I�m sitting on my couch in just a bra and sweatpants. For some reason I also have a cocktail ring on my right finger and a feather headband atop my head. I�m too embarrassed to wear the feather-band outside of the house�although I guess not too embarrassed to commit to print that I�m wearing it and knee-high pom-pom slippers late at night. When I�m on a writing procrastination binge I start playing dress-up, and I just got bored and quit halfway through, so now I�m procrastinating my game of dress-up by finishing writing the introduction to this book. This is just one example of what it is to be me. Besides the usual distractions from life�friends calling in tears because they�re heartbroken, flat tires, deaths in the family, leaks in the ceiling, work�I pretty much have the ability to do whatever I want, whenever I want because I don�t have children. That�s not the only reason why I don�t want children�it�s just one perk.

And yes, I don�t want children. As far as I know, I can have children. But I�m not great with kids and the thought of raising them scares me�it�s more terrifying to me than an empty house in the woods or a clown doll sitting in a chair. You�re just so screwed if you find yourself in any of these situations! There�s no way out!

Most people assume that �doing whatever I want� includes partying all night and enjoying my hangover without a toddler sitting on my head. But I�m actually pretty mild. I got nervous one time after taking Benadryl three nights in a row to fall asleep. I fantasized about whether I would have to call my loved ones before checking in to Betty Ford or would someone from the rehab center go through my iPhone for me?

I remember asking my mom when I was little if I could go live at this place in Boston called �The Home for Little Wanderers.� I didn�t realize that it was a facility for orphans. It sounded to me more like a place for free spirits who knew that even if they loved where they were one moment, that could change tomorrow. One thing I know about myself is that everywhere I go is my new favorite place. And I�m not a cold, heartless vagabond either. If in my wandering I end up reading to children at a zoo in Madagascar�wonderful! I don�t hate kids. I just hate the idea of dragging a kid around with me as he or she is forced to adapt to my lifestyle. I also don�t want to have to carry animal crackers around in my purse.

I have a picture of my cat from childhood, Mittens, on my living room wall. He�s been dead for twenty-four years. When friends ask me why I don�t just get another tuxedo cat, I say, �I loved Mittens because my mother changed his cat litter. Not me.� I do have a small collection of stuffed-animal tuxedo cats given to me as gifts by people who, I assume, assumed that I needed something to care for. But those kitties are smashed down facefirst in a wicker basket in the bedroom. I�m afraid to look. I think they might be dead.

The way most people feel about loving being a parent is exactly how I feel about not being a parent. I love it. And I can�t imagine my life any other way. I�m one of those people in an ever-growing movement called childfree by choice. I think it�s a clinical and defensive name for what sounds like an otherwise fun group of people. I�ve never actually seen members of this movement all in one place. I guess we�re not as organized or fabulous or as into riding floats as gay people. We live in pockets of cities and suburbs all across America and the world and we may not have anything else in common with one another except that none of us right now has a toddler saying, �Mommy, please put a shirt on. It�s inappropriate to sit around the house in a bra and why is there a peacock on your head?�

So while I sit here on my couch at home dressed like someone halfway to senility, I�m remembering the time that I was sitting on a couch in my psychologist�s office, wondering whether it was weird that I still had my sunglasses on my head during our session. I wondered whether I was too accessorized for sitting around figuring out my problems and analyzing my patterns. It feels like I should treat therapy like going through airport security (which I do a few times a month as a traveling stand-up comedian)�I should have nothing in my pockets, no shoes and no jewelry around my neck, nothing on my outside that can distract the person in front of me from seeing what I look like on the inside.

That day I said to my shrink, �I feel like an outsider in the world because I never want to have children. When people ask me if I want children and I say no�they always say things like �You�ll change your mind.� I�m sick of it and I feel like I don�t fit in.� I don�t know what I expected my therapist to say�probably her usual: �Was there a time in childhood when you felt like an outsider? Is this pushing any old buttons? You know if it�s hysterical, it�s historical.� What I didn�t expect was that she�d say, �You don�t want kids? Why not? What�s up with that?� What�s up with that?

�Oh no,� I said. �Not you too! You�re going to tell me I�m weird for not wanting children?� She explained that it�s my reaction to those people that we need to work on�and that we don�t need to attach any jumper cables to my biological clock. She suggested that instead of answering, �I don�t want kids,� that I should simply say, �It�s not in my plans right now.� Oh boy. She had no idea what I was up against at every cocktail hour/wedding/shower/holiday party I�ve been to since I started to ovulate. I�m convinced that people who want kids and people who have kids have secret meetings where they come up with their talking points. There�s not one response to �I�m not having kids� that I haven�t heard and I�ve heard the same questions and comments approximately one bazillion times:

��If you don�t have kids, who is going to take care of you when you�re old? (Servants?)

��Men have to spread their seed. It�s in their DNA. (He can spread his seed all he wants. I have a magic pill that prevents it from growing.)

��But it�s the most natural thing you can do as a woman. (So is getting my period every month.)

��That�s selfish. You can�t be immature forever. (And spending your days watching Dora the Explorer with a kid is mature?)

��You have to replace yourself on earth. What will you leave behind? (There are a few plastic bags that I never recycled�)

Random people who want me to have children are the same type of people who won�t let up on me because I haven�t watched The Wire and I never plan to. I just never got into The Wire. Is The Wire brilliant and life altering and does it make you feel less alone at night? Yes! That doesn�t mean I have to like the show. I have no opinion on The Wire. It is just not a part of my life. I�m not trying to be cool or different. A Non�Wire Lover is not my identity. I just don�t even think about The Wire. And yet people continue, �It�s available on Netflix!� �I understand that it�s easy to get.� �You�ll love it.� �I won�t. I might. I don�t care.� �How can you not watch it? Well, what kind of shows do you watch?� What will happen to these people if I never see The Wire? Are they at home feeling a phantom pain in their abdomens and thinking, If Jen would only watch The Wire, this bad feeling would go away. And in the same way my Netflix queue remains Wire-free, people seem really agitated that my womb remains baby-free.

I took my therapist�s advice and started getting cagey with my answer. But once I started saying, �It�s not in my plans right now,� it was taken as, �Yes, I plan to have kids someday.� And then just to avoid arguments, I went through a phase of lying. �Yes. I want to have kids someday. I want to have kids right now. Anybody have a turkey baster? Let�s kick this party up a notch. I�m ovulating!� But I�m not going to lie anymore.

I�ve always been a little different. I was called a �freak� in high school because I wanted to be on a stage instead of on a lacrosse field. I went to a job interview at an office straight out of college wearing black tights, green nail polish, and clear jelly shoes. I got the job but my new boss took me aside to explain the office dress code. She asked me, �What were you trying to prove with that outfit? Why do you want to look weird?� I had honestly thought that this was a good outfit to wear. I wouldn�t even know how to try to be weird. It seems like too much effort. Just like trying to be normal�whatever that looks like�often seems more trouble than it�s worth. I mean, who really wants to wash her car in the driveway every Sunday (or even have a driveway)?

My favorite TV show when I was six was The Lawrence Welk Show. I wanted to grow up and live in a world of bubbles and polka music someday. I went to the most popular girl in school�s slumber party in the sixth grade dressed as Groucho Marx. (It didn�t go well�you�ll read all about it.)

It may not be filled with bubbles and polka (actually thank God for that, my aesthetic and musical tastes have changed), but I�ve found a community of weirdos in the comedy world. I moved by myself to New York City and Los Angeles. All of my family and my childhood friends live on the East Coast. I decided to wander the country in search of a career as a stand-up comedian. Fifteen years later and two comedy albums in, I�m doing just that for a living, in addition to writing and appearing on Chelsea Lately and playing the part of myself in the Chelsea Lately spin-off After Lately. My days consist of writing comedy and the occasional phone call to my sister to explain that the e-mail she just received from me saying �I�m pregnant, please call Mom� was really from Chelsea Handler, after she�d had her way with my computer.

My twelfth-grade teacher Mr. Bergen would be proud of me. He wrote me a card when I graduated from high school that said in big black letters, GET OUT OF THIS TOWN. GET OUT WHILE YOU CAN, and a lovely note on the inside that encouraged me to follow my dreams because he could tell that I wouldn�t be happy trying to conform on any level. Now, I don�t think having a child makes you a conformist and I don�t think that not having a child makes you a nonconformist�but I do think that following your heart no matter what other people have to say takes a real sense of self. My friend Shannon, who has two children, says that the judgment never ends. She had children�she did the supposed �normal� thing�and still people chastise her for not having six kids or for the fact that she doesn�t abide by the latest parenting trends. �What? You breast-feed before sunrise? Oh no. You�ll end up with a vampire.�

The bottom line is that the choices we make often make sense to us but can confuse others. Somebody is always going to be disappointed with your life choice, and my rule of thumb is that as long as I�m not the one who is disappointed, I can live with that. If you�ve ever been thought of as selfish and immature or told �you�ll change your mind� about anything, I hope this book can be your card from Mr. Bergen. �Get out while you can��get out of that mentality that there is a �right� way to live. (Well, technically there is, I believe it�s called the Golden Rule, and you can find it either in the Bible or on a coffee mug, I forget.)

I know some people think that not wanting kids means I�m cold, but I�m not totally without baby urges. I felt something when I saw my friend Grace�s baby all swaddled in a blanket on the couch. She looked like a yawning peanut. She was just a content little lump, drooling and going in and out of sleep. And I got that feeling deep down inside that almost brought tears to my eyes. I got an urge and I thought, Oh my God. I want to� be a baby.

After graduating from Boston�s Emerson College in June 1996 with a bachelor of fine arts in �theater arts,� I moved back into my parents� house. (There are few to no well-paying jobs available to a girl who minored in rolling around on the floor collecting dust bunnies on her sweatpants�otherwise known as �modern dance.�) I wish I�d had a really good reason for moving back home, like my friend Jayson from freshman year in college. It was rumored that Jayson took too much acid and also became possessed by the devil on the same night�this rumor started because he dropped two tabs while doing a s�ance around a pentagram that Mick, his practicing Satanist roommate, had burned into their dorm room rug. After the devil possessed him and/or the bad trip never wore off, folklore has it that Jayson was forever unable to speak but couldn�t stop laughing�like some kind of demonic hyena. Jayson left school during his first semester and moved into his mom�s basement, where he sat staring at the wall and listening to Pink Floyd�s Dark Side of the Moon most of the day, except for the time he spent at his part-time job at his hometown library. I know that story sounds implausible�what library would employ a loud laugher?

Anyway, I didn�t have an excuse for moving back home that I could pin on my mom and dad either, such as: it turned out that my mom wasn�t just a hypochondriac and she actually did have a fatal heart murmur and it was her dying wish for me to move back into my childhood bedroom that was still covered with floral psychedelic wallpaper from the 1970s. That would have been a good one (except for the fatal heart murmur part).

It�s not like I hadn�t made plans for my postcollege life. I had. My plan was to become a famous television actress, the type who could play younger, because as a twenty-one-year-old, I still looked sixteen, just like everyone on Beverly Hills 90210 (well, except for Andrea). Always a realist, I also had a backup plan and that was to become a famous actress on Broadway. I�d certainly put in some semiquality time training to be an actress. I spent every morning in acting class, putting my hand on my solar plexus to find my emotion and then breathing from my diaphragm. I usually found only a cough when I breathed deeply from my diaphragm because I�d developed a pack-a-day habit of smoking Camel Lights. I inhaled the acting class air like a young, hopeful girl, then hacked and wheezed out phlegm like a longshoreman whose emphysema gets exacerbated by his seasonal pneumonia.

I was convinced that simply because I attended college and majored in acting, I would walk out of the not-a-serious-acting-conservatory Emerson College and straight into my own trailer in Hollywood or some backstage door on Forty-second Street. The details were not mine to work out! That�s what acting professors were for! This was before I realized that my acting professors were themselves actors who also thought at one point in their misguided youth that they�d be famous. I don�t think any of them ever got offered a role in The Godfather and told Coppola, �Thanks for thinking of me, but I�m going to have to turn this role down. My real passion is to wake up every morning and teach a bunch of hungover college kids the concept of sense memory.�

In all my years of college, I never really sat down and got to thinking, Okay, so how do I take this class where I do monologues from Equus and turn it into a career? I was usually busy thinking about the cute Kurt Cobain look-alike who was always sitting alone in the cafeteria near the cereal. (Turns out that the reason he looked so much like Kurt Cobain was that he was also a heroin addict. I recently looked him up on Facebook and now he�s a chubby, short-haired, button-up-shirt-wearing computer programmer�married, with two kids. I mourn this outcome more than if he had OD�d.)

