I Can Barely Take Care of Myself

want with your free time?”

I’ve worked myself up into a bit of a frenzy and am admittedly heated. So, warning: This chapter might not be for you if you’ve ever asked someone whether he or she wants to have children and after that person says no, you’ve tried to guess why, didn’t listen to the answer, and instead offered unsolicited advice on how to still make it work, such as:

“Don’t worry about the money now. Just get pregnant and it will all work itself out.”

“You should freeze your eggs because if you’re feeling like an empty soulless husk as you get older, it will be too late.”

“Not everyone shits in the hospital bed when they deliver a baby. If you poop before you go to the hospital, you’ll be fine.”

Most people who don’t want kids also don’t want to be cornered by strangers at parties who launch an informal investigation into our psyches and backgrounds and decision-making capabilities. It’s been proven that vice presidential hopeful Sarah Palin wasn’t vetted as extensively as I have been in the company of women who are searching for a yet-to-be-discovered “good reason” why I don’t want to have children.

Because a woman might have reached a certain age (at which her eggs are rotting in her abdominal refrigerator) or wears a wedding ring (signifying her clear willingness to settle down with one sexual partner for life and gain some permanent weight around her midriff), people seem to think that it’s high time to encourage her to take the next natural step in life: getting nauseated at random scents that nobody else can smell, not being able to have more than one glass of prosecco on New Year’s Eve, and experiencing the near impossibility of a sex life for six weeks after the baby is born. Invalidating a woman’s life choices by saying things like, “Oh, but you’ll regret it if you don’t have kids,” or, “I didn’t think I wanted kids either until I had one,” is like me going to an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting and telling the newly sober that eventually when they grow old, they’ll want to take the edge off with a little gin and tonic and that if they could only just be mature enough to control themselves, they could go on a fun wine-tasting tour in the Napa Valley.

Ladies, if you have recognized yourself in this chapter, I have news for you: you are not the first person to say these things to us childfree-by-choice-ers and sadly you probably won’t be the last. These comments aren’t things that I can laugh off, like when your charming toddler tells me that I look fat. (Okay, nobody’s toddler said that, but it does sound like something a toddler could say.) You are forcing your values onto my life and I know that you don’t think you are doing that. I know you think you are saving me from a life of childfree loneliness by telling me what it’s like on the other side, but what you’re really doing is making me scared of you mom types. I will walk down a dark alley at night and not flinch at the sight of a shady man in a doorway— but if I see one of you coming toward me on the sidewalk in broad daylight while pushing a stroller, I will cross the street.

I BARELY KNOW Eileen. She’s a friend of my friend Derek and we were talking at his son’s daytime birthday party at Dr. Tea’s Tea Garden (a trendy tea shop in Los Angeles where you can order a frozen CapaTEAno). Wait, I’m sorry. I don’t want Oprah to yell at me about how I’ve exaggerated my memoir. Full disclosure: I was not talking with this woman. She was talking at me. Seemingly unprovoked, Eileen delivered a passionate monologue about how she thought that she never wanted kids until she and her husband accidentally got pregnant and now she can’t imagine her life without baby Henry.

“Once we got pregnant, we thought, This is a miracle! Having a baby is absolutely what we were supposed to do!”

Oh, Eileen, you say “miracle”… I say one drunken night your birth control pill rolled under the sink and you said, “Just come inside me. I don’t feel like wiping anything off my stomach afterward.”

It’s not a “miracle” that when you have unprotected sex in your thirties a baby gets made even though you always thought you didn’t want one. Babies are not analogous to your drunken cousin whom you didn’t expect to appear on your doorstep on Christmas Eve. (Except that they might be equally as needy.) And baby Henry did not show up like the Virgin Mary on a piece of toast. It’s science.

Also, would all couples kindly stop saying “we’re” pregnant? “We’re going to have a family” is fine. But only one person is actually pregnant, which is the medical term for “knocked up.” If her husband gets lung cancer in thirty years, is Eileen going to appropriate his physical condition as well? She’ll grab the elbow of her dear friends at holiday parties and whisper, “It’s stage three. We’re dying.” She accidentally got pregnant. Not her husband. If their failed birth control actually produced a growing fetus in her husband’s nonexistent womb, then they need to pitch a reality show ASAP. Episode one can probe this phenomenon and show how hard it is to raise two babies when both Mommy and Daddy have to recover from a C-section!

Eileen bounced baby Henry in his BabyBjorn. He spit up a little bit on her hand but she smiled and said to me, “It’s all worth it. Every minute.” Then asked, “So, when are you going to have kids?”

I wanted to answer, “It’s none of your business, but since you asked… ,” and tell Eileen that I didn’t really want to find myself strapped to a poop machine at an overpriced tea shop anytime in the near future, but in the interest of polite conversation I just said, “Actually, I don’t want kids.”

This is where that polite conversation should stop. It should be no different than her asking, “So, when are you buying a multimillion-dollar mansion?”

Me: “Actually, I don’t want to buy a multimillion-dollar mansion.”

Eileen: “Oh, no mansion? That’s cool. That’s your personal choice. So, how crazy was Mad Men last week? Boy, that Don Draper sure does like all kinds of midcentury modern pussy!”

BABY HENRY FIDGETED in his external cotton-womb, trying to unbutton his mom’s shirt. Eventually, like all men, Henry gave up trying to figure out how to work a hook and-eye clasp and just pulled Eileen’s shirt to the side, located her boob, and put his mouth right on her nipple. I felt like I was thirteen years old again and watching Alex the Burnout go up the shirt of Nicole the Skank on the dance floor during Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven.” And just like Nicole the Skank, Eileen the Mom let her date suck on her left one in front of all of her friends.

Eileen seemed sad. The breast that baby Henry’s mouth wasn’t attached to was kind of… leaking. It looked like her nipple had left a sweat stain on her nice afternoon tea party shirt. As she bounced, she let out a few farts that tooted along in perfect time with her rhythm. She didn’t acknowledge the farts so I didn’t either. Maybe that’s why Eileen wanted me to have a baby, even though she didn’t know me. Maybe once you’re at the point of having a boob that drips like a leaky faucet at parties, your instinct is to proselytize. You’d be more comfortable surrounded by women who are leaking and farting as well. You can harmonize like the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. And then when you’re done harmonizing you can go door to door, extolling the virtues of multiple wives for one man who will give him at least a dozen children!

I know that nothing you love comes easy. There’s crying, flatulence, and wetness with anything that’s ultimately worthwhile. That’s how Eileen feels about raising baby Henry and how I feel about spending all of my time working on my career. I wish I could spend less time on it, but I don’t make the rules about how much dedication it takes just to get a morsel of success in show business and stand-up comedy. Just like Eileen doesn’t make the rules about how much dedication it takes to keep baby Henry alive and happy. Eileen chose motherhood. I didn’t. And to me, that’s where the conversation ends. That and when someone starts making toot noises out of her butt while I’m trying to eat a cupcake.

Even though I’m the one making this argument, I resent having to refer to my career as my baby in order to explain myself to parents. It suggests that as long as a woman has something she feels maternal toward, then she passes as a regular human being. She wants to swaddle her career, so we’ll make an exception and give her a pass!

Women don’t have to have maternal urges to be women. My career is not my surrogate baby just like my car is not my surrogate sex slave just because I turn it on and ride it. Men don’t call their careers their sons or