I Can Barely Take Care of Myself

teeth move or else it will stick straight out just like your grandmother’s. A crooked tooth is fine for her—she lives alone in a nursing home—but you’re about to get out there and have meaningless postmarriage sex with young musicians.

My lawyer took me through the basic questions as he filled out the paperwork for me. Homeowners? No. Age? Thirty-seven. His Age? Thirty-three. Kids? No. Mr. Legal Marriage Ender dropped his pen and looked me in the eye. “No kids?” No. “Did you want kids?” No. “Did he want kids?” No. “Well, if he changes his mind, at least he’s young, right?”

I always wondered whether Matt would change his mind about kids if he weren’t married to me. I know he said he didn’t want kids, and he never had a visible paternal instinct. He cringed even more around babies than he did around cats—and he’s allergic to cats. I always predicted that if I died before Matt, in some kind of tragic stand-up comedy accident on the road—like if too much in-flight Klonopin caused me to trip over my carry-on bag as I shimmied out of my seat toward the bathroom and I used the emergency exit door handle to break my fall, causing me to get sucked out of the plane, where I’d free-fall for a bit and have a heart attack in midair, and my lifeless body would flop to its final resting place in someone’s backyard in Oklahoma—he would remarry a much younger woman who really wanted a baby. She would have family money and neither she nor Matt would ever have to work again, nor would they have to take care of their own child. Matt agreed with my assessment. The only way he could see himself becoming a father would be after my untimely death and his union with a hot twentysomething and her trust fund.

Mr. Legal Marriage Ender said, “Okay. Off the clock.” This was his way of showing me that he was keeping it honest. We were about to talk but it wouldn’t be deducted from my retainer (the money one—not the one on my teeth).

“You really don’t want kids? Are you sure it wasn’t just because you were with the wrong guy?”

“You know,” I told him, “I’m actually writing a book about how I never just get to say, ‘I don’t want kids,’ without a million follow-up questions and now this conversation is going in the book.”

“What if you get pregnant before the book comes out?”

“Then I hope you’ll represent me in the first-ever divorce from a baby.”

NATURALLY, MY FRIENDS were concerned about me after the divorce—not because of the fact that I live in a first-floor apartment in a complex with no doorman and a very chintzy home alarm system, making me the perfect victim of a home invasion by either a roving gang of up-to-no-gooders or an army of superfit, tan L.A. zombies, but because I was now thirty-seven and childfree, even though I’d spent all thirty-seven of those years telling them I didn’t want children.

I was on a flight after a gig once with my comedian friend Ray, who couldn’t wait for the plane to land so that he could get home and give his wife and kids a hug. He said to me, “Jen, you were so sure that Matt was the One —so how can you be sure that you don’t want kids?”

“I wasn’t a hundred percent sure Matt was the One,” I replied. “But I took a leap of faith. Romantic love is not parental, instinctual, unconditional love—it’s complex. And what if I change my mind about having kids and I decide to have one and then I change my mind again? As gut-wrenching (and expensive) as it is to change your mind about who you love, it’s a hell of a lot easier to get divorced than it is to toss a kid back into the sea and tell them that they’ll meet someone else someday who will really love them.”

Then Ray added the kicker, the go-to asinine comment from parents everywhere who want to induct you into their club of 3:00 a.m. feedings, applying to private pre-preschools, playground concussions, teenage daughter pregnancy scares, and teenage sons who realize one day that they always wanted to be daughters and hit you up for money for their transition surgeries: “I’ll just feel so sad for you if you never know the love of a child.”

To which I said, “Well, I feel sad for you too. You’ll never know what it’s like to fuck a twenty-three-year-old drummer.”

THE FIRST MORNING that I lay in bed without Matt beside me, I decided to go to Starbucks and get a coffee and the New York Times Sunday Styles section, and then get back into bed in my clothes and stay there all morning. And yes! I get up at seven on weekends because I love my free time. Not every childfree person sleeps late and parties all the time. I am still a grown-up. I was happy. It felt right to be in a big bed by myself. I was relieved that I was on my way to no longer being married. I thought of my old coworker Miriam, who used to read the Times every morning in our shared workspace in the basement of the Charles Playhouse in Boston as she balanced a lit Pall Mall cigarette in her mouth.