In the back of my mind I just assumed that there existed a special red phone in the dean�s office at Emerson. In my limited knowledge of how the world actually worked, I decided that this phone I made up in my head existed solely for placing and receiving calls to and from Hollywood. I pictured a kingmaker with a Santa Claus�esque workshop running Hollywood, who kept a master list. Instead of who�s naughty and who�s nice, his list had names of who�s talented and who�s not. I pictured my acting teacher calling this Hollywood Santa and saying something like, �Hi. This is Judith Renner. I�d like to report that Jen Kirkman just made herself cry in my Acting 101 class. Yes, she was doing a monologue about being a single mother but she used the image of her favorite dead pet as a catalyst for the tears. She was also speaking from her diaphragm and not mumbling. Oh, and she also nailed this really difficult Fosse dance move that involves crooking her pinky finger and sitting on a chair. Can we move her up on the �talented� list? Great. We�ll be in touch once she nails a Scottish accent�specifically the Shetland Isles.�

Most of my friends who have kids insist that they won�t make the same mistakes their parents made. They read books and take classes. My friend Shannon is on a one-woman personal crusade via Facebook updates to get all toxic toys off the market. She�s not going to let her baby put plastic products in his mouth like she did. My friend Tracy doesn�t say no in a stern voice to her toddler. Instead, when he goes toward a light socket with his wet finger, she stops him and asks, �Is that the right choice?� (And it works!) Maybe we can prevent our kids from hating us for the same reasons that we hated our parents, but I have a feeling that they�ll just end up hating us for a whole new set of reasons�which is why I want no part of this cycle.

I�m the youngest out of three girls in my family. There�s this myth out there that parents are pretty lenient with their youngest kid. I always heard things like �Oh, by the time I came around my parents loosened up. When I was a kid I didn�t have a bedtime. I didn�t even have a bedroom. I had my own apartment down the street from my parents.� Not me. My parents were the most strict with me, their innocent theater-geek baby girl whose only real desire in life was to wear all black and star in Needham High School�s version of The Crucible.

The restrictions placed on my teenage life read like a really fucked-up rule board:

��No boyfriends allowed! It�s not called date rape for nothing!

��Talking to a boy on the phone is allowed only during daylight hours and in a room where you can�t shut the door! And no whispering!

��If you go to Dunkin� Donuts instead of church on Sundays�you�re not fooling God! That�s an automatic purgatory sentence!

��Diaries will be randomly searched! You shouldn�t be writing about secrets anyway!

��You can only go to your friends� houses at night when a parent is home. Even then I�m not happy about it because your friends� mothers are pushovers!

��Sleepovers at girlfriends� houses are strictly forbidden! Are you really just �sleeping�?

��Curfew is at 10:30 p.m.! No exceptions. Except to come home earlier.

��No driving a car unless one of your parents is in the front seat. And even then�where do you think you�re going?

Once I�d successfully survived my teen years by following their foolproof guidelines, my mom sent me to college, having saved every penny she�d earned. Her dad had told her that women didn�t go to college, so she and all the other moms of her generation raised their daughters to aspire to college. And I think my mom telling me not to be so boy-crazy was more than a subtle hint that the priorities of a new era of women were emerging (that and she really didn�t want me to end up enduring a teenage pregnancy).

But each generation makes new mistakes. For example, I know that I wouldn�t feed the son that I�m never going to have white bread or processed cheese, but I wouldn�t have the answer if he couldn�t sleep and called out to me in the night, �Mommy, Mommy, there�s a monster under my bed!� I believe in monsters and if he were telling me that in the next room there was a monster on the loose? I�d yell back, �Of course there�s a monster under your bed, honey, that�s where they live!�

I�ve already tried to influence kids by doing things differently than my parents and I�ll tell you right now, it didn�t work. Most Saturday nights from 1988 to 1992, you could find me at the Reinhardts� house, babysitting their four-year-old son, Eli. I fell into babysitting for Eli through a friend. I substituted for Eileen one day and after that fateful afternoon, Eli started saying, �Don�t want Eileen. Want Jen to play.� And from then on, my Saturday nights belonged to a four-year-old. That was the only time I ever stole a man from another woman.

I still think it�s weird that adults would leave a toddler with a fourteen-year-old, whom they barely know, especially in a house filled with sharp-edged glass coffee tables. It makes me feel old, like I grew up in some kind of 1940s It�s a Wonderful Life world where everyone knew one another and Eli wasn�t in any real danger because an angel was watching our every move and the townspeople would come over with baskets of money in case of emergency.

When I interviewed with Mr. Reinhardt for the position of babysitter (or, what I think is a more accurate job description, �Person in Charge of Making Sure Someone�s Kids Don�t Die While They�re Out Seeing a Movie�), he asked me, �So, do you like kids?� I was stumped. Like kids? I never thought about kids. I was the youngest and basically an only child. I didn�t have any experience in playing with kids younger than I was. I don�t even remember playing well with others when I was a kid. My friends enjoyed things like sledding, which involved too much prep for my taste, plus putting on long underwear, a few more layers over that, and a big, puffy Michelin Man coat�only to have snow find its way into your sock. I hate being cold and spending ten minutes walking up a snowbank just to spend two seconds sliding down. I always wanted to skip to the good part�going back inside, having hot chocolate, and watching Richard Dawson host Family Feud.

�Name something that most kids like doing, except for little Jen Kirkman. Survey says? Having fun!�

I didn�t know what to tell Mr. Reinhardt. I didn�t hate kids. I just never thought about them. Kids evoked an �eh� emotion in me at best. But I wasn�t going to make eight dollars an hour sitting at home with my parents on a Saturday night, so I told my first but most definitely not my last white lie on the subject: �Yes. I love kids. I�m great with them.�

Babysitting every Saturday night felt like the world�s most boring New Year�s Eve, as I sat there counting down the last hour before little Eli�s bedtime. One night Eli couldn�t sleep. He was talking as if he�d been reading a Nietzsche pop-up book. Right before I was about to turn out the light he asked, �Jen? Is there a God?�

If only he knew that even though I was in charge, I was just a kid myself. I hadn�t even had my first real kiss yet. I was wearing an A-cup bra. Really it was a training bra. There were no cups. It was almost like wearing an Ace bandage around my upper torso. I was so not a grown-up.

Eli persisted. �If God can see me, why can�t I see him?� (A Jewish kid wanted a Catholic girl to explain to him why we can�t see God. Oy boy!) Then he started to get hysterical: �I don�t want God watching me sleep!�

I had no idea how to answer Eli. I didn�t know the first thing about the Jewish God. I knew that Jesus was Jewish and that Moses� did some� stuff. I�m not even sure of the timeline. I couldn�t remember whether those guys knew each other or whether they just sort of respected each other�s �miracle corners.�

When I was a little older than Eli was then, my mom tucked me in every night and we said that prayer: �If I die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take.� That prayer is comforting�if you�re ninety and on a respirator. It doesn�t make much sense for a healthy eight-year-old. Then, after we prayed about this Lord guy coming to take me away in my sleep, my mom would shut the light off and close the door, leaving me to stew in my newly developed neurosis. I couldn�t do the same thing to Eli.

Standing in Eli�s doorway, looking at his innocent little face, I didn�t have the heart to just turn the light out and ignore him. I wouldn�t have to wait until I had my own kids. This was my moment to make an impact on the youth of America by doing the exact opposite thing that my parents did. I would not tell him that there is a God waiting to take him in his sleep.

While I racked my brain for the best way to answer his question without really answering his question, Eli, in the manner of children everywhere with too much time on their hands, came up with more questions. Such as, �When am I gonna die?�

I knew I had to protect him and let him remain a kid. Kids need myths, like the tooth fairy, and when they�re older they can handle the truth: that your parents flush your teeth down the toilet like they�re getting rid of forensic evidence and leave you only twenty-five cents, not accounting for the inflation that�s occurred since they were kids. You�ll have to borrow a dollar from them later anyway in order to afford a Charleston Chew candy bar and they�ll guilt you and say, �That will pull your teeth out.� By the time Eli knew the truth about anything I�d be in college and wouldn�t have to worry about helping him process it. For tonight, in order to protect him and get myself out of his room and on to the bag of Oreos waiting for me in the Reinhardts� kitchen, I would lie my ass off.

�Oh, Eli,� I said. �You will live to be two hundred years old before you die and that is a very, very long time from now.�

I was proud of myself until Eli said, �So, I am going to die?�

I said, �No. No. I mean, if you die, you will die at two hundred, but� not everybody dies.�

Eli said, �So, some people die and some don�t?�

Um. Yes.

Eli said, �Why did God make my grandpa die?�

Um�

Eli asked, �Can I die before I turn two hundred if I�m murdered in my bed?�

I�m glad that I didn�t think to raid the Reinhardts� medicine cabinet to see whether the missus had any �mother�s little helper,� because I seriously would have considered crushing some into the orange juice on Eli�s nightstand to help him take his mind off bed-murder.

Fuuuck. How did this kid know about murder? He�s right. Murder is scary. And it�s real, even in seemingly safe havens like Needham, Massachusetts. Some guy in our town had chopped his wife into tiny pieces in their bathtub just streets away from where little Eli Reinhardt lived. I was terrified of murder myself and to be honest I didn�t like the idea of the Reinhardts� glass sliding doors in their living room. Sure, they had locks, but I could just picture the murderer tossing his ax through the thin glass, shattering it, and then walking purposefully toward me with a bloodthirsty gleam in his eye. �But I don�t even really live here!� I�d scream. As if that would be a good reason why he shouldn�t introduce me to the pointy end of his ax.

I still had a chance to be a good substitute parent. I told Eli that there was no such thing as murder. I told him it was just a thing he saw on TV but not actually something that was physically possible. People couldn�t kill other people, so he had nothing to worry about.

As a special treat, I decided to lie on the floor next to Eli�s bed. I told him that I�d lie there until he fell asleep so that if he had any more scary thoughts, I�d be right there. Once Eli was asleep and dreaming of a vengeful God, I snuck out, whipped the blinds shut in the living room, and stuffed my face with Oreos.

I had no idea that kids under the age of five had the capacity to remember things from week to week. I thought Eli would have forgotten all about murder and dying at age two hundred by the time I saw him seven days later. Nope. Eli wanted me to sleep on his floor again, and as I lay there he worried out loud that his parents would get murdered. He asked, �If my parents were murdered, would you live here and take care of me?�

How did I go from favorite babysitter to guardian-in-case-of-a-double-homicide? I reinstated my lie to Eli. �Eli, no one is getting murdered. I told you. It�s not real.�

Should I tell the Reinhardts about Eli�s obsession with untimely death? I couldn�t tell them that I fell asleep on his floor�that would make me sound like some kind of perv. I felt like I�d fucked this kid up for life. Maybe there�s something parents know that babysitters don�t�like how to properly and with authority squelch all conversations about stabbings and how to not do what the kid wants just so you can get what you want, because eventually that type of negotiation brings everyone down.

A few weeks later Mrs. Reinhardt talked to me woman-to-teenager about the little boy we were raising. She was distraught because Eli kept saying that he wanted to stab people to see whether they would die. Ever since I told Eli there was no such thing as murder, he had apparently gotten confused and become sort of obsessed with this crime. She said that Eli was mad at God for picking his grandfather to die. She asked me, �Jennifer, why was he thinking about such things? How did these ideas get put in Eli�s head?�

I don�t know, Mrs. Reinhardt. Chalk it up to� kids think the darndest things?

The Reinhardts eventually stopped calling me. I�m sure that wasn�t Eli�s decision�after all, I was to be his godmother after his parents were found bludgeoned in their beds by the Massachusetts Murderer.

Sitting on my coffee table are Vanity Fair magazines dating back to December 2010 that I haven�t had a chance to read yet. My DVR is full of Real Time with Bill Maher episodes from the 2012 election that I�ll get around to watching by the 2016 election, I�m sure. I do not know where all of this �spare time� is that people who have kids always tell me I have.

I�m also totally ADHD. Yes, it�s a real disease, but I admit that �totally ADHD� is not a real medical term. I have an actual hyperactivity disorder and that�s why when I drink coffee, I get sleepy. I got excited when my doctor gave me a prescription for an ADHD medication that can make you feel jumpy and lose weight. The catch is that you only get jumpy and lose weight if you abuse the medication. When you take ADHD medication as needed, you just feel even-keeled, and it made my skin break out. I spent a year on these meds with a new temperament and oily skin. It felt freaky, like I was some kind of well-adjusted teenager. I stopped taking it because I�m vain and I�d rather suffer quietly in my head than break out on my forehead. These days I just deal with my ADHD by allowing myself to stare at walls, pace, lose my keys, and find myself with hours and hours of time that I can�t account for.

People often seem to think that this �spare time� of mine ought to be filled with trips to the pediatrician, Mommy and Me movies, and annual pumpkin patches. They ask me whether I worry about feeling �unfulfilled� without raising children. When you grow up having a panic disorder, anxiety, and depression since age nine, it�s pretty easy to be fulfilled at age thirty-eight just by the knowledge that you�re no longer an overmedicated or stressed-out little neurotic. In fact, I�m not only having a second childhood, I feel like I�m finally having a first. The last thing I want to do is bring a kid into all of this fun, leaving me to become the chaperone.

