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

At a certain point, we all have to admit that parents asking their children for grandchildren is really just a polite way of parents asking their kids to get down and fuck. Come on, honey! Take your pants off and let my son-in-law penetrate your vagina without a condom. I know I raised you to be modest but I must ask you, just this once, to put a pillow under your butt and get those legs up over your head so that when he ejaculates his sperm inside of you, it just slides right into your uterus and makes me a grandchild on the first night of your honeymoon!

Second, my mom essentially confirmed that the camera had added its magical ten pounds to the twenty pounds that I’d added to myself and I looked like a human water balloon.

I stood outside of a Starbucks, shouting into my BlackBerry, “Mom, don’t worry, I’m not pregnant!” as people stared while making awkward attempts to hold the door for me. It was like the opposite of the conversation that Madonna had in her song “Papa Don’t Preach.” I wasn’t in trouble deep and I was not going to keep my baby—because there wasn’t one.

I’M NOT MAKING fun of my mom and I’m not just saying that because she’s going to read this. I wouldn’t have it any other way. I love having a mom who, if I were pregnant, would automatically ask, “But what about your career?”

There’s an article tacked to my corkboard that my mom ripped out of a magazine. The headline is “Child-Free by Choice” and the byline is “Not sure motherhood’s for you? You’re not alone.” My mom wrote on a Post-it note:

This is from an old magazine that I found in a drawer. However, I think it’s still relevant.

The note is written in her perfect Catholic school–taught cursive handwriting. In addition to writing in perfect cursive, my mom is the last of a generation who still clips articles and sends them via snail mail when she could just e-mail them to me. I appreciate it, though, because my e-mail account is already clogged up with friends from high school who have turned ultraconservative and send me forwards about how illegal immigrants are bringing down the economic system and stealing all of our jobs.

My mom is really supportive of my decision/instinct not to have a kid. Part of me thinks the fact that I’m publishing a book about it makes her even more supportive. Even though I know her support is genuine, I think that if I decided to become a Wiccan transsexual poet, the acceptance of that would come easier if there was a promise of a book display at Barnes and Noble stores nationwide of Jen Kirkman: My Life as a Wiccan Transsexual Poet, and a possible appearance on The View.

She told me recently that I never played with baby dolls as a kid.

“In fact, Jennifah, you took the clothes off a baby doll I bought you and instead dressed up the cat like a woman and then did a photo shoot. You had a Cabbage Patch doll named Ramona whom you loved, but I think it was because she was named aftah those books you liked. And Cabbage Patch was more of a status symbol anyway. You usually carried her by the arm and let her yahn hair drag on the floor.”

(This further supports my theory that the childhood signs that you have no instinct to mother anything, not even cats or dolls, are very similar to the signs that you will grow up to be a gay man—both evident before age ten.)

My mom kept interrupting the stories about me to tell me about herself: “Jennifah, I never thought to say, ‘Why don’t you be a moth-ah when you grow up?’ I thought it would take away from what you were showing me you wanted to do. All you did was talk about show business. When you weren’t at ballet and tap school you were putting on shows in the living room for nobody. Everywhere I took you, you asked people if you could tap-dance for them.”

To be honest, it sounds like I was an annoying kid. Thirty years later, whenever I’m drunk, if there is a DJ in the vicinity, I request “Thriller” and I do an interpretative dance. (This half-serious dance is to distract from the fact that I can’t quite nail those Michael Jackson/zombie moves.) A lot of people, when they drink, their hometown accents come out. When I drink, my inner child comes out and all I want to do is dance for you. Thank God this (usually) happens when I’m hanging out with other drunken people who hopefully just think that I’m standing still and it’s the room that’s spinning.

At the end of our phone call outside Starbucks, my mom finally believed that I was not pregnant and that I wouldn’t be having an abortion or a baby. But she also reminded me that no matter what happened—if I did end up having a baby sometime—she would support me and not judge.

My mom’s only regret about my plan not to have children has to do with her desire to look at potentially beautiful people. When I interviewed her for this book, she said to me, “Jennifah, I think your children would be beautiful and it sometimes makes me sad that I won’t get to look at attractive children who you made. That’s what moth-ahs think. Don’t let anyone tell you differently. It’s not always some altruistic thing. Sometimes you just think your children are so good-looking that you want to see more of them.”

That’s what I love about my mom ever since she’s entered her seventies. She’s still lucid but has the honesty of someone who’s lost her mind. I’m up to my neck in hearing my friends listing their reasons for having kids, how it’s all about “taking part in creating the next generation” and “carrying on the species” and “giving