one hand, holding the pint between your teeth and wiping your sticky fingers on the passenger seat.

Knowing I’m going to die someday has never filled me with the desire to make another human being, whom I have to spend the “good years” of my life looking after in hopes that someday he or she might return the favor. What if you died during childbirth? Then you’ve screwed yourself out of a life and you’ll have created a person who will have no elderly mother to take care of someday.

In the song “Beautiful Boy,” which he wrote for his son Sean Lennon, John Lennon sang, “Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans.” And I say, “While you’re busy making other plans, hoping that one day your teenagers will grow up to be adults who sponge-bathe you, they’re hiding behind the local 7- Eleven doing whip-its.”

Have a baby: Just add water and boom! Instant caretaker! Guaranteed to bring you your high blood pressure medication and administer your insulin shots! But what if your kid grows up to be completely inept? These are a handful of possible outcomes for your child’s life that could hinder his or her ability to be your emergency contact, let alone care for you in your old age:

• Your daughter is busy trying to make a living as a reality TV star and most of her days are spent in undisclosed locations so that the rose ceremony results remain confidential.

• Your son is a commercial pilot with a drinking problem and bad depth perception who flies exclusively in the Rocky Mountains.

• Your son is a scientist—only because he secretly wants access to Bunsen burners so that he can continue with his after-work meth-making hobby.

• Your daughter is a stand-up comedian.

• Your kid ends up being the teenage boy who waited on me at a Best Buy in Las Vegas. His name tag said BREN—is that a name? Creative naming is a blueprint for making either an angry outcast or an entitled hipster—and both of those types of guys end up being completely unfuckable in their early twenties, wearing their short-sleeved plaid shirts and Malcolm X–style black-rimmed glasses.

Anyway, I’d gone into the Las Vegas Strip–adjacent Best Buy during my friend’s destination birthday party weekend, scrambling last minute to buy what would hopefully be the best birthday gift I could give her—the Golden Girls DVD boxed set. Young Bren appeared to be sleeping standing up when I approached him at the counter. He literally looked like he had the weight of the world on his shoulders—as if gravity and the mere effort it took to stand up against it were too much for this kid to handle as he worked his Saturday- afternoon shift in the DVD section. Or maybe it was just the weight of those weird plug earrings that were stretching his lobes to the size of a dilated-and-about-to-give-birth vagina.

I wasn’t sure how to approach a teenager who was dozed off in the upright position. I knew from dealing