I spent about thirty years of my life being too afraid to travel and constantly worried that I was going to die in a plane crash (What if this plane crashes? or sometimes the odd What if this plane above me falls out of the sky and onto my head?). I�d like another thirty years of enjoying how I�m totally not afraid anymore, and the only child I have time for is my inner one. (She can�t believe she�s been to Disney World ten times and never had the guts to ride Space Mountain.)

When I was growing up in the 1980s, adults used to let Practical Steps in Preventing Children from Dying slide a little bit�like not mandating seat belts on school buses. Yet they worried incessantly about nuclear war�a thing that might happen but, unless they were Ronald Reagan or Gorbachev, they had absolutely no control over.

I�d always had a general sense of well-being and hope for the future until one fateful weeknight in November 1983 when I suddenly didn�t. That was the night that I sat down with my parents at the age of nine and watched the made-for-TV movie The Day After. The film portrays a fictional war between NATO forces and the Warsaw Pact that rapidly escalates into a full-scale nuclear exchange between the United States and the Soviet Union.

Apparently Ronald Reagan wrote in his diary that the film was �very effective and left me greatly depressed,� and that it changed his mind on the prevailing policy on a �nuclear war.� (Thank you, Wikipedia!)

After I watched the movie, I wrote in my diary as well. My sentiment was slightly different from President Reagan�s. I wrote, �I hope I kiss a boy and fall in love before the world ends and that he�s the one I die with in the nuclear war.� I was such a little romantic.

My elementary school teacher, Mrs. Williams, had very strong feelings about her students watching The Day After. She sent all of us fourth graders home with a note, strongly urging our parents to forbid us from watching. When I brought the warning letter home my parents were offended that my teacher had the audacity to tell them how to shield their daughter effectively from a life of post-traumatic stress disorder. I had signed my name on the dotted line, under the promise �I will not watch this movie.� My mom put the letter aside. �Jennifah, where was Mrs. Williams when the boys were throwing snowballs at you after school and calling you a geek? She just told me, �Boys will be boys,� and now she thinks she can send home notes telling me what to let you watch? Maybe if more kids watched this movie, they wouldn�t be such little shits on the playground.�

Yes. Maybe if more kids watched a supposedly realistic enactment of a nuclear holocaust, kids would be off playgrounds completely and instead roaming the halls of their local mental institutions or in line at the pharmacy for some nice prescription opiates.

I�ll never forget the scene where the nuclear bombs from the Soviet Union hit Lawrence, Kansas�all portrayed with that (Emmy-nominated) stock footage of mushroom clouds. Residents of Lawrence, Kansas, are on the highway. The traffic is bumper to bumper. The entire state is desperate to drive away from the three hundred incoming nuclear missiles from Russia, but no one makes it out alive. The sky zaps and rumbles. Flashes of red and orange appear and then a white mushroom cloud rises on the horizon and, just like they�re being X-rayed, the people in their cars go from bodies to bones in an instant. Skeletons suddenly sit behind the wheels of cars.

My dad tried to console me with realism. �Jen, this movie isn�t completely true. If the Russians bomb us, they�ll hit Washington, DC first. Besides, the Russians don�t want to nuke us because then we�ll nuke them off the face of the planet.�

The Day After ended with Jason Robards�s character nearly disintegrating into the arms of another man as they sat helpless among the ruins of Lawrence, Kansas. They held each other as they waited for their last breaths. I rabidly read the credits, which assured me that this was just a fictional event. My mother talked over the disclaimers. �You know what I�m realizing? We don�t have the right kind of basement for a nuclear war. It�s too porous and Ronnie, when are you going to fix that old, rotten cellar door? That�s not going to keep out radiation. I guess we could drive to Jennifah�s school and stay in the bomb shelter there.�

That was news to me. There was a bomb shelter under my school? I decided that I no longer trusted adults. First you have your crazy adults, like the ones who want to run countries and start wars. Then you have your lying adults, like my teacher who pretends war isn�t possible even though she�s teaching us state capitals directly over a bomb shelter. If there was no way that a nuclear war could happen, why was I forbidden to watch a movie about it? Why didn�t my teacher send home a note warning parents not to take their kids to see Poltergeist? I now believed that war was imminent and this was everyone�s way of educating us about what to do because no one had the guts to just tell us, �We do frequent tests of the Emergency Broadcast System because we know that soon there will be an actual emergency.�

The next day on the walk to school I told my best friend, Shannon, about the movie. She hadn�t watched it. She declared that her mom grew up in England and knew a lot about Europe and other countries. �So, if there was going to be a war, she would have told me.� I felt bad for Shannon. Her naive apocalypse mentality was going to leave her caught by surprise.

FOR A LONG time, I had the coping mechanism to push the utter terror that was known simply as �being alive� to the back of the cupboard of my brain. I loved life. I was a spunky kid. All I wanted to do was to have fun. So despite my grave misgivings about nuclear holocaust, I was still excited for our school field trip to Plymouth Plantation, which is a Disney World�esque pastiche of a rural 1600s community in Plymouth, Massachusetts�home of the Mayflower landing. It�s also a place for Boston-area actors to get some work, either a pit stop on their way to their real ambitions or the final resting place of a career that never blossomed. Plymouth Players acted as carpenters, milkmaids, and blacksmiths, carrying on as if it were really the 1600s, demonstrating their skills without any modern conveniences.

Once we were let loose on the plantation, my fourth-grade class immediately began its mission: get one of these pilgrims to screw up and act as if it�s 1983, not 1683. I watched the class bully, Greg, mess with a busy Pilgrim woman. �So, do you have milk?� he asked. She answered, �Yes. We get milk from the cow�s udders every morning.� He said, �Do you put it in the fridge?� She said, �I don�t know what that is.� He asked her, �Do you have a VCR?� The class burst into giggles and Mrs. Williams warned, �Okay, that�s enough.� This pilgrim was unfazed. She answered, �Do I have a what? I don�t know what that is. But I do have this device, a loom!�

I wandered from the group and over to the edges of the plantation, where the bridge to the present day led right into the gift shop. I recognized a familiar sign discreetly hanging on the wall behind the door, a yellow sign with three triangles meeting in the center. FALLOUT SHELTER. Wait, was Plymouth Plantation a target for a nuclear bomb? Does everywhere have a fallout shelter? One minute I could be browsing the collection of Plymouth Rock refrigerator magnets and Mayflower coloring books, and the next minute I could be underground, taking shelter from a nuclear winter.

Suddenly my thoughts were tumbling over one another like socks in a dryer. If there is a nuclear war right now, we are going to die on this plantation. If I try to run off this plantation, I�m going to get lost and no one will be able to find me. I can�t breathe. What if something is wrong with my lungs? Even though I was only just standing there, thinking scary thoughts, my body was reacting like I was in the front seat of a roller-coaster carriage, about to careen down the tracks on the first drop.

I got a surge of adrenaline and turned to run back to the plantation, back to 1683, a simpler time when wars were fought with bows and arrows. Then I heard a noise. A plane was flying low overhead and the rumbling shook me. What if it was a warplane carrying a bomb? Suddenly, I couldn�t feel my heart beating. Were there secret modern hospitals at Plymouth Plantation or just fallout shelters? I felt alone and on the verge of death while everyone around me kept up this stupid butter-churning charade.

Even with my cardiac arrest, I managed to run back to my group and saw my classmates innocently learning how to shoe a horse. I asked Mrs. Williams, �Why is that plane flying so low? What�s going on?� The blacksmith continued banging metal together and denied the very existence of the plane. �What�s going on is that I�m preparing a new shoe for our trusty horse.� I couldn�t stand it. I couldn�t have my life risked in order to carry on this facade that it wasn�t 1983 and that our lives weren�t all in nuclear-level danger. I was possessed by a newfound fearlessness and disregard for authority. I screamed, �Drop the goddamn pilgrim act! It�s Armageddon!�

And it happened. I got a pilgrim to drop the act. He wiped his brow with his handkerchief and said to my teacher, �Is she okay?� I felt like I had just come up for air after drowning. The pain in my heart stopped. The rush of speaking up was exhilarating and my knees began to buckle.

Mrs. Williams led me away from the group and the blacksmith continued to heat his coals. My teacher demanded an explanation. I told her that I saw the fallout shelter sign and then the low-flying plane and I wasn�t sure whether the air-raid signals like the ones in The Day After were working at Plymouth Plantation. Mrs. Williams said, �You watched that movie? Jennifer, nobody else in class watched that movie. I sent home that note.� Instead of yelling at me, she took my hand and led me to the parking lot. She told me to relax and sit the field trip out. Mrs. Williams whispered with the bus driver and I spent the rest of the field trip napping on the front seat of a parked bus.

I had no idea that what I�d just suffered was a panic attack�a simple fight-or-flight response that happens to your body and brain when adrenaline takes over. I thought what I experienced were two separate incidents: I was concerned about the fake pilgrims and my real teacher ignoring the fact that nuclear war was imminent, and coincidentally on that very same day, during my confrontation with a fake pilgrim, I happened to have mysterious heart palpitations and chest pains.

Once my mom got wind of this we went straight to the emergency room. I did a stress test�you know, those things that forty-year-old men do on a treadmill with all of those stickers on your chest like E.T. had on in the scene where he was dying. The ER doctor diagnosed me with �stress.� That seemed about right to me. I didn�t realize I was nine years old. I felt like I was forty. I was stressed. I was worried about nuclear war. I was worried about my sister who was getting a divorce and my other sister, who was just starting college but her grades weren�t that good. I was worried about my parents, who had been fighting a lot. I had to keep the entire family together! If stress was all that I had�I was pretty damn lucky! I called my sister Violet in her college dorm at UMass Amherst. I told her the good news: �I didn�t have a heart attack. I�m just stressed!� She said, �You�re nine. You shouldn�t have stress. If you�re stressed now, you�re going to be a nervous wreck when you�re a grown-up.� She didn�t hang up the phone but let it swing back and forth from the pay phone cradle. I heard her run down the hall with her friends, laughing and screaming all the way. Our lives were so different.

I didn�t realize until years later at a cocktail party that The Day After did not affect everyone of my generation the way it did me. Some people were like, �That movie was so stupid. Did you see that dumb part where everyone turns into a skeleton? My friends and I were laughing.� I visited Shannon and her family last Christmas. She bounced her adorable son on her knee and remembered, �Jen, you were always obsessed with the world ending. It was so funny. You used to cut up pictures of Bruce Willis and put them in your shoe because you wanted to be with him when you died. Who thinks about death at age nine, let alone Bruce Willis?�

I was just really glad in that moment that Shannon�s kid had her for a mother and not me.

A YEAR BEFORE all of this Day After drama, I�d written my last will and testament on a cocktail napkin during a three-hour flight from Boston to Orlando, Florida. I developed a fear of flying the first time I stepped foot on a plane.

My parents and I boarded the now defunct Eastern Airlines plane via an external set of stairs. I felt just like one of the Beatles�except I was not exiting a plane to a hysterical, crying bunch of fans, I was entering a plane with a hysterically crying mother who had just realized how afraid she was to fly. My mom made her way to our seats in coach. My dad put his hand on my shoulder and guided me toward the cockpit. This was, of course, before 9/11/2001. This was just barely after 9/11/1981. You could smoke cigarettes and listen to a Richard Pryor album in the cockpit if you wanted to back in those days. The stewardesses (not yet flight attendants) ushered us into the tiny, low-ceilinged pod. My dad said, �My daughter is apprehensive about flying but I wanted to show her how safe it is!� I hadn�t really been apprehensive about flying�but now I was. What if the pilot pressed the wrong button? Would we be ejected from our seats? What if the copilot started goofing around and pulling levers willy-nilly�would the plane take a nosedive? The pilot and copilot shook my hand. They motioned to the gazillion million controls, gadgets, lights, and levers before them. �This is where the magic happens!� the pilot said. My hands got clammy instantly at even the casual thought that the only thing keeping me in the sky would be �magic.�

We left the pilots to their gadgetry and magic making. There was one more stop on the airplane tour. My father led me up a mini�spiral staircase to the lounge. I know what you�re thinking. What lounge? You mean the metal snack tray that the flight attendant wheels around? No. That�s a cart. I�m talking about a lounge; an actual lounge with a bar and alcohol and bar stools. Men and women who looked like they were graduates of Studio 54 sipped drinks, from real glasses, at the bar. Both sexes wore feathered hair and shoulder pads. I thought to myself, I want my life to be just like this: glamorous, high rolling, and permanently tanned. Gone were my clammy hands and the memory of the intimidating cockpit. This glamorous world seemed safe. The people at the top of the spiral staircase had no worries. They were jet-setters. Maybe one of these rich people would adopt me and we wouldn�t have to tour cockpits or fly coach. I could sit next to my glamorous mom and dad and sip a Shirley Temple while they got bombed on gin. We would travel the world together�always maintaining the perfect amount of fantasy to counteract life�s reality.

