I Can Barely Take Care of Myself (18 page)

I switched to another magazine that was a few months old. If the World Wide Web ever permanently crashes and I need to know who won the Oscars in 2009—I think the nail
salon would be the first place I’d go to find out. The windowsill at any given manicure place is like a national archive of celebrity gossip. I don’t know what happens to the new magazines. I have a feeling that Tammy and her cohorts take the new ones home and keep them on the back of the toilet, where they are left to absorb foul odors and humidity that makes the pages curl, only to bring them back
to the salon six months later.

I read that Jay-Z made some big changes in his career upon the birth of his new daughter, Blue Ivy. (By the way, whenever I hear that name I can’t help but think of the late porn star Blue Iris, who was a frequent guest on Howard Stern’s radio show. I hope for the best for Jay-Z’s baby and that she doesn’t grow up to become a granny who says, “I’m getting myself
hot,” and shows her elderly gray pussy on Pay-Per-View.)

Jay-Z had allegedly decided that since he has a daughter, he would no longer say the word “bitch” in any of his songs. He even supposedly released a poem promising as much:

Before I got in the game, made a change, and got rich

I didn’t think hard about using the word bitch

I rapped, I flipped it, I sold it, I lived it

Now with my daughter in this world I curse those that give it.

Unfortunately, before I could get all huffy and wonder whether Hova ever considered the feelings and opinions and struggles of his mother, his wife, and his female friends
before
his daughter was born, the report was exposed as a hoax. Apparently there are still plenty of bitches in his life that he holds near and dear and it did not take making a baby
for him to have basic empathy and a social conscience. Jay-Z, I salute you.

But so many other celebrities who are not married to Beyoncé
claim that until they had a baby their lives were just a series of trivial things like maintaining a movie career, and now that they have a baby their lives have real meaning. I’ve never had a movie career or a baby and I’m a firm believer that my life has a
lot of meaning! I believe that every person on earth has meaning just by being alive. I also believe that the meaning of life is to love—whether you love a child or a string of skinny-jeans-wearing bass-player boys. One of my favorite quotes about the meaning of life is from American contemporary spiritual leader Ram Dass: “We’re all just walking each other home.” I’d never have known he said this
if I weren’t scrolling through Twitter, but whatever, it still counts as spiritual reading.

Even though I don’t have a maternal instinct, I often fantasize about helping some of these celebrity babies that I read about in
Us Weekly
’s “Toddlers—They’re Just Like Us” section.

Me: “Hey, I’m worried about you.”

Celebrity Baby: “Who are you?”

Me: “Oh, just a nosy person who keeps reading about
you and your family in the tabloids.”

Celebrity Baby: “I’m in a magazine? People can see my picture and know what I look like? What if someone decides to kidnap me? I’ll be so easy to find!”

Me: “I know. I don’t know if your parents have the best judgment. They’re kind of using you to prove to the world that they’re not complete narcissists. Not that the definition of ‘narcissist’ is ‘childfree.’
It actually just means an inability to feel empathy. Lots of childfree people are still quite empathetic, usually not toward children but . . . I feel bad for stuffed animals in stores that no one buys. That counts as selfless.”

Celebrity Baby: “My parents seem nice, although I still don’t get why I’m white and my mom is Mexican.”

Me: “Oh, no, honey. That’s not your mom. That’s your nanny.”

Celebrity Baby: “Oh. Where’s my mom?”

Me: “She’s off filming a movie in Vancouver for a few months.”

Celebrity Baby: “But I thought her life had meaning when I was born and that movies weren’t that important. So why is she making more?”

Me: “Well, it
is
her job.”

Celebrity Baby: “But she has dozens of millions in the bank and owns four estates all over the world. I didn’t think she had to work.”

Me: “Look, I told you they have judgment problems. Your parents seem to think that birthing you or paying their surrogate to birth you because they were too busy not wanting to get fat has transformed them into good people who suddenly understand the meaning of life and now care about things outside of themselves.”

