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

After every encounter with oral sex, I was panic-stricken and convinced that I was pregnant. For some reason, despite having taken sex ed class in fifth grade, my perception of how someone gets pregnant grew more and more skewed with each passing year. It got to the point where I was convinced that if I gave a guy a hand job, the sperm would then live on my finger, and since I had forgotten to wash my hands before I peed, the sperm would travel through the thin bathroom tissue when I wiped, jump from the outside of my vagina, and skip up my fallopian tubes. I had the kind of Catholic mom who, I suspected, might withdraw me from school if I got pregnant and make me go upstate, where I would carry the baby to term in some dilapidated mental institution and then give it away to some nice nuns to raise. But I didn’t want to leave school and my ballet lessons for nine months. I didn’t want to have an abortion either, because when I was sixteen and fearing I was pregnant, I made a promise to God.

I prayed, “God, if I ever get pregnant, I just have to have an abortion. I can’t raise a baby. But if I have an abortion, I promise I will become a nun.”

I figured I could spend my life being celibate and secretly pining away for boys, writing about them in my diary. It was how I spent my early teen years anyway. As long as nuns could listen to the Cure to help offset some of the loneliness and angst, I was convinced I could handle it. But I was not ready to answer a stranger at a wedding about how I’d handle an accidental pregnancy.

As I stammered and babbled my neurotic tales of teen angst to Lucy, I looked over at Matt and Peter, who were laughing and ordering more whiskey. Why wasn’t Matt getting grilled about his supposed immaturity? How was Matt not realizing that I’d been hijacked into a philosophical debate as middle-aged relatives of our friends were starting to drunkenly swipe their fingers through the frosting in the wedding cake? Couldn’t he see the SOS looks I was shooting him that said, “Help me. I’m being judged by a woman for an abortion I didn’t have!”?

I went to the bathroom and just grabbed on to the sink until my heart stopped racing. I fought back tears. How had I allowed a total stranger to bully me at a fucking wedding? I let the tears fall. Goddamn it! Isn’t this why people get engaged, so they don’t have to spend Saturday nights crying in bathrooms anymore?

On the drive home Matt and I caught up on the two different conversations we’d had at the wedding.

“Jen, I’m sorry I didn’t check in with you. You were talking with your hands and you had plenty of wine in front of you. It seemed like you were having fun.”

“Matt, she asked us if we wanted children and then she started whispering at me! What did you think we were talking about?”

“I didn’t think about what you were talking about. I was talking to Peter.”

“Why can’t men think about more than one thing at once? I was talking to Lucy and thinking about your conversation.”

“You win, Jen. You win.”

I started talking to Matt like I was his military superior. “Matt, we can’t fight. We’re on the same side and we have to stay vigilant. This is our new world. People are going to start having kids and I’m not taking the brunt of the pressure. You know what? You need to start lying and saying that you’ve had a vasectomy.”

“I’m not going to lie about things I didn’t do to my penis, Jen.”

“But that’s our trump card! I can say, ‘My husband can’t make sperm! He paid a doctor to take a knife to his balls! Take that! We can’t change our minds!”

I thought for sure that once I was in my thirties, people would stop telling me that I was young and that I’d change my mind about not wanting to have children. Someone my age in colonial times would be dead by now, probably from childbirth. “I’m in my thirties” always seemed like a way to say you’re in a nice, tidy adult age bracket where you might not yet own a home but you definitely know what you want out of life. I always thought that thirty was that magical age where, just like from Brownies to Girl Scouts, you cross that bridge into the land of Being Taken Seriously as an Adult. I thought that getting married at age thirty-five to a man who also didn’t want children would ensure that I finally “won” my own argument. I’m not having children. I was right. Ha. Ha. I didn’t change my mind. My eggs are drying up and probably damaged anyway. Even if I did change my mind and wanted to get pregnant at this age, there’s a good chance that something would go wrong in the DNA and my baby could end up a Tea Party wacko.

I don’t want to wish my life away, but I’m starting to think that life is going to get really sweet when I’m seventy, and people will finally have to accept that I’m old enough to manage my own mind. Although I wouldn’t be surprised if someone said, “You say you don’t want children but you have early-onset dementia. You only think you don’t want kids and you only think that you are presiding over a conversation between your oxygen tank and your St. Francis of Assisi figurine. You’ll change your mind.”

6. Jesus Never Changed Diapers

Years ago, I was in the women’s bathroom at a comedy club in Addison, Texas, after I’d come offstage. (I’m sorry to brag about performing in the suburbs of Texas and using the same bathroom