I Can Barely Take Care of Myself

12. Becoming Miriam

When my sister Violet had stage three breast cancer she didn’t become a medical marijuana–smoking, mellow, sleepy little patient. The chemotherapy turned her into a superhero—whose superpower was finding household projects that absolutely needed to be done. (They didn’t need to be done.) It’s hard to wrestle a hammer out of the hands of a determined woman with steroids in her bloodstream and try to tell her that the oil painting of her cat that a friend made does not need to be hung up above her fireplace at this very moment—or ever. (Just so you don’t think I’m a total monster—she made a full recovery and she still has her original boobs.) I stood behind Violet while she surveyed the plaster in her wall. I thought of taking a bronze candlestick to her head—just one sharp blow that would either sedate her into a silly grin like a cartoon character or perhaps injure her enough to go to the ER, where she could get some drugs that would ease her pain and get her to calm the fuck down.

I left the house to walk down her long driveway to check the mail. “Jennifah, I told you the mail doesn’t come until aftah two o’clock. There’s no point in walkin’ down there.” Oh, there’s a point. To get a few minutes’ respite from the chemically created Bob Vila–Womanzilla—even if it was a failed mission.

Even though Violet was doing things like telling me to rip the lettuce for her salad more quietly, I felt such compassion for her. The chemo didn’t make her nauseated like most patients, it made her irritable. I imagine it was like having a rush-hour Friday traffic jam, a screaming baby on a red-eye, and a fly that won’t stop buzzing around your head all pumping through your veins at the same time. What’s worse is that she was surrounded by a bunch of friends and family who loved her, but they did not have cancer. She was alone in a sea of smiling faces that couldn’t stop asking questions in order to make themselves more comfortable. Do you want to lie down? How about soup? Do you think that you need to see a specialist in the city? Have you tried drinking fresh- squeezed orange juice? You should really lie down. Have you thought of joining a support group? Are you nauseous? Will you be nauseous later? Can you spell “nauseous”? There are two us in that word, right?

My sister, who had divorced a year earlier and lived alone, had to suffer through the most annoying question of all during her recovery: “Do you regret not having kids?”

One afternoon Violet and I sat on her couch and watched Elf for the second time that day even though it was the middle of July. Our favorite scene is when Will Ferrell is in the waiting room at the pediatrician’s and he says to a cute little girl, “I’m a human—raised by elves.” And the little girl says in a sweet voice, “I’m a human—raised by humans.” We always tear up and say to each other, “Oh, she is sooo cute and so sweet. She’s just full of wonder and joy because it’s almost Christmas. She’s so innocent and pure—she doesn’t judge Will Ferrell’s character, Buddy, for wearing an elf costume because she hasn’t even learned how to judge others yet.” That’s about where our maternal instinct stops. By the next scene we’re grossed out by all of the kids who are touching things all over the store and we realize just how many germs we encounter when Christmas shopping.

Violet and I never talk that much about how we both don’t want kids. We don’t need to, because we both accept and respect each other’s decision and we don’t need to ask nosy questions we already know the answers to. Plus we’re usually too busy quoting lines from Caddyshack or talking to her tuxedo cat, Miss Mitty. But we definitely bonded over our collective outrage at how people turned her cancer into an opportunity to give her a sideways glance about being childfree at age forty. When my sister told me that some of her friends and even random people in the waiting room at the hospital had said some version of, “It’s too bad you don’t have children to help you through this,” I got as angry as a cancer victim who had to suffer the injustice of her little sister making a salad too loudly.

Look, you want to badger a normal, healthy woman about whether she realizes that if she doesn’t fix that biological clock, she could run the risk of never having C-section scars or her floppy post-childbirth vagina sewn up in episiotomy surgery like a real woman—that’s one thing. But to suggest to a cancer victim that she might suddenly regret not having children, when there is so much else to think about, like oh, I don’t know… Am I going to die? Do I have to stop eating Twinkies? Why can’t I use this free time off work to hang a paint-by-numbers replica of a cat in the most prominent place in my living room?