Celebrity Baby: “But do I count as something outside of themselves? I mean, technically
I am an extension of them. Who wouldn’t want a cute miniversion of herself and her hot actor husband?”

Me: “You seem pretty smart for your age.”

Celebrity Baby: “Yeah, well, I have to be pretty smart for my age, don’t I? I just found out that my parents didn’t have a basic moral code until I was born. They sound pretty fucking stupid if you ask me. Besides, why aren’t my parents filming movies
in Los Angeles? One of our greatest exports, Hollywood, is being outsourced to Canada. This is why our economy is in the shitter.”

Next in my trashy-magazine-a-thon, I happened upon this quote from Sarah Jessica Parker:

As a working mother high heels don’t really fit into my life anymore—but in a totally wonderful way. I would much rather think about my son than myself.

Have these moms ever
heard of yoga? Meditation? Volunteering for the elderly or the homeless? Taking care of a relative? There are
lots
of ways to not think about yourself and when you’ve truly mastered not thinking about yourself, you don’t even have the urge to tell everyone that you are not thinking about yourself!

You know who does a lot of good deeds and doesn’t have kids
and
totally understands what’s important
in life? George Clooney. Unlike me, he doesn’t give a fuck what you think about the fact that he’s not “selfless” enough to father a kid. He’s not writing a book defending his position. He’s having sex with a cocktail waitress and then saving Darfur. Both are noble positions.

I read in
Marie Claire
that George said, “Even one kid running around my villa makes me nervous, so I’m definitely not
a candidate for father of the year! If I need to surround myself with children and feel like I have this big extended family, I can always call Brad and Angie and ask them to stay with me, just to remind me why I’m so happy without.”

Booyah! Not only does George not have kids—he wants to gently remind you that he’s friends with Brad and Angie and lives in a villa in Italy. Try to tell me with
a straight face that changing diapers is preferable to drinking wine on Lake Como.

So-called journalists constantly ask him, “But, George, don’t you want to be a father?” He recently answered no for the millionth time and also said that he has no plans to dye his hair and that he’s going to embrace the gray instead. I want to embrace who I am just like Clooney. (Except I’m dyeing my gray hair
every six weeks. Fuck that. Women still haven’t mastered that “distinguished gray” thing—we end up looking like vegan Wiccans.)

My old friend Tammy shook my bottle of silver-sparkle nail polish and asked, “Big plans this weekend?”

“No, actually. I’m just going to relax.” I tried to concentrate on reading a tabloid. I
did
want to find out how Nicole Richie went from party girl to business owner.

Not one to let her clients read anything without interruption,
Tammy said, “Your husband and kids out of town?” I mean, technically, yes, my husband and kids
were
out of town. My husband was in another town called Ex-Husband-Ville and my kids were in a town many galaxies away called “Nonexistent Limbo.” I wanted to give Tammy the benefit of the doubt and assume that she didn’t remember that I
was the woman she once shamed for not having children—but I saw the look in her eye. She was jabbing at me and not just with her sanitized nail clippers. She knew there was no husband or kids because I looked well rested and didn’t have food stains on my shirt. My old instinct kicked in and I answered, “Naaaaaww.” We made eye contact and in that moment I thought of my inspiration, George Clooney.
Just like me, he did the marriage thing and he couldn’t commit, and having children just isn’t for people like George and me! But I panicked because I am not George Clooney. I am not friends with Brad and Angie, nor do I have a villa or any self-confidence. So . . . I lied.

I beckoned Tammy close with my unmanicured finger. I whispered, “Can you keep a secret?” I motioned to my uterus or where
I think my uterus is—I could have been pointing at my kidney—and said, “I’m expecting. But we haven’t told anyone yet because it hasn’t been twelve weeks. I’m still nervous.”

Tammy dragged her nail file across her mouth to give me the “my lips are sealed” promise. She realized that she had crossed a line in making a pregnant woman tell before it was time. She blushed and waved her hands. “Okay,
okay. I see. I see. Just a few weeks along. I ask no more.”