Soon I went back to coach to join my real mother, who had her rosary beads in her lap. The beads only came out on big occasions�like funerals. When the beads came out it signaled that my mom was in dire need of strengthening her long-distance connection to God. She had taught me once how to pray with rosary beads but I could never remember the routine. I had no interest. Madonna hadn�t come out with �Like a Virgin� yet. It would be a little while before I found out how cool they look as an accessory.

I excitedly relayed to my mom that there was a whole other universe/cocktail lounge right above our heads. She snapped nervously at my father, as if he had been the architect of the plane: �Ronnie, there�s a bar on this plane? How on earth can this plane hold that much weight? We�re not going to make it!�

During takeoff my dad remained silent, fully focused and staring straight ahead, like he was trying not to get seasick on a boat. He gripped our shared armrest. He gritted his teeth and said over and over in a forced singsong, �Here we go! Here we go!� As the wheels left the ground, I realized that I was in the hands of two parents who were anything but grounded themselves. My dad was terrified of flying and the tour of the cockpit had been more to calm his white knuckles than mine. My dad clenched and my mom prayed. I was sandwiched in a chorus of �Here we go!� and �Hail Mary, full of grace��

In that moment, I knew I was going to inherit this rosary-saying woman�s fear and this cockpit-touring man�s denial. It couldn�t be stopped. And the exotic people wearing blue eyeliner upstairs represented a fantasy world, an alternate universe in which I felt I should be living but that I knew was impossible. Later in life, my various therapists have called this sort of thing �conditioning.� My mom calls it �We weren�t that bad. You have such an imagination.�

From then on I could panic on airplanes even if the view was fantastic, even if there was no turbulence, even if the flight attendants were actually smiling that day, even if the pilot said, �This is God. I will be your pilot today and I swear to myself�we will not crash.� I could panic even sitting in first class, where they serve warm cookies and champagne. Distractions and logic do not help temper what my psychiatrist explains to me is just some overintense fight-or-flight response that is left over from my caveman DNA. I have nowhere to put my adrenaline on flights, since my inner caveperson cannot club the wild beast that is chasing her and drag it back triumphantly to the cave. There is not enough legroom for that.

After ten years of school-vacation trips to Disney World, at age sixteen I finally called it quits. And it wasn�t because I was too cool. I loved Disney World. By the time I was fourteen, I had started to wear all black to the Magic Kingdom and I posed with Mickey wearing a mean scowl, but I secretly wanted to be there while looking like I didn�t. I had to surrender my annual trip to the most magical place on earth�or anywhere else that required flight�because my anxiety on airplanes had grown too severe. I couldn�t look forward to seeing a palm tree if it meant I had to survive a few hours of sheer terror to get to it.

Not flying for a while didn�t cramp my high school life at all. I was happy just staying on the ground and being a teenager in the suburbs of Massachusetts. I went to college in Boston. No planes needed. My goal was to become a famous world-traveling actress who lived on the West Coast. I figured I�d eventually just grow out of my fear of flying in the same way that I had grown out of thinking it looked really defiant to wear floral dresses with black knee-high combat boots.

I sat out spending a semester abroad in Amsterdam during my junior year of college simply because I was too afraid to cross the pond at thirty thousand feet. I watched classmates and friends pack up their backpacks. I stood with them as they convened in the dormitory lobby, waiting for the shuttle that would whisk them to the airport. They would board a plane without worrying about meeting an untimely death. And they would spend three months in Amsterdam living in a converted castle and studying things like Shakespearean Breath Control for Actors. I stayed behind with other nonadventurous people and we suffered through another New England winter, during which my greenskeeper dad would drive his sitting snowplow throughout the golf course and yell at the kids sledding, �Hey, there�s grass under there and you�re ruining it!�

In retrospect, I�m okay with my decision to remain in Boston while some of my friends lived in the Netherlands. I�m glad I didn�t turn into my friend Shane. Shane and I had coffee upon his return and he lit up a marijuana cigarette in the middle of our local caf�. I grabbed his arm. �Are you crazy?� Shane looked at me, puzzled. �Dude, what?� I grabbed his joint and put it out. �Ohhhh. Yeah. It�s against the law. I forgot. Man, I�m just so used to being in a more culturally mature place like Amsterdam where pot is legal.�

When I was twenty and living with my parents for the summer before my senior year of college, I decided that I couldn�t be afraid to go anywhere anymore. In case I didn�t naturally outgrow my fear, I didn�t want to be stuck in Boston for the rest of my life. So I joined a support group at Boston�s Logan Airport in the Delta Airlines terminal. The group was called�and I�m not joking�Logan�s Heroes. My fearless leader was Dr. Al Forgione, a clinical psychologist who in twelve weeks was going to rewire our brains so that we associated thoughts of flying with relaxation rather than catastrophe.

Dr. Al handed me a small cup of orange juice and told me to take a seat anywhere at the conference table. At my chair I found a book and a collection of cassette tapes called Relaxation Exercises for Air Travel. Dr. Al said, �Flip through the book if you want, but don�t look at the pictures on page sixty-eight. You won�t be ready for that until week six.� I immediately disobeyed the doctor�s orders and turned to page 68, where I came face-to-face with a photo of a plane�s cockpit. My heart went from zero to high blood pressure and I felt the classic prelude to a panic attack. I couldn�t even look at a picture of a plane? Shit. I didn�t know I had it that bad.

At one point Dr. Al said to me, �What are you doing here? You�re too young to have any fears! These years are the best years of your life!�

In my opinion, sitting in an airport with a bunch of terrified middle-age people on a balmy night the summer before one�s senior year in college was not anyone�s idea of �the best years of your life.� I had never considered that I was too young to have fears. I knew that being too afraid to travel abroad put me in the minority at college. But I had expected to come to Logan�s Heroes and meet all the other twenty-year-olds who weren�t spending a semester abroad finding themselves.

�Get mad at the fear!� This was Dr. Al�s motto. Take the rush of adrenaline that fear produces and turn it outward. Screw that fear! How dare that fear creep into our heads and start messing with us. We were in control! The fear was an unwelcome pest. It all sounded empowering in the moment and especially sitting in the safety of a conference room chock full of gravity.

Being a Logan�s Hero was hard work. Every week I had to read a page of the Fearless Flying book. Every night I was to sit and do a guided meditation. This was called �practicing the relaxation response.� Dr. Al was the narrator on the tape. He suggested getting in a comfortable chair and picturing yourself alone on a beach in a quiet, remote location. That�s the first time that I realized I also had a fear of being on a beach in a remote location. Was there a hospital in this beach town? How alone was I? What did I eat? Was there shelter in case of a hurricane? I decided that it was best for me to picture myself on a crowded beach, complete with all of the necessary accommodations.

All of us Logan�s Heroes took a graduation flight from Boston to New York City and back. Every other Logan�s Hero was heroic. They did not panic and used only breathing techniques, no drugs or alcohol, to combat their anxiety on the flight. I didn�t use drugs or alcohol either but I couldn�t breathe. I white-knuckled the flight and sat next to Dr. Al, making whimpering sounds. When the plane landed, he took me aside and said, �I think there is more going on with you than just a fear of flying. You might want to look into seeing a psychiatrist who can help you with your anxiety. And just remember, this is the time of your life.�

Dr. Al was right. I did need a psychiatrist. I finally started seeing one a few years later once the mere fear of having a panic attack caused actual panic attacks in malls, on highways�even while lying quietly in �corpse pose� in yoga class. All that silence and stillness and my brain would start to go crazy: Hey, Jen, while you have five minutes at the end of class, I thought I�d remind you that you�re just a small person stuck on a ball that is spinning through the atmosphere.

My psychiatrist offered me something that Dr. Al never did. Just like Dr. Al had his motto: �Get mad at the fear!� I now have my own motto: �Have Klonopin, will travel.�

It took a lot of therapy and a lot of different antidepressants to rewire my brain. I�m still in therapy but am not medicated�unless you count Skittles. I take Klonopin as needed when I fly and I carry some in my purse just in case. (Please, muggers, if you see me on the street, don�t hit me over the head and steal my purse. Psychiatrists never believe you when you say your prescription was stolen.)

I finally understand that it�s okay to be a little afraid of things but that obsessing over them does not mean you have any more control over what you fear. There�s a big difference between thinking, Hey, it would suck to die in a nuclear war or a plane crash, and, Good morning�oh my God. What if a nuclear bomb hits my home now? Okay, what about now? Now?

When I turned thirty-five, I finally shook off most of the �fear of life� that had gripped me since before MTV was even a thing. The Day After, my parents, and Eastern Airlines are not to blame for the neuroses of my youth. Clearly, other children watched that movie but were comforted by Sting�s end credits song, �Russians.�

I just happened to be wired to develop panic disorder, depression, and anxiety. Youth was wasted on the young in my case�but I am not going to waste my middle age. In the past two years I�ve been lucky enough to have my work take me to London, Australia, and almost every state in America. It�s afforded me vacations in Paris, Mexico, and Hawaii. There are so many more places I want to see. I�ve relinquished my responsibilities as the world�s sole nuclear war worrywart, and the only child I want to indulge right now is my inner one.

A LOT OF my friends who have kids say to me, �We�d love to travel more and go out every night, but we have a child now. We got that out of our system in our twenties, so now it�s just time to settle down.� Well, I got nothing out of my system in my twenties and I�m excited about starting to put things in my system. I�m lucky that my friend Sarah doesn�t want kids either, and if she ever changes her mind, I�m going to push her down a flight of stairs.

Sarah and I decided to take a trip to Maui together to ring in the 2012 New Year. We figured after we spent Christmas with our respective families, we�d then detox in Hawaii by cooking our skin in the sun and getting salty seawater in our eyes. We both write for Chelsea Lately as well as work on other projects, and we travel a lot to do stand-up. We wanted a vacation where we could do absolutely nothing. (For parents who are reading this, �nothing� is that thing you will get to do once your kids leave for college, if they ever leave for college. I hear tuition is skyrocketing.)

We opted to stay at the Grand Wailea Maui. It�s a family-friendly resort. We�re not opposed to families existing�we�re very generous that way. Sarah and I were confident that we�d be undisturbed by screaming toddlers in the cabana we rented at the adults-only pool.

See? There was even a sign at the entrance of the adult pool that clearly states as much. I don�t know anyone who dutifully and without question obeyed authority more than my parents and I when I was a child. That sign would have put the fear of God in us. If eight-year-old Jen had even walked near this sign on a family vacation, my mother would have grabbed my arm and harshly whispered, �Jennifah, don�t go near there, it�s for rich people who will have their own private security. They�ll have us arrested and we�ll have to spend the rest of the vacation in the town jail run by the local mafia.�

Seems like kids these days (and their parents) aren�t scared of some words engraved on a placard. On our first day in Maui, there was not one adult in the adult pool because there were so many kids swimming (aka peeing) in the four-foot-deep waters. There were tween boys in the hot tub! Just in case you think I�m not being fair, just in case you�re thinking to yourself, Jen, let the children enjoy a refreshing chlorine dip in the hot Maui sun! They�re on vacation and they�re just kids. This is the time of their lives! I�ll show you Exhibit A (and the only exhibit that I have to offer): On the next page is a map of the pools at the Grand Wailea hotel in Maui:

The only pool for people eighteen and over is the Hibiscus Pool. Children have access to a lazy river, rapids, a water slide, a scuba pool, Pool no. 1, Pool no. 2, Pool no. 3, and even a pool with a swim-up bar for their twenty-one-and-over parents! There was no swim-up bar at the Hibiscus Pool. There was no bar at all. Just a few harried waitresses trying to deliver watered-down drinks while rogue toddlers tripped them up.

My legs were sore from being cramped on a long flight and because I�m thirty-eight now and beginning to feel the fact that I�m slowly rotting from the inside. I wanted to sit in the hot tub but I couldn�t because I was self-conscious about sitting in a hot tub with a bunch of twelve-year-old boys who would see me in my bikini. If I wanted to spend my vacation feeling uncomfortable in a bathing suit around boys, I�d buy a round-trip ticket on a time machine and go back to 1987, when I was called �boobless� by two boys back on Duxbury Beach in Massachusetts. Sure, I have boobs now, but I also have a stomach. There was probably a six-month window of time when I was nineteen when my boobs were of a good size and I had no stomach flab�that girl would look great in a bikini if she weren�t busy trying to be �grunge� in her oversize flannel shirts.

Sarah squinted and looked toward the far end of the pool. She pointed at what appeared to be two eight-year-old girls splashing. �Look! Over there!�

�Where. Is. Their. Mo-therrr?� I asked Sarah, overemphasizing every word like a total bitch.

�I don�t know. This is ridiculous,� Sarah said. �I mean, there are ten kids� pools here! They need this one too?!�

The waitress arrived and brought us our drinks. �Is everything okay?� she asked. Sarah immediately masked her rage. �Everything�s great. Yeah.� Liar. I nodded and smiled. The waitress walked away. Our confidence came back. �Well, this is total bullshit,� I said. �I�m totally going to say something to somebody.� Just as the �somebody� I could say �something� to was completely out of reach.