I revered the way Miriam ashed her cigarette while she counted the one-dollar bills in the cash box. We were box office cashiers, selling tickets to Boston’s original long-running dinner theater show Sheer Madness. I was twenty-two years old, broke, single, and miserable. Miriam was sixty-two years old, broke, single, and fabulous. Not only did I want to be her when I grew up—I wanted to be her at that moment.

Miriam wore a brooch that on any other woman who doesn’t get her period anymore would look musty. She looked fashion-forward. Her nails were painted such a specific shade of retro-red that I’m sure it came from a thirty-year-old bottle of nail polish. She wore a different black dress every day—always a fine wool-cashmere combination, always perfectly tailored. Miriam went to New York City two weekends every month to have dinner with friends and see a Broadway show. She told me that it was easy—just a forty-dollar round-trip bus ride on Greyhound and a very inexpensive stay in a youth hostel. It sounded so glamorous and free-spirited. Years later when I realized you have to share rooms in youth hostels and there are no private bathrooms, I wondered how she possibly could have lived that way. Miriam was the type of woman who, if not obligated by a job sitting behind a card table in a Boston basement every day to make a living wage, would be in a cafe somewhere just drinking endless cups of black coffee and reading the paper. She had a European sophistication about her, where she could linger leisurely doing one thing at a time, smoking unfiltered cigarettes and apparently not getting cancer.

I was struck by Miriam’s independence. She was divorced and happily never married again. She had no kids. She seemed just as content and natural as other women her age who were grandmothers. I couldn’t picture Miriam ever having ugly stained potholder mitts on her red-lacquered hands. Money was saved not for a rainy day but for a few days later at the TKTS booth in Times Square. She was exactly the kind of person a teenager/young adult looks up to. She seemed to be doing all of the things that reminded me of what James Dean did during his years in New York City—taking dance classes, being creative, hanging out with interesting people who knew they were interesting, kissing men.

I smiled in bed as I read Bill Cunningham’s column and wondered whether Miriam was still alive. I hadn’t thought of her in fifteen years but that day, because of her, I wasn’t sad to be alone in bed, reading the New York Times. I’d never read the paper with my husband, or any man, as a couple. I cringe at those TV commercials that show couples doing the crossword puzzle together in the morning. I start to get claustrophobic just watching. Can’t couples do anything apart? Can’t one of them run an errand while the other one chain-smokes at an outdoor cafe? How do they have all of this free time to waste together? And more important, who has one pencil in their home—let alone two?

I always knew that I was a Miriam, but as each year of my life went by I talked myself out of it, thinking that since being a Miriam wasn’t what most women did, my reasons for wanting to be like her were probably just immature fantasies or excuses to myself about why I couldn’t have a “real” job and a “normal” marriage and family. Parents talk a lot about how much strength and dedication it takes to raise a child. It does. It also takes a lot of strength and dedication to carve out a life that doesn’t seem normal to anyone else.

After my marriage ended I found out that I have something in common with moms and dads. Divorcees count time in months just like new parents who say, “Little Jillian is only sixteen months old but she’s already reading!” I find myself saying, “It’s been nine months since my twenty-month marriage ended and I’m not waking up in the middle of the night with nervous explosive diarrhea anymore!”

People used to ask me whether Matt would regret marrying a woman who didn’t want children. I don’t know whether my ex-husband has any regrets. I do know that he has to write a letter to Brookstone and tell them to stop sending catalogs addressed to him at what is now just my apartment. I also know that, like not wanting to have kids, one of the only other instincts I ever had as a young adult turned out to be correct and it’s that I am a Miriam. Miriam is like the silent, fifth character from The Golden Girls. She’s the spontaneous and unafraid-to-be-alone woman who lives inside all of us. Just like the spirit of God exists even in the most lapsed Catholics—we can access our inner Miriam as much or as little as we want at any given