I Can Barely Take Care of Myself Jen Kirkman (best books for students to read txt) 📖

it’s wrong, and if I end up going to hell and meeting Adolf Hitler, I promise that I will kill him with my bare hands, but to this day when someone brings up The Diary of Anne Frank, I can’t help but think to myself, That little whore.

My relationship with my parents had improved over that year. Somehow living with Blake wasn’t as abhorrent to my folks as spending the night with Blake and then coming home the next morning in the same clothes in which I’d left their house—to see my boyfriend, who was planning to take those clothes right off. My mom and I sat at the kitchen table, where she’d referred to me as a “trash bag” just a year before. We were having our first frank discussion about sex, without actually talking about sex. Actually, we’d talked about sex once—in 1985.

In fifth-grade sex ed class, my teacher taught us what happens when sperm enters a woman’s fallopian tubes. Our homework assignment was to draw a picture of the opposite sex—or what we thought the opposite sex looked like naked. Then we were to write a paragraph underneath, from our best understanding, of what intercourse was and how babies were made. I told my mom about the homework assignment and she teased me by chasing me around the kitchen table, asking to see what I’d drawn. I remember feeling disappointed in sex ed class. I’d had a vague inkling that sex was something that people did for fun, but the way it was being taught, it seemed like the teacher was dismissing that notion and instead presenting sex as something that two people do only when they want to make a baby. I half listened to the teacher explain how sperm meets egg, figuring, I don’t need to know this. I don’t think I’m having kids anytime soon.

I think about raising kids now and how they’d have access to Facebook and actual real pictures of naked people on the Internet. I think about how my ten-year-old daughter would be nothing like me. I had no idea what a penis looked like, so that picture I had to draw in fifth grade of a naked man looked like a Ken doll—just legs with no anatomy in between. My ten-year-old daughter probably would already have had a dick-pic sent to her cell phone by some little shit in her class. Would my ten-year-old daughter have to have a cell phone? I guess I could forbid her from having one—just like my mom forbade me from watching MTV because she thought music videos were too sexually explicit and directed by the devil. But then again, what if my daughter had to make an emergency call? There aren’t pay phones on every corner these days. If some creep in a van were to abduct her outside of school, my daughter wouldn’t be able to speed-dial 911 or text me. I can’t send a ten-year-old girl to school with no viable means of communication. And what if my ten-year-old girl was an early bloomer and had her period already? Would I have to teach her about safe sex or secretly slip a birth control pill into her oatmeal every morning? I know that when I was ten I was terribly horny for Bruce Willis and Michael J. Fox. Luckily, the boys at school whom I liked didn’t like me back, so my lust remained only a fantasy reserved for the hours that Moonlighting and Family Ties aired. But what about my imaginary daughter? What if the boys liked her back? Then they’d be screwing at my house after school while I was on tour doing comedy, and before you know it, I’d have a pregnant ten-year-old daughter and I’d be a grandmother and a mother to two people before one of them even turned eleven.

I don’t understand what’s so great about having kids when I’m faced with the fact that at some point my kids would disappoint me—just like I disappointed my parents. It’s the vicious cycle of life. It’s an absolute certainty that the babies that I’m not having would become horny teens who send pictures of their genitalia to one another on cell phones that I’m paying for.

Eleven years later, I sat around that same kitchen table with my mom as she gave her version of a mea culpa. “Jennifah, I’m reading a biography on Lauren Bacall. She had a lot of men in her life but she loved them deeply because she was passionate . . . about everything she did. She was a wond-ah-ful woman who was very talented.”

That was my mom’s way of telling me that I was forgiven and that even though she’d never slept with a man before marriage, it was something that “the kids” and Hollywood legends were doing and maybe it wasn’t so abnormal or trash bag–like after all.

She’ll never admit it, but I believe that my Catholic-but-starstruck mom gives a free pass to people in Hollywood on certain moral issues. The affair between JFK and Marilyn Monroe was blessed by my mom in ways that Monica Lewinsky and Bill Clinton’s affair wasn’t—and they only had oral/cigar sex! But Bill Clinton’s saxophone-playing appearance on Arsenio Hall was not enough for my mother to consider him Hollywood royalty. My mom doesn’t condone abusing prescription drugs, but to her, Judy Garland is a saint and a victim. She’ll forever blame the movie studios for handing Judy the pills. And I remember when her best friend called to say that John Lennon had been shot—my mom said over the phone, “Oh Ruthie. It’s just not fair. A Beatle shouldn’t be allowed to die.”

As long as my mom and I were having a heart-to-heart, I summoned up the rest of my gumption and told her that I wanted to be a stand-up comedian. I knew I was killing her dream of my owning my own little local dance studio or becoming a Broadway actress. Her response was, “Are you even