Sarah and I watched the mothers of the children who so boldly ignored the sign. The moms sat in their lounge chairs, slathering on their lotion. Mom no. 1 yelled toward the pool in that loud voice that moms are forced to use to be heard above screaming kids.

�Hey, Jessica, come here. Let me put some more sunblock on you! Yes. Yes, you do need more sunblock. It�s high noon. Jessica! Come here right now. You can get right back in!�

Why didn�t Jessica�s mom walk over to the pool and talk, in a normal voice, to her child, who shouldn�t even have been in the adult pool to begin with? How would I know? I�ve never had a kid. I don�t understand why it�s fun to spend a vacation screaming into the ears of your innocent children on a warm Maui afternoon�especially when you end up screaming into the ear of an innocent childfree woman who is just trying to pretend to read her InStyle magazine�s greatest haircuts edition as she secretly eavesdrops on other cabana conversations.

Then Mom no. 2 yelled to her daughter, who was even farther away than little Jessica. �Ashley, do you want me to get you one of those rubber tubes? Which one do you want? Huh?! Which one?! No, which one? The inner tube that you sit in and not the foam roller? Okay. Okay.�

Ashley�s mom walked past Sarah and me on her way to the kids� pool to rent a toy for her kid, to bring back for her to play with in the forbidden adult pool.

As she passed us, I said loudly, �It�s not very quiet here today. These cabanas were expensive. It would be nice to have some quiet.�

In her best loud-on-purpose voice, Sarah said, �I know. This is the adult pool, right? Kids aren�t allowed?�

That was the extent of our confrontation with Ashley�s mom�a hopefully-she-heard-us level of passive-aggressive commentary. She returned with an inner tube and Jessica and Ashley climbed in, got comfortable, and floated around in the adult pool, which continued to be populated with nonadults. I felt like I was at a strip club with my family�these things just don�t go together.

After a lunchtime margarita, we got a little more confident. Before she could walk away, Sarah said to our waitress, �Um, so, kids aren�t allowed in this pool, right? This is the adult pool?�

The waitress agreed. �Yes. This is the adult pool.�

Sarah, in her best yeah-I-know-I�m-being-a-C-word voice, asked, �Sooooo, what�s that?� pointing at our new nemeses Jessica and Ashley.

The waitress turned and noticed the girls. �Oh,� she said. �I don�t know.�

I added, �And I think those boys in the hot tub are definitely under eighteen.� I immediately felt bad for tattling on anyone so I made a joke. �I mean, I�m so bad with guessing ages. They could be thirty for all I know and just really skinny.�

The waitress smiled and said, �Well, yeah. This is the adult pool.� And with that she turned on her heel to leave.

I summoned all of my courage. �Oh, ma�am? Um, can you come back for a second? Um, is there someone we can talk to about this? I mean, they�re not doing anything wrong, but it is the adult pool and we don�t care if they�re here in general but there is a sign that says no one under eighteen can be here. I mean, it�s not my rule. It�s yours.�

The waitress said, �I�ll get a manager.�

As she walked away, Sarah high-fived me. �Best passive-aggressive comment of all time. �It�s not my rule. It�s yours.� Yes!�

I started to get excited because I noticed a young couple sitting on the edge of the pool, listening to our conversation. I assumed that they also wanted to go into the pool but couldn�t because of Ashley, Jessica, and the rest of the Inner Tube Gang. I made eye contact with them as I said to Sarah, �I mean, at least the manager is on the way, because we have to say something. These kids shouldn�t be in the adult pool!� I think I expected the young couple to stand up and applaud like congresspeople approving my presidential declaration about the state of the adult pool. They looked away from me and started whispering and giggling in each other�s ears. I wanted to yell at them, �Oh, fine. Make fun of me. But I�m fighting for all of our rights! Even if you honeymooners change your mind and have kids later in life�right now this is our time by the Hibiscus Pool!�

A manager who looked like he was too young to be allowed in the adult pool himself approached us. He said, �What�s going on? Are the kids bothering you guys?�

�Well, no�,� Sarah said. �Not exactly.�

�They�re really well behaved,� I said, trying to sound very maternal. �But it�s just that this is the adult pool and technically they shouldn�t be here. We paid extra money for these cabanas in the quiet area and it�s not very quiet.�

A toddler ran by with her wet feet slapping against the concrete. One slip and her head would split open like a dropped coconut. I gripped my lounge chair, feeling helpless, and blurted out, �Oh my God. Be careful. Be careful, honey.� I turned to the teenage manager. �See?� I pleaded. �I can�t handle this.�

He said, �Okay. I�ll talk to someone about it,� and scurried away, passing the hot tub full of leering boys without saying a word.

Our cabana quickly became Child Watch Headquarters. Sarah and I grabbed our laptops and took advantage of the free WiFi connection. We got to work. I took to Twitter and started tweeting to the Grand Wailea hotel, asking them, �What�s your policy on kids who crash the adult pool? We have a situation here.� Sarah got the general manager�s information off the Grand Wailea website. She picked up her BlackBerry, made a call, and left a very stern message with the general manager�s assistant.

�What did she say?� I asked.

�She said that he�d call me back later today. She wouldn�t take down my cell phone number. She said he could just call me back in the room.�

The general manager would return a customer�s complaint call to her room? Who sits in her room in the middle of the day when she�s on vacation in sunny Maui? You know who should be sitting in their room in the middle of the day�parents and their toddlers. Those kids need a nap.

I�d had enough bullshit. I was going to take a bullet for my partner in Child Watch crime. �You wait here, Sarah. I�m going in and there�s no need for you to see this.� I put on my sandals and angrily flip-flopped off toward the check-in desk to confront the person who had handed me two plush towels that morning.

The towel girl was suspiciously nice and she said that she�d call security for me. Okay. Now we were getting somewhere. Security. I went back to the cabana and Sarah and I watched and waited for security. I was ready for plastic handcuffs to be slapped on some toddlers and their rule-breaking moms. While we were waiting we spotted a heavy preteen girl whose boobs had not grown as round as her thighs and stomach just yet. She seemed awkward and unhappy. She held her tired-looking mom�s hand as they walked around the adults-only pool, looking for lounge chairs. Sarah and I shared a look.

�She can stay,� I said.

�Yeah,� Sarah agreed. �She�d probably get bullied by some assholes at the kids� pool. Who knows what she may have already been through.�

�Yeah,� I said, �she�s obviously got some weird enmeshment shit going on with her mom too. They can�t be apart and this girl seems like an old soul.�

Just then a towering, broad-shouldered black man in uniform rounded the corner. Here he was. Security. Tiny heads are gonna roll. Then the towering, broad-shouldered black man in uniform walked right by the boys in the hot tub, strolled past the preteen girls in the pool, and darted around the toddlers running on the pool�s edge. We watched him walk off into the bright sun back toward the hotel. Sarah was speechless, so I can�t really capture her reaction in print. It was a series of guttural sounds and wild hand gestures, like someone trying to make a w sound for the first time. �Don�t worry, partner,� I told her. �I�m going back out there.�

I got up and ran after the security guard, this time barefoot, hopping and saying, �Ouch, hot, ouch,� with every step. �Hey, security guy. What was that out there? You�re just going to walk by?� He said, �I think they got the message.� �What message? That security means nothing? That if they keep wading in the adult pool, security might� walk by again? Ooooh, scary. You have to actually say something to the kids, like, �Hi, you kids don�t look like you�re old enough to be here. You must leave this pool if you don�t get your period yet or have never had a wet dream.���

He followed me back to the adult pool and talked to the kids and their parents. I went back to Child Watch Headquarters and let Sarah know that it had all been taken care of. �Uh, then what�s that?� Sarah asked. I looked and just as Security was walking away, the kids were getting back into the pool. Sarah and I retired from our beat that afternoon and ordered four more margaritas�well, we ordered six, but the waitress gave us a dirty look and said, �My tray only holds four.� And in a not-so-subtle way she said, �Four is a good limit. Dontcha think, girls?�

I SAT DEFEATED in Child Watch Headquarters, watching the kids finally get out of the pool as the sun started to go behind the clouds. I hadn�t yelled. I hadn�t said anything mean to the kids or about the kids to their parents. But I felt like a monster. How come I felt so guilty about wanting the rules to be enforced so that I could enjoy our vacation the way I paid for it?

It was the hotel�s rule that there was a separate pool for adults. Why can�t the two pools coexist without the generations crossing? It wouldn�t dawn on me to go act like an adult in the kids� pool. I wouldn�t jump in the shallow end with a drink in my hand and start talking loudly to Sarah in front of a toddler about the best way to prevent a urinary tract infection after sex.

It�s so taboo to say that you don�t really enjoy the company of children. May I point out that the adults who brought their kids to the adult pool obviously did so because they did not want to be around only other children? Do they get a free pass because they procreated? I see parents all the time who get a kick out of saying, �I only like my kids. I don�t like other kids.� But if a single woman without children says, �I don�t like kids,� she sounds like a sociopath. I realize that one of those boys in the hot tub or girls in the pool could be president someday. I realize that we have children�s futures in our hands and they have our futures in theirs. I acknowledge that it�s a beautiful cycle and I�ll admit that I made myself tear up just typing that sentiment. I don�t want to be made to feel like a bitch because I�m upset that now, before those kids grow up to be president, they are peeing in my pool.

Sarah and I went back to our room and enjoyed some champagne on our balcony while we watched the sun set. We also maybe threw a pillow or two off the ledge. We also maybe threw an entire bag of Skittles, one by one, off the balcony at the people walking below (no, no children were harmed). We were well aware that throwing things off a balcony was against the rules, but we knew that the security and management team would be too lazy to bust us unless we told on ourselves.

I GOT HOME from the vacation to find out that there was a new upstairs neighbor in my fourplex apartment building�three new neighbors actually: a mommy, a daddy, and a toddler. My landlord made the executive decision to let a toddler live above a quiet, single woman who works from home as a writer on weekends. I long for the days when the twenty-six-year-old drunk girl lived upstairs and faked really loud, operatic orgasms until four in the morning. At least with her, I could count on the fact that she�d pass out immediately after and she�d stay asleep until about one o�clock the next day. (And if I was in the right mood, let�s be honest, it was scintillating to listen to the noises she was making.)

I�m sitting in my home office, typing, and I can hear him now, running up and down the length of his apartment. He sounds like he has weights in his shoes. Every once in a while he stops running, only to drop and then drop again a toy that sounds like a regulation-size bowling ball. I can hear his dad chasing him down the hallway playfully, which makes little Tony (I named him Tony) squeal with delight. Can we all admit that the sound of a kid squealing, even if it�s with joy, sounds like squealing? I can angrily press the button on an air horn or I can press the button on an air horn with a sense of carefree fun and either way it sounds like an air horn.

I woke up at five in the morning today because that�s what time Tony wakes up�or at least it�s the time that he starts crying and screaming and then choking on the phlegm he�s built up from crying, and then screaming because he thinks he�s going to die from choking on phlegm. Luckily, my dad taught me ingenuity. I put a fan on the floor. I turn it on low and it makes just enough of a sound to create some white noise. If I close my bedroom door, I can�t hear a thing that�s going on outside of my bedroom�which includes any smoke alarms in the hallway, my home security alarm, or a murderer if he decides to break a window in my kitchen so he can climb through and grab those enticing knives on my counter because he forgot to bring his own weapon. If only these parents upstairs knew just how selfless I was�putting aside my own peace of mind for a little peace and quiet because I know that there�s no way I can march upstairs and tell a toddler to stop crying about how he doesn�t understand yet that sleeping is fucking awesome.

I took to my Facebook page to get some advice about this situation with Toddler Tony. I asked my friends who were parents to tell me whether there is ever a good time or a good way to talk to the parents upstairs. Was it out of line for me to ask Tony�s parents to not let him run while wearing shoes? It�s a lot nicer than what I really wanted to ask, which was, �Why don�t you take Tony outside, you fucking morons? It�s a permanent seventy-five degrees in Los Angeles and you have this kid cooped up inside an apartment for eight hours straight?�

My friends� comments ran the gamut from unhelpful to infuriating. Suggestions like: �Bake some cookies and bring them up to the new neighbors and slip into the conversation, ever so subtly, that you know of a good park in the neighborhood. Maybe they will get the hint that they should take Tony outside more and it could help educate them about the neighborhood.� They lost me at �bake cookies.� Bake? Cookies?

I made sure to phrase my Facebook question in a very pro-kid light. I was even gracious enough to admit that one can�t expect a kid to ever be completely quiet. Of course, some casual acquaintances of mine who have kids responded:

Jen, sometimes you just have to let a kid be a kid. As a parent, I know this from experience. It�s a tough, underappreciated job, having kids. May I suggest noise-canceling headphones?