Tammy then started yammering to her coworkers in the language of her native country, the place where I’d finally be accepted as a woman who was not dishonoring her family. The other manicurists snapped to and sashayed to my side, like a bunch of chorus boys at the sight of Carol Channing.

The women brought me pillows for my back, warm
washcloths for my face. The owner, “Trisha,” walked over, clutching a bottle of vanilla-scented lotion. She tapped my shoulder. “Up. Up,” she
ordered. I leaned forward and she started massaging my neck. “For free. For free,” she promised. A free neck massage? A pillow for my back? Even with my 20 percent tips I’d never had this type of attention!

I was having fun watching people believe my lie
and I started to tell Tammy the details of my pregnancy, which I’d farmed from listening to my friends talk about their experiences. I told her about the morning sickness, which wasn’t so much about throwing up but about how inexplicable nausea gripped me every morning, an uncomfortable sensation akin to taking a vitamin on an empty stomach. I told her about how my food cravings were getting weird—not
just what I was eating but how I was eating—and that I went to restaurants and stole french fries off total strangers’ plates. I told her about how I was so horny from pregnancy hormones that I took paper towels off their cardboard roll and made a DIY dildo. I told her all about how the bliss from being pregnant made me want to keep the good feeling going, so I tried Ecstasy for the first time
and felt the baby kick like she was at a rave.

Tammy touched my knee and said, “Sshhh. You rest.” She even closed the magazine in my lap and told me to shut my eyes. I felt like a genius. I got the benefits of motherhood—feeling like I fit in with a tribe of women, not feeling judged, actually being told that it’s not rude of me to close my eyes and tune out the person rubbing lotion in between
my toes—without having to sit there with a human being growing inside of me and pressing on my bladder, causing me to have to cut the pedicure short so I could pee.

When I went to pay for my mani-pedi, Tammy waved me off. “This one on us.” It was like an impromptu surprise baby shower. A free mani-pedi? That’s like someone handing me a free thirty-five bucks, which equals two boxes of diapers
or six boxes of baby wipes!

While pretending to be pregnant really suited me for a blissful hour of pampering, I resented that I was treated better just because I was a mother-to-be. If I’d shown up at the salon telling everyone
about how I’d just worked for ten hours and spent an hour each way in traffic, would I have received a free vanilla-scented neck massage? When I think about Tammy and
other women who think like her, I get as angry as I do at homophobes who for some reason can’t stop thinking about two men fucking. Mind your own business! All paying customers on Planet Earth deserve a comfortable stay—not just mothers. Even though womanhood technically begins when you get your period, it seems that in our society nobody considers you a woman until you stop getting your period for
nine months at a time. Okay. I will admit—that is one huge selling point for pregnancy.

The ladies gave me a curious look when I left, because even though I was only a few weeks pregnant, I stood up and cradled my lower back with my hand, pushing my stomach out as if I were about to give birth. I let out a sigh and waddled toward the front door. I realized I’d forgotten what month into my pregnancy
I was and I was behaving as if my water were about to break. But Tammy and Trisha and my new extended family thought I was just a hilarious knocked-up Charlie Chaplin with my physical pregnancy comedy. They clapped and giggled like toddlers watching a thrilling game of peekaboo.

Being fake-pregnant for an afternoon gave me a new perspective on life. I realized, finally, what was important: well,
I realized what wasn’t important. It is not important to get the approval of people whom I don’t know about a very personal decision. As I walked out the door, Tammy threw the bottle of glittery silver nail polish in my purse. She winked at me and said, “Keep it.” I accepted her generous gift because with my husband and children permanently out of town and because George Clooney still hadn’t invited
me to Lake Como, I definitely needed a little sparkle in my weekend.

9. “But You’d Be Such a Good Mom!”

There are a lot of things I might be good at, such as competitive figure skating, window washing from ten stories up, and being an open-heart surgeon. I might also make an excellent kamikaze pilot—except for the fact that I don’t want to learn how to fly and have no interest in taking my own life on behalf of Japan.