I Can Barely Take Care of Myself

daughters. A fireman without kids doesn’t have to pretend that his job is his baby replacement. Oh, yeah, when I walk up those forty flights of stairs fighting back the burning and falling asbestos, I just cradle the hose in my arms and think, This is my baby.

It’s a weird thing society puts on us women. They tell us that we can have careers (well, after they told us we could vote—they sort of said it would be okay if we wanted to have a career, as long as we agree to get paid less than a man for the same job), and then they tell us that we aren’t real women if we have careers but no babies, and if we dare pick a career over a baby… we better at least talk about that career like it’s a baby in order to blend in and not call attention to the fact that we’re selfish women who are not carrying on the human race.

I don’t actually feel maternal about my career, although there are similarities to motherhood. Sometimes my career has me out of bed at five in the morning and it doesn’t give a shit how much sleep I’ve had the night before. I have to constantly come up with new things to “play with” or my career gets bored. You’ll never see me breast- feeding my desk or taking its temperature rectally, although I am steadfast about wiping it down every day with antibacterial wipes. (Don’t worry. I use the environmentally friendly, chemical-free wipes. I want to make a nice planet for other desks to grow up in.) But unlike with motherhood, I don’t feed my career. My career feeds me, and I can’t ignore my career because if I do, someone younger and funnier will give it the attention it needs and then she’ll get her own sitcom.

I WENT ON a business trip one weekend and the guy who drove the shuttle from the carport to the airport said, “Where you headed?”

“New York City,” I told him.

He got all bright-eyed. “New York City. I’ve always wanted to go there. But I only know about it from Sex and the City repeats.”

I was delighted. I realized that my subtle streaks of racism had prevented me from ever assuming I’d get to talk about one of my favorite TV shows with a straight, middle-age black guy.

“Can I ask you a question, Ms. New York? Now, let me guess, are you a Carrie, a Samantha, a Charlotte, or a Miranda? Let me see…” He took a look at the motorcycle boots I was wearing and said, “Damn, girl, according to those shoes, you ain’t any one of those ladies.”

I explained to him that it’s not comfortable to wear Manolo Blahniks on a red-eye flight and that it’s not financially comfortable in general for me to wear shoes that cost a thousand dollars.

“So you’ll get to town and see your girlfriends and have some drinks, like a cosmo or even a lemon drop? That’s a new one I’ve heard of,” he said.

“Well, I land at five forty-five a.m. at JFK, so I’ll probably just try to find a yellow cab and avoid those guys with the duct tape on their 1988 BMWs who call themselves ‘independently owned car services.’ But then yes, I will probably see my friends that night. I haven’t given any thought yet as to what type of drinks we’ll have.”

I was having fun with my driver, who looked like a world-weary older black guy but had the soul of a 1980s teenage club kid heading to the Limelight. That is, until he said, “Your husband and kids okay with you taking off for this girls’ weekend?”

“Well, actually it’s not a girls’ weekend. I have a business meeting. Anyway, I’m not married and I don’t have kids.”

“Girl! What you waiting for! You’re attractive! You can find a man!”

I’m not sure why this myth exists that only attractive people get married. Have you ever googled “Cracker Barrel weddings”? I told him that I had once had a husband, that that husband and I did not work out, and that I’m very happy because I get to do things like get on a red-eye without asking anyone’s permission. Suddenly it seemed like I was slowly falling into the trap of needing the approval of the guy driving the shuttle from my car to the airport.

“But you wanna have a kid, right?” he asked (I was no longer fooled by the wide-eyed club-kid persona). I told him no. He said, “Hell, what? I have six kids. It’s hard to afford them these days and they are a pain in my ass. They have minds of their own, but I love them. They are the light of my life when I go home. What’s waiting for you when you go home from New York City?”

“I think some Greek yogurt that hopefully won’t expire over the weekend?”

“Girl,” he said, “Greek yogurt don’t keep you warm at night.”

True. In fact, Greek yogurt will not keep me warm at night but it most certainly will keep me up at night… with stomach cramps, because I’m lactose intolerant, but I refuse to acknowledge this fate. But when I’m tired and coming home from a business trip on a Sunday at midnight only to have to turn around and be at work by nine o’clock the next day—I would avoid both active cultures and tiny active human beings at all costs.

I WATCHED BABY Henry suck away at Eileen’s nipple and, just like I did at the eighth-grade dance after no boy asked me to dance during “Stairway to Heaven,” I felt uncomfortable and excused myself. “Well, Eileen. I’ll let you go. You seem busy.”

She ignored my hint and picked right up where she’d left off before the boob hijacking. Henry kept eating his lunch while I kept missing the passed plates of tea cookies.

“Well, Jen, having a baby is definitely something you can only plan so much. Nobody is really ever ready. There is no perfect time to try to have a baby. You just have to jump in and try.”

I’m sorry, what? You have to plan a baby. It’s the most important decision a human can make! I’m just some selfish woman with a lack of maternal instinct and even I know that you should at least try to plan for a baby. Buying a vintage Fonzie lunch box at a yard sale you just happened to walk by is something you can’t plan a perfect time to execute. Those are the only kinds of miracles that just happen.

“Well, okay, but I think the perfect time to try to have a baby should at least start with someone wanting a baby, which I don’t.”

She eyed me with that vaguely condescending mom look. “I know you love your cute figure and trust me you don’t get that back after you have a baby, but once you have kids you realize that there’s more to life than fitting into skinny pants.”

“Tell that to David Bowie,” I joked. “I mean, he’ll destroy his whole legacy if he starts walking around with side fat over his leather pants. Nobody wants Ziggy Stardust to turn into… Ziggy.”

Obviously if I wanted to have a baby, and I could have a baby, I would fucking have a baby! But I am never going to throw away my leather pants from 1997.

“Look,” I said, “my not wanting a baby has nothing to do with not wanting to gain weight. I just don’t want a kid. But even if I did want a kid, I’m really not the best person for the job.”

Baby Henry slapped his tiny-but-stronger-than-a-robotic-claw hand over Eileen’s mouth and held it there. He squealed with delight and for no apparent reason, one second later, burst into sobs. With Henry’s miniature fingers acting like a fleshy muzzle, Eileen mumbled out the best she could, “Jen, somewhere deep down, you want a baby, but you’re scared. I think you doth protest too much.”

I don’t know what’s worse: the fact that she talked only about her kid during an entire birthday party and that my saying I don’t want kids just opened me up to a half-hour psychoanalysis session—or the fact that it’s twenty- first-century America and she just said “doth.”

I wanted to join baby Henry in his tantrum. I don’t want to have a baby but sometimes I want to be a baby because it’s socially acceptable for them to cry and scream in public. I wanted to blurt out, “Oh yeah? Well, I think that you doth protest too much and you don’t diet enough! Somewhere, deep doth down, you want to go to Weight Watchers and fit into those skinny jeans again but you don’t have the stamina! You know you think about skinny pants as much as any other woman. You’re a female living in Los Angeles and I’m supposed to believe that you’re the only one without some kind of body image issue?”

Eileen was right about one thing. I was letting myself engage in this type of confrontation and get defensive again. I was “protesting too much.” I should have walked away the minute she said, “I think you’ll want a kid now that all of your friends are starting to have them, no?” If she were a lawyer, the judge would have slammed the