I haven�t had time to bake any cookies (or buy any ingredients), and I�m definitely not up for wearing headphones around my house ten to twelve hours a day. But I have found a solution that works for me. Every time I hear Tony running up and down the entire length of the apartment upstairs and squealing, �Aahhhhhhhhhhhh!��I put on a pair of high heels and I run up and down my hardwood-floored hallway, stomping and clunking and also yelling, �Aaaaaaahhhhhhhh!� at the top of my lungs. (I don�t have any downstairs neighbors�unless you count the termites underneath our complex.)

I�m hoping that Tony�s parents get the hint and realize that they are not living in a soundproof building. So far, even if they have gotten the hint, the noise hasn�t stopped. But I�m actually having a ball. It�s so therapeutic and freeing, I just might cut back my therapy sessions from weekly to biweekly. And if Tony�s parents stop by to complain, I�ll just ever so subtly inform them that my inner kid needs to be a kid and that I know from experience how hard it is to raise one.

If it was a Tuesday night in 2004, I was hanging out at the M Bar, a supper club that housed a popular night of stand-up comedy in a strip mall on Vine at Fountain in Hollywood. I was on a bit of a comedy hot streak�I mean as much of a hot streak as a stand-up comic can have who is performing unpaid for fifty people who are all crammed in the back of the room, trying to avoid sitting at a table because they�re too broke to order the stale bruschetta. My hot streak was because I was single and I�m never funnier than when I�m feeling dejected and undersexed. I�d just come to the natural end of a love relationship with (aka I was dumped by) Thomas, who had decided that it would be an improvement in his life to get back together with Hariette, his adult-Goth ex-girlfriend with a death wish. I should have known. He talked about her incessantly and I couldn�t keep anything in the nightstand drawer on the side of his bed that I slept on because it was full of her cards and letters from their fucked-up relationship. One card had dried blood and a rose on the inside. Yes, I read the cards. How else should I have amused myself while he was taking a shower or sleeping? This was before the Instagram app or Netflix Instant was invented.

I joked onstage about the band Weezer one night at M Bar and the guy who acted as the comedy show DJ played one of their songs as I left the stage. I couldn�t see him, but I knew that this mysterious figure in the booth had been listening closely to my act. That�s thoughtful, I thought to myself, and went to the bar for a drink. At the bar the mysterious DJ introduced himself to me. His name was Matt. �Nice to meet you,� I said.

�We�ve met a million times before and every time you say it�s nice to meet me,� Matt said.

�Oh,� I answered. �You�re a really good DJ. Where else do you work?�

He smiled and said, �I�m not a DJ for a living. I just play music for this show. We�ve also had this same exact conversation a few times.�

I wish I could say that normally I hate being called on the fact that I�m terrible with names, faces, and conversations that happened more than five minutes ago, and that when Matt called me on it I immediately responded positively and realized that I needed this man in my life to love and guide me and help me stay present and in the moment. Nope. I thought, Well, that�s no fun�being called on my shit. And then I ended up going home and washing the dishes that my clinically depressed roommate had left in the sink.

Throughout my life people have told me that I would �change my mind.� I became a vegetarian when I was thirteen and I remember my friend Tracy�s mother saying to me at their July Fourth barbecue, �Oh, Jen. This is just a little phase. You�ll change your mind.� She really thought I�d change my mind, like, that day. She put aside a cheeseburger on a paper plate for me that got rock-hard and cold into the night because I did not change my mind. Twenty-five years later, I�m still a vegetarian. (Okay, I eat fish sometimes. So I guess I�m a pescatarian�or a poseur, or just someone who is committed to not eating anything with legs.)

When I was thirteen my mother told me that I would not always like the music of Morrissey and that someday I�d realize that he �sounds like a British Kermit the Frog.� I have seen Morrissey in concert more times in the last three years than I�ve seen my family on holidays. Not only did I not change my mind about Morrissey, my mom changed her mind. She got free tickets to see him perform at Foxwoods Casino and she took a break from playing a slot machine to go check him out. I got a voice mail the next day. �Jennifah, it�s Mom. I was front row at Morrissey and wow, is he a crooner or what?� Meanwhile, I have never sat front row at a Morrissey concert.

I�m not saying that I�ve never been wrong about what I want. I�m capable of changing my mind in certain situations and admitting that my judgment was a little off. Like the time in sixth grade when I declared that I was always going to love Ross Damon no matter what and I would never ever change my mind. Then my friend Shannon told me, �Ross Damon put tennis balls in his shorts in gym class today and kept asking everyone to �touch his balls.��� I changed my mind about Ross immediately. I also once stated that Madonna�s song �Borderline� would be my favorite song forever and ever. In my defense, I had no idea that �Vogue� was waiting for me six years down the line.

I said to my dad when I was in high school, �Dad, I don�t care about money, only happiness.� I�ll admit that I�ve changed my mind on that one. I would like both money and happiness and I�m not entirely convinced that money doesn�t buy happiness. I�ve traveled first class on someone else�s dime to Australia, and if you think lying down in a fully reclining seat that turns into a bed while sipping free champagne for eleven hours doesn�t solve all of your earthly problems�you�re right. But it sure does numb you to the pain of those earthly problems for a little while.

But one thing I haven�t changed my mind about is the fact that I am not going to have children. My parents support this decision, yet my choice to be childfree gets questioned by strangers, like they�re the CIA and I�m a suspect who isn�t giving them the whole story. I wouldn�t be surprised if someday one of these baby-happy people decides that in order to get a satisfactory answer, I�ll need to be water-boarded on a Slip�N Slide.

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 as the audience.) Anyway, I was washing my hands at the sink and a woman came out of the stall. She had seen my set and referenced the part in my act where I talk about how I don�t want to have kids, saying she loved my joke that goes: �My husband and I don�t want kids. We can�t have a third person running around the house who is more helpless than the two of us.�

She washed her hands and started to fix her hair in the mirror. �But you want kids someday, right?� she asked.

�Oh! No. I was totally serious. We�re� childfree by choice,� I said, trying to make it sound official, like it was some club I�d joined with a nonrefundable deposit.

She continued to casually fix her hair, reaching into her purse for a trial-size bottle of hairspray and going to work on her Texas bangs. Her gaze remained on herself in the mirror but she said to me, �Really? No kids? So it�s just going to be the two of you? Isn�t that selfish?�

Do people think that saying the words �Isn�t that� in front of �selfish� masks the fact that they just blatantly called me selfish to my face? It�s like when people say, �No offense, but,� before saying something offensive. Or when someone says, �I don�t mean to be racist,� and then tells you that they think Puerto Rican people smell like burnt hamburgers.

Isn�t that selfish? She�d said it so casually! I�d rather she pulled a combination comb-switchblade out of the back pocket of her jeans, held it up to my neck, and said, �You wanna rumble, you selfish non-child-having bitch? You think you can just go onstage and make jokes and then tell me in a bathroom that you�re not interested in bringing a baby into this world? Huh?�

If she were actually mad at me about not wanting to have a baby, it would make more sense. I�d know this was just her hot-button issue�she wants everyone to procreate. And I would simply choose to not engage, just like I do with my angry atheist friends who talk about God more than people who believe in one:

�There is no God! It�s just something people believe in because they�re afraid of death!�

�Okay. So there might not be a God and we�re all afraid of death. Well, you�ve figured that one out. Can we have lunch now?�

�But, Jen, you have to pick a side. You can�t just be agnostic. It�s as silly as saying you don�t know if there�s a Santa Claus!�

�Got it. There is no proof of God and it�s the parents who put the presents under the Christmas tree. Can we have lunch now?�

But it was the way that this woman cemented her bangs to her forehead while she coolly tossed off a judgment about my person that made me realize that whether she was even aware of it or not, somewhere in her core she just assumed that everyone wants to have children, and to not want children indicates some sort of factory malfunction. She made me feel like not wanting kids was a character flaw on my part, because I wasn�t paying attention in nursery school when we were learning how to share blocks. She could have said any other s word. She could have asked, �No kids? Really? Isn�t that� sexy?� Or, �Isn�t that� shrewd?� I wouldn�t even have bristled so much at being asked, �Isn�t that� shitty?�

She finished shellacking the top of her head and turned to me to say, �Well, maybe you don�t want kids now, but when you�re done with all this� you might want to give back.� And when she said �done with all this,� she pointed all five of her fingers at me, like a lazy, droopy version of �talk to the hand.� She wiggled her fingers as if to indicate that my career as a stand-up comic, what she called �all this,� was something she could lift from me, like a reverse spell.

�It can�t be just about you forever, Jen. Trust me. My husband and I couldn�t not have kids. After a few years of just us, we felt that we were being too� selfish. Now I can�t even imagine not having brought my daughter into the world. Who was I to keep it from her? Anyway, you�re really funny. Good luck with everything!�

And with that unsolicited advice, she matter-of-factly tucked her hairspray back into her purse and walked out of the bathroom, leaving me to stew in the airborne taste of aerosol and that word: �selfish.�

I went into a stall and just hid there for a bit, hoping that I wouldn�t run into any more women who felt compelled to tell me how funny and how selfish I was. I had to wrap my head around the concept that this woman thought that not bringing her daughter into the world was keeping the world from her daughter. So, every woman who doesn�t choose to give birth is leaving some poor kid hanging out there in some kind of limbo? There�s a semiexistent child right now holding on to a lottery ticket and he has no idea that his number is never going to come up because he�s been assigned to selfish me? Fuck. How do you stop having kids with that guilt on your head?

I wanted to run after her and yell, �Hey, I wouldn�t have been here making you laugh tonight if I had a baby, because comedians can�t take babies on the road!� I thought of adding, �How dare you call me selfish? You were probably at home and your baby threw up on your blouse and you had to change a few times and you said to your husband, �The girls and I are going out tonight. We just need to laugh!� And I was the one who made you laugh! That�s my way of giving back!�

I kicked the tampon receptacle in the stall out of frustration because I came up with the best comeback after she was long gone: Oh yeah, lady? I�m selfish because I don�t have children? Oprah Winfrey doesn�t have children and you want to tell me that she�s selfish and doesn�t give back? She�s building schools in Africa and giving away refrigerators that have TVs in them to her audience! She handed Dr. Phil, Dr. Oz, and her best friend, Gayle, their careers and asked for nothing in return! (Except maybe a signed confidentiality agreement or two.) Oprah can afford to have kids and Stedman could stay at home and watch them and she still chooses not to procreate! Why aren�t you calling her selfish? And you know who else didn�t have kids? Jesus Christ himself! I win! I played the Jesus card! Jesus, the supposed human incarnation of God, who allegedly walked on water, did not have kids. Is he selfish? Didn�t he die for our sins or something? (After fifteen years of going to church every Sunday as a kid, I still don�t quite get what that means, but it still sounds pretty unselfish to me.)

One of the casualties of doing stand-up comedy and then using the same bathroom as the audience is that people will talk to you about your act. Sometimes if they like your act, it can be a more difficult conversation to have than if they simply say, �I didn�t like you that much.� (That happens a lot actually. I get it. I was shouting my opinions into a microphone for almost an hour. People want to tell me their opinions after and sometimes their opinion is that I suck.)

I have a stand-up routine I do about masturbation and the unwanted thoughts that go through women�s heads when they put their hands under their sheets. I need a story to think about. I need a fantasy that makes sense. I can�t just finger myself and picture Johnny Depp�s face. It needs a sense of realism, like how did I meet Johnny Depp? He lives in France. I don�t have a work visa. Besides, he has children and I�ve made it quite clear that I don�t want to be a mom and I don�t want to be a stepmom either. People love to talk to me about that and share their own tales, which are usually way more graphic than my act. This is part of a conversation that happened between me and a stranger in a women�s bathroom at the Improv in Palm Beach, Florida:

More power to the woman who finger blasts herself in the bathroom stall at work and then drunkenly confesses it to me. She was just telling me what she does without passing any judgment on me, unlike the woman with the Dynasty bangs who told me that someday I would definitely want to stop what I do for a living and raise a child.

Aretha Franklin sang, �I didn�t know just what was wrong with me / Till your kiss helped me name it / Now I�m no longer doubtful of what I�m living for / �Cause if I make you happy I don�t need no more / �Cause you make me feel, you make me feel like a natural woman.�

That song is not about having a baby, and do you think that anyone dared to get in Aretha�s face and tell her that love and kisses are nice but she�s not really a natural woman until she pops one out?