What kind of person would seriously wish for a cancer-ridden single woman to add motherhood to her to-do list? Not to mention wish for a child to exist in the world and have to watch her mother lose all of her hair. And oh, what a shame, Violet didn’t get to test out her cancer genes on a new generation. Bummer that her daughter won’t grow up to maybe also get breast cancer someday! My poor sister—I mean, she had to get in her car and go to chemotherapy without having to strap a child into a car seat. She must have been so not put upon by another human who needed her for life sustenance, and she had to take naps during the day—because she was too tired to even check her Facebook page to see whether any cute guys from high school were divorced yet—without worrying about a tiny helpless being screaming in the next room. It’s morbid but we joked that if she had died, people would be saying, “It’s such a shame, there are no kids at this funeral to lighten the mood.”

Since Violet was full of vim and vigor and anger-inducing chemo, she actually answered people with things like, “I have cancer. I’d hate for my kids to see me like this and I’d hate to not be able to take care of them because I have to sleep all the time. Besides, I can’t even have a lot of visitors because I have a shitty immune system at the moment and kids, being the little germ machines that they are, could possibly kill me right now. So, I’m sorry that you’re sorry, but I’m not sorry. Besides, I never wanted kids and having cancer hasn’t changed that.”

Luckily, my sister Lynne is a mother of three grown children and so she had the freedom and time to visit from Vermont to help out and get told by Violet that she wasn’t making toast correctly. My guitar-strumming, folk-singing sister Lynne has never questioned her sisters’ choices not to have kids. Mainly because she’d rather work in the garden in her backyard, deep in the woods and high in the mountains of Vermont, than bother telling anyone how to live her life. (She knows how complicated it is for us just being aunts. You want to bum a cigarette off your seventeen-year-old niece and ask your nephew in college if he has any pot, but you know it’s inappropriate. Just kidding, Lynne!)

Violet confessed that even though she felt sick all of the time from the chemo, she kind of enjoyed the time off from taking care of four horses and working full-time at a brokerage firm. She was tired. (Yes! People without kids also get tired!) And she had enough to deal with—our dad was at her house every day asking the same questions over and over: “Where do you keep your paper towels?” And my mother was saying things like: “Your hospital bills are high, are you sure you want to start buying organic vegetables?”

WHEN I TOLD my parents Matt and I were splitting up, my mom said, “Jennifah, my other two daughters are divorced and now you’re getting a divorce? I have to ask you. Was it something your father and I did?”

Most kids worry that their parents’ divorce was their fault, but in my world, my parents worried that my divorce was their fault. The divorce was nobody’s fault. It was amicable. “Amicable” when used for breakups means: “It’s not really your business and this whole thing sucks but I wasn’t dumped, so don’t pity me.”

After convincing my mom that it wasn’t anything she did that made me no longer want to be married, she finally concluded, “Well, Jen, this is very Hollywood. It’s very hard to stay together in show business. Look at Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton. They married, divorced, and then remarried! Their relationship couldn’t take the scrutiny of the public eye.”

“Mom,” I told her, “Matt and I weren’t in the public eye. I’ve never been chased by a paparazzo.” She then consoled me, not about the divorce but about my celebrity standing. “Oh, Jen, you will be there shortly. I always run into people who say that they love watching you on Chelsea Lately.”

I was sitting in my divorce lawyer’s office, thinking, I have a divorce lawyer. This is something that grown-ups have. Well, not every grown-up, but still. I feel like a war veteran. I have been through some shit that not everyone is strong enough to go through. Some people stay married when they’re not in love. Some people don’t even demand that lots of love exist in their marriage—it’s a partnership, a way to raise kids and join incomes. But hey, I’m not a victim. I’m not a hero. I’m just a grizzled old vet who fought for his country/woman getting a divorce.

Then I caught my grandiose train of thought and abruptly changed gears. Jen, what are you, five years old, thinking that putting a divorce lawyer on a five-thousand-dollar retainer makes you a grown-up? And speaking of retainers, you wear one at age thirty-seven. Where is it? Your orthodontist told you that you have to wear the Invisalign twenty-two hours a day for one year if you ever want to see that incisor on your top row of