I cry. I get manicures and pedicures. I am the sole employee and president of my own corporation. I get my period. I get PMS. I get bloated. I get horny around hot guys. I get horny around quirky-looking guys. I change my hair color and style about four times a year. I think that if I were a lesbian, I�d be a �lipstick� one or I�d like the Hilary Swank�in�Boys Don�t Cry type. I live alone and am thus the head of my own household. I�ve had my heart broken. I�ve broken hearts. Sometimes I feel like I don�t have a heart. I�ve had sex for love and I�ve had sex for sex. I�m still unsure of my exact bra size. I like how my stomach seems flat in the morning and hate by the end of the day that it resembles a semi-blown-up beach ball half. I have varicose veins that I just don�t look at because they�re on the backs of my legs. I squeal and clap my hands if a song comes on the radio that I like�even if I�ve heard it ten thousand times in my life. I do karaoke. I get drunk at weddings. I listen to Madonna. I listen to the Sex Pistols. I�ve been in therapy for ten years straight. I love my parents and I talk to them on the phone. I yell at my parents when we�re on the phone and I just don�t have the patience to answer the same question over and over. All of these things make me a woman. I feel pretty natural about it. I don�t even own a push-up bra, that�s how natural I am. Yet there are people who have tried to invalidate my womanhood because I refuse to do this one thing�grow another person inside my belly.

They act like my not having kids spells the end of the human race. Look, plenty of other women can take care of this. I�d start to get nervous if men were the ones who had to have the babies�that would be the end of humanity. My dad cried once because he accidentally used my toothbrush. He hates germs and couldn�t fathom how to go on with his life for a good five minutes after the incident. He�s a sensitive soul who spends his days trying to avoid physical pain, and using someone�s toothbrush could lead to catching a cold, which could lead to a painful sinus headache. So, while I love that women are the ones who got the �people-making equipment,� I just don�t want to use mine, much like that juicer I have that�s still in the box. I simply don�t have the urge to make a fresh-squeezed fetus in my lady-blender.

I�m sure squatting in a hole to go number two is actually more natural and the way God intended us to expel our waste�rather than sitting on a porcelain chair and reading the National Enquirer. But I�m fine with being unnatural about my bathroom habits. I�m comfortable. Coincidentally, my body is very comfortable not being pregnant. I have some small stretch marks on my inner thigh and I don�t know where they�re from. I�ve had them since I was a teenager. I do not write blogs or do interviews with magazines about them, or show them off on TV. There�s this cultural fad around women who have stretch marks from pregnancy, claiming that the marks are beautiful and the women are �proud of them.� I am not proud of mine. They confuse me. When did I stretch?

Unless your stretch marks have solved a water-shortage crisis or found a way to cap greenhouse gas emissions, let�s go easy on the word �proud.� Your skin got stretched out because your body went through some changes. There shouldn�t be pride in the natural cycle of life. My parents didn�t teach me to be overly proud of myself. It�s a Catholic thing. (It�s also a Massachusetts thing. There�s no shortage of people in your family to say, �You think you-ah so great or somethin�? So what you can Hula-Hoop? I saw a boy on TV do it for a wicked long time.�) It happens whether we worked hard for our stretch marks or not. And besides, we all know that given the choice, most people would choose to not have stretch marks, unless the reward was sleeping with 1960s Robert Redford. And then you�re fucked because he�s not going to sleep with you again after he sees those puppies. So let�s stop acting like stretch marks are God�s greatest gift to women, shall we?

Here�s a list of things that don�t appeal to me, physically speaking:

��Dying a slow, drawn-out death as the result of an accidental subway incident where I�m trapped between the platform and the train.

��Having any kind of liquid come out of my nipples.

��Having someone bite, tug, chew, and suck on my nipple.

��Shitting in a bed in front of doctors and family.

��Having water break out of my crotch and spill all over the floor.

��Passing a human through my vagina. Or, in an emergency, having a human being cut out of my stomach.

Most of these things can be avoided right now and are within my control. I know that when I�m elderly there will be bed shitting. I�ll deal with that when I get there. Maybe they�ll invent a Craftmatic Adjustable Bed Toilet by then. The trapped-between-a-train-and-a-subway-platform thing is something I plan to avoid, but a lunatic could always shove me. The other things are totally avoidable. I know it all sounds very base when I reduce bringing human life into the world into a series of awkward moments involving bodily secretions, but I can�t help it. I�m slightly immature and I often look at things I don�t want to do in stark black-and-white terms. It�s the most natural thing that a comedian can do.

Oh, Madonna. You claim to have had a cabdriver drop you off in Times Square with only fifty dollars in your pocket when you first moved to New York City in the 1970s. Then you became the biggest pop star in the world. You married Sean Penn and you introduced us all to Vogueing. While you were doing all of that, I was so painfully aware of the fragility of life that I had to be put on Prozac to calm my anxiety. Now that my serotonin levels are evened out, I don�t need a kid to remind me again about the fragility of this life. Also, I think you realized how magical life was before you had kids when you sang in �Like a Prayer,� �Life is a mystery / Everyone must stand alone / I hear you call my name / And it feels like home,� and then made out with that hot, black Jesus.

The nail salon is a place where small talk breeds like Michelle and Jim Bob Duggar. (His name is fucking Jim Bob and he has nineteen kids. If I invented a character named Jim Bob who bred nineteen people, any television network executive or movie studio mogul would say, �That sounds a little clich�d. I mean is anybody really named Jim Bob? Even we hateful Hollywood writers can admit that�s a name that�s manufactured by the likes of us who still harbor contempt for our flyover-state hometowns.�)

At a nail salon, when a woman whom you�ve never met looks over and asks, �What color is that you�re getting?� that�s one degree of separation away from, �Do you have children? Let�s talk about our kids!� It�s a strange phenomenon, but when mothers have an hour to spare, they want out of the house and away from their kids�and yet they can�t stop talking about them. Mom�s manicure is just going to get fucked up right when she gets home, when Billy hands her an action figure wrapped in a hard-to-open plastic package and says, �Get this out for me, Mommy, or I will start screaming like Mel Gibson about the Jews and you�ll rue the day you left me at home and went to a nail salon!� But she wants out of the house anyway just so she doesn�t have to listen to inane cartoons or talk in a baby voice for sixty minutes. She can sit down and have a real, adult conversation about� babies.

Women who have babies have these predictable hormones that make it impossible for them to talk about anything but babies. Just like every teenager has predictable hormones that make them so horny that they�ll dry-hump a throw pillow to orgasm.

New moms especially have that glazed-over Heaven�s Gate look in their I-had-to-stop-taking-Xanax-while-breast-feeding eyes.

Remember when Katie Holmes started (contractually) dating her (benefactor) boyfriend Tom Cruise? She couldn�t stop saying, �Tom is amazing. Everything is amazing.� I�m sure everything was amazing for Katie at first�until she filed for divorce seven years later. I remember reading that on their first date, Tom flew Katie on a private jet to Paris for dinner. I�m not sure whether he took control of her brain on board the flight or under the Eiffel Tower, but she definitely wasn�t in Dawson�s Creek anymore. Once Tom started having Scientology minders follow Katie around (I know these things; I read Star magazine) and he changed her name to �Kate,� I�m sure there were moments when Katie/Kate/Mrs. Cruise thought, Oh my God. What the fuck have I done? I�m not myself anymore. But I�m the one who wouldn�t shut the fuck up about how amazing everything was and I�ll look stupid if I suddenly change course now and say, �It was amazing but now it�s just like every other relationship, full of challenges and compromise and not all that glamorous.� Well, I�m just going to keep saying �amazing� because there�s no turning back. And every time I do literally turn back, there is someone on Tom�s payroll following me. It�s amazing!

This is what new moms remind me of. (Although on a side note, I have to admit, even though I�m convinced that she�s part robot, I�m completely taken with Suri Cruise. She wears high heels and lipstick and walks around Manhattan carrying a Starbucks cup and she�s six years old. She doesn�t play with other kids and although that sounds sad on paper, think of all the germs she�s avoiding. You never see a picture of Suri Cruise with a summer cold. If I had to have a kid, I�d want Suri Cruise. She could totally get me in to see all of the cool shows at Fashion Week and I�d probably get a pretty sick allowance.)

New moms love to start conversations with strangers like the one I had with my manicurist �Tammy� when I was still married. I didn�t put her name in quotations to protect her identity. The tag was too small for, �We all know this woman�s name is something you could never pronounce and she doesn�t want to hear you butchering her native tongue, so she picked one of your boring American names so that you people can address her. You happy? Tammy.�

Tammy noticed my wedding ring as she removed my chipped nail polish and asked, �Do you and your husband have children?�

That day I replied no with confidence. I used to answer that question, �Naaaaww,� with a song in my voice because I was trying to sound pleasant and not like some emotionally closed-off Anti-mother Monster who stomps through neighborhoods, lifting roofs off homes, grabbing children out of their cribs, and actually gnawing off their cheeks and toes, unlike most adults, who just jokingly threaten to do so.

I�m not an emotionally closed-off Antimother Monster but that seems to be how people with kids see me, so I used to say, �Naaaaww,� hoping that it would read as, �Awwww, I just don�t want kids but I�m supersweet and I�m happy to hear your stories about kids. I think it�s funny, for example, when a toddler�s first words are �Goddamn it.� You have kids. I don�t. Different strokes for different folks! What a wonderful world! Awwww. Naaaaww.�

But despite my best efforts, never once has answering, �Naaaaww,� ever been met with a simple, �Oh. Okay.�

So this time when I answered no, I didn�t smile. I didn�t maintain eye contact. I did nothing to indicate that this topic�or any topic for that matter, Tammy�was on the table for dissection. I put my nose back into my book. But I might as well have chucked the book into my bucket of foot-soak, pulled out an accordion, played a tune, and sung, �Ask me anything!� because Tammy didn�t pick up on my social cues.

She stopped filing my nails. She grabbed my hand and forced my eyes to meet hers. She said, �In my country, it is against the family and your husband to not want to give them a child. It is a sin.�

I wanted to say, �Well, that sounds oppressive. So aren�t you glad you�re no longer living in that country with your no-fun family?� Instead, I said, �Well, my relatives and my husband are fine with my decision.� Tammy admonished me, �When it�s too late you will want one and then you will have no eggs left.� Oh, okay, I didn�t realize that it was Buy One Manicure, Get a Fucked-Up Fortune of Doom Day.

I regularly tip more than 20 percent in cash at this place and in my humble opinion that means that I should not have to be lectured about adopting the sexist rules of a third world country that I never intend to eat food from, let alone visit. It�s bad enough that during my manicure I have to inhale the acrylic nail fumes from the Real Housewife of the Cheaper Neighborhood Five Miles from Beverly Hills who�s sitting next to me, incense from the Buddha shrine in the doorway, and unattended burnt rice from the Crock-Pot in the bathroom. Besides, when someone is rubbing lotion on my feet and legs as if they�re trying to seduce and make love to me�I don�t think there should be any conversation at all. Focus!

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.

Recently I ran into my old friend Rich in line at Target. I was standing there with my industrial-size bags of Skittles and a magazine about doing yoga and eating healthy. I was catching him up on the last year of my life, which went something like: �So, yeah, I�m divorced and dating around and I love living alone and I�m working all the time�traveling about every other weekend as well as finishing up my book about being childfree.� For some reason, this prompted him to say, �Aw, come on, Jen Kirkman. You�d be such a good mom!�

This statement is at best condescending and at worst patently false and potentially dangerous. It�s like telling a friend who you know has a paralyzing fear of wild animals that she would make a great game warden. Seriously, she should just shake off her deep-seated anxiety about being around rhinos and lions and just go out there and guide some poor, innocent family on a safari. I�m sure you�ll do fine!

A few years ago, Matt�s parents threw us an engagement party at their house. My former future mother-in-law and I stood side by side in the kitchen, prepping for the guests. (Well, I think I was just pouring myself some wine while I awkwardly watched her chop vegetables.) It was an idyllic scene, the two most important women in one man�s life, coming together over food and wine. (Okay, I was the only one with the wine.) Sort of semicasually, her knife hand holding the neck of a celery stalk hostage, she said to me, �So, I think we should talk about how you and Matt don�t plan to have children.�

I braced myself, expecting she�d take a blender, turn it on, and hold my hand over it, threatening, �Tell me again. Tell me one more time that you�re not giving me grandchildren. I dare you.� I figured she�d at the very least say something like, �You�re a horrible, soulless, morally barren woman who is stealing a future family from me and my son!�

Instead, she said very simply, �I support that decision. I participated in the women�s movement so that women could have more choices in life and this is one of those choices.� I felt relieved. She worked full-time and raised two kids but she didn�t try to make me feel like I needed to do the same.

But what would a conversation with your mother-in-law be without a little nugget of guilt that she gets to leave on your pillow before she turns down your metaphorical marital bed?

�Still, I can�t say that it isn�t a little bit sad to think that I�ll never see your children,� she continued. �And I know that you two would make great parents if that�s what you wanted.�

Mrs. Sanders, the ninety-two-year-old lady who lived across the street from me when I was a little kid, died alone trying to change a bulb in the Tiffany light fixture on her kitchen ceiling. In what should be documented as the biggest �are you fucking kidding me� in the history of bad timing, she had a heart attack while standing on the chair and fell backward, and only the kitchen floor was there to break her fall and her brittle bones. She was found on her back, clutching a sixty-watt bulb, next to a tipped-over chair, while her apparently necrophiliac poodle, Mimi, licked her face. She had a �kid��a seventy-two-year-old son named Donny who didn�t live with her. He wasn�t there to take charge and say, �Mom, I�ll change the lightbulb for you. Please, don�t climb that chair. You could fall to your death on the floor, where I will find you in a day with your housedress over your head and your knee-high panty hose exposed.�

I think of Mrs. Sanders whenever somebody says to me, �If you don�t have kids, you won�t have anyone to take care of you when you�re old.� Mrs. Sanders sacrificed her best years in metabolism�her twenties and thirties�to raise Donny, and she still ended up changing her own lightbulb, which led to her taking her last breath alone in the dark on some cold linoleum. Donny came by every week to help his mom grocery shop and to weed her flower garden, but he wasn�t there on the night that he could have been most helpful. According to the logic of bearing children in order to have built-in caretaker insurance, if Mrs. Sanders birthed Donny only so she could get some help around the house in her twilight years, she wasted her life.

Obviously I realize that having a kid who doesn�t end up changing your lightbulb one time and therefore not preventing your untimely death doesn�t necessarily mean your life was wasted. But she could have just skipped the whole �raising Donny� thing and been a swinging-single flapper, swilling gin at speakeasies. Sure, she still might have died on the kitchen floor, but it could have been because she was being taken by a handsome gentleman with a jaunty fedora and due to the strong gin, she tilted backward in ecstasy, hitting her head and falling to her death on the floor in the throes of passion�her last words of �Oh, God!� left up to interpretation.

Feel free to skip this chapter if you�ve ever been at a cocktail party and asked someone whether he or she wanted to have children, and after that person said no, you pressed on and either told the person what to do (have a change of heart and have a child) or asked follow-up questions such as: �Well, are you open to adoption?� and �What does your husband/mother/father/sister/brother/psychic/proctologist/mailman say about your selfish refusal to pass on your DNA and contribute to the excessive number of double-wide strollers on narrow city sidewalks, not to mention the selfish preservation of the sanctity of your bedroom by not adding a crib and doing whatever you want with your free time?�

I�ve worked myself up into a bit of a frenzy and am admittedly heated. So, warning: This chapter might not be for you if you�ve ever asked someone whether he or she wants to have children and after that person says no, you�ve tried to guess why, didn�t listen to the answer, and instead offered unsolicited advice on how to still make it work, such as:

Most people who don�t want kids also don�t want to be cornered by strangers at parties who launch an informal investigation into our psyches and backgrounds and decision-making capabilities. It�s been proven that vice presidential hopeful Sarah Palin wasn�t vetted as extensively as I have been in the company of women who are searching for a yet-to-be-discovered �good reason� why I don�t want to have children.

Because a woman might have reached a certain age (at which her eggs are rotting in her abdominal refrigerator) or wears a wedding ring (signifying her clear willingness to settle down with one sexual partner for life and gain some permanent weight around her midriff), people seem to think that it�s high time to encourage her to take the next natural step in life: getting nauseated at random scents that nobody else can smell, not being able to have more than one glass of prosecco on New Year�s Eve, and experiencing the near impossibility of a sex life for six weeks after the baby is born. Invalidating a woman�s life choices by saying things like, �Oh, but you�ll regret it if you don�t have kids,� or, �I didn�t think I wanted kids either until I had one,� is like me going to an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting and telling the newly sober that eventually when they grow old, they�ll want to take the edge off with a little gin and tonic and that if they could only just be mature enough to control themselves, they could go on a fun wine-tasting tour in the Napa Valley.

Ladies, if you have recognized yourself in this chapter, I have news for you: you are not the first person to say these things to us childfree-by-choice-ers and sadly you probably won�t be the last. These comments aren�t things that I can laugh off, like when your charming toddler tells me that I look fat. (Okay, nobody�s toddler said that, but it does sound like something a toddler could say.) You are forcing your values onto my life and I know that you don�t think you are doing that. I know you think you are saving me from a life of childfree loneliness by telling me what it�s like on the other side, but what you�re really doing is making me scared of you mom types. I will walk down a dark alley at night and not flinch at the sight of a shady man in a doorway�but if I see one of you coming toward me on the sidewalk in broad daylight while pushing a stroller, I will cross the street.

When my sister Violet had stage three breast cancer she didn�t become a medical marijuana�smoking, mellow, sleepy little patient. The chemotherapy turned her into a superhero�whose superpower was finding household projects that absolutely needed to be done. (They didn�t need to be done.) It�s hard to wrestle a hammer out of the hands of a determined woman with steroids in her bloodstream and try to tell her that the oil painting of her cat that a friend made does not need to be hung up above her fireplace at this very moment�or ever. (Just so you don�t think I�m a total monster�she made a full recovery and she still has her original boobs.) I stood behind Violet while she surveyed the plaster in her wall. I thought of taking a bronze candlestick to her head�just one sharp blow that would either sedate her into a silly grin like a cartoon character or perhaps injure her enough to go to the ER, where she could get some drugs that would ease her pain and get her to calm the fuck down.

I left the house to walk down her long driveway to check the mail. �Jennifah, I told you the mail doesn�t come until aftah two o�clock. There�s no point in walkin� down there.� Oh, there�s a point. To get a few minutes� respite from the chemically created Bob Vila�Womanzilla�even if it was a failed mission.

Even though Violet was doing things like telling me to rip the lettuce for her salad more quietly, I felt such compassion for her. The chemo didn�t make her nauseated like most patients, it made her irritable. I imagine it was like having a rush-hour Friday traffic jam, a screaming baby on a red-eye, and a fly that won�t stop buzzing around your head all pumping through your veins at the same time. What�s worse is that she was surrounded by a bunch of friends and family who loved her, but they did not have cancer. She was alone in a sea of smiling faces that couldn�t stop asking questions in order to make themselves more comfortable. Do you want to lie down? How about soup? Do you think that you need to see a specialist in the city? Have you tried drinking fresh-squeezed orange juice? You should really lie down. Have you thought of joining a support group? Are you nauseous? Will you be nauseous later? Can you spell �nauseous�? There are two us in that word, right?

My sister, who had divorced a year earlier and lived alone, had to suffer through the most annoying question of all during her recovery: �Do you regret not having kids?�

One afternoon Violet and I sat on her couch and watched Elf for the second time that day even though it was the middle of July. Our favorite scene is when Will Ferrell is in the waiting room at the pediatrician�s and he says to a cute little girl, �I�m a human�raised by elves.� And the little girl says in a sweet voice, �I�m a human�raised by humans.� We always tear up and say to each other, �Oh, she is sooo cute and so sweet. She�s just full of wonder and joy because it�s almost Christmas. She�s so innocent and pure�she doesn�t judge Will Ferrell�s character, Buddy, for wearing an elf costume because she hasn�t even learned how to judge others yet.� That�s about where our maternal instinct stops. By the next scene we�re grossed out by all of the kids who are touching things all over the store and we realize just how many germs we encounter when Christmas shopping.

Violet and I never talk that much about how we both don�t want kids. We don�t need to, because we both accept and respect each other�s decision and we don�t need to ask nosy questions we already know the answers to. Plus we�re usually too busy quoting lines from Caddyshack or talking to her tuxedo cat, Miss Mitty. But we definitely bonded over our collective outrage at how people turned her cancer into an opportunity to give her a sideways glance about being childfree at age forty. When my sister told me that some of her friends and even random people in the waiting room at the hospital had said some version of, �It�s too bad you don�t have children to help you through this,� I got as angry as a cancer victim who had to suffer the injustice of her little sister making a salad too loudly.

Look, you want to badger a normal, healthy woman about whether she realizes that if she doesn�t fix that biological clock, she could run the risk of never having C-section scars or her floppy post-childbirth vagina sewn up in episiotomy surgery like a real woman�that�s one thing. But to suggest to a cancer victim that she might suddenly regret not having children, when there is so much else to think about, like oh, I don�t know� Am I going to die? Do I have to stop eating Twinkies? Why can�t I use this free time off work to hang a paint-by-numbers replica of a cat in the most prominent place in my living room?

What kind of person would seriously wish for a cancer-ridden single woman to add motherhood to her to-do list? Not to mention wish for a child to exist in the world and have to watch her mother lose all of her hair. And oh, what a shame, Violet didn�t get to test out her cancer genes on a new generation. Bummer that her daughter won�t grow up to maybe also get breast cancer someday! My poor sister�I mean, she had to get in her car and go to chemotherapy without having to strap a child into a car seat. She must have been so not put upon by another human who needed her for life sustenance, and she had to take naps during the day�because she was too tired to even check her Facebook page to see whether any cute guys from high school were divorced yet�without worrying about a tiny helpless being screaming in the next room. It�s morbid but we joked that if she had died, people would be saying, �It�s such a shame, there are no kids at this funeral to lighten the mood.�

Since Violet was full of vim and vigor and anger-inducing chemo, she actually answered people with things like, �I have cancer. I�d hate for my kids to see me like this and I�d hate to not be able to take care of them because I have to sleep all the time. Besides, I can�t even have a lot of visitors because I have a shitty immune system at the moment and kids, being the little germ machines that they are, could possibly kill me right now. So, I�m sorry that you�re sorry, but I�m not sorry. Besides, I never wanted kids and having cancer hasn�t changed that.�

Luckily, my sister Lynne is a mother of three grown children and so she had the freedom and time to visit from Vermont to help out and get told by Violet that she wasn�t making toast correctly. My guitar-strumming, folk-singing sister Lynne has never questioned her sisters� choices not to have kids. Mainly because she�d rather work in the garden in her backyard, deep in the woods and high in the mountains of Vermont, than bother telling anyone how to live her life. (She knows how complicated it is for us just being aunts. You want to bum a cigarette off your seventeen-year-old niece and ask your nephew in college if he has any pot, but you know it�s inappropriate. Just kidding, Lynne!)

Violet confessed that even though she felt sick all of the time from the chemo, she kind of enjoyed the time off from taking care of four horses and working full-time at a brokerage firm. She was tired. (Yes! People without kids also get tired!) And she had enough to deal with�our dad was at her house every day asking the same questions over and over: �Where do you keep your paper towels?� And my mother was saying things like: �Your hospital bills are high, are you sure you want to start buying organic vegetables?�

WHEN I TOLD my parents Matt and I were splitting up, my mom said, �Jennifah, my other two daughters are divorced and now you�re getting a divorce? I have to ask you. Was it something your father and I did?�

Most kids worry that their parents� divorce was their fault, but in my world, my parents worried that my divorce was their fault. The divorce was nobody�s fault. It was amicable. �Amicable� when used for breakups means: �It�s not really your business and this whole thing sucks but I wasn�t dumped, so don�t pity me.�

After convincing my mom that it wasn�t anything she did that made me no longer want to be married, she finally concluded, �Well, Jen, this is very Hollywood. It�s very hard to stay together in show business. Look at Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton. They married, divorced, and then remarried! Their relationship couldn�t take the scrutiny of the public eye.�

�Mom,� I told her, �Matt and I weren�t in the public eye. I�ve never been chased by a paparazzo.� She then consoled me, not about the divorce but about my celebrity standing. �Oh, Jen, you will be there shortly. I always run into people who say that they love watching you on Chelsea Lately.�

I was sitting in my divorce lawyer�s office, thinking, I have a divorce lawyer. This is something that grown-ups have. Well, not every grown-up, but still. I feel like a war veteran. I have been through some shit that not everyone is strong enough to go through. Some people stay married when they�re not in love. Some people don�t even demand that lots of love exist in their marriage�it�s a partnership, a way to raise kids and join incomes. But hey, I�m not a victim. I�m not a hero. I�m just a grizzled old vet who fought for his country/woman getting a divorce.

Then I caught my grandiose train of thought and abruptly changed gears. Jen, what are you, five years old, thinking that putting a divorce lawyer on a five-thousand-dollar retainer makes you a grown-up? And speaking of retainers, you wear one at age thirty-seven. Where is it? Your orthodontist told you that you have to wear the Invisalign twenty-two hours a day for one year if you ever want to see that incisor on your top row of 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.�

I�m sure plenty of people will be mad at me for writing about them in a book�even with a fake name. And now everyone else can be mad at me for either forgetting or omitting them from the acknowledgments. I will try to keep this list of people I�m thanking to those who have something directly to do with the book�or else the list is going to go on and on and I�ll end up thanking Morrissey or just listing private jokes I have with my friends as if this were a middle school yearbook.

Thank you to Sarah Knight at Simon & Schuster. Because of your lack of maternal instinct, you made me a paid author. Thank you for your smart notes and encouragement to keep this book on target and funny and to take chances. Thank you to my manager, Kara Baker, for encouraging me to write a book about my experience as a childfree chick. Thank you to my agent Simon Green at CAA for your support and for selling this. Thanks to everyone at Avalon and CAA.

Thank you to Chelsea Handler. Let�s be honest. Nobody was buying my book ideas before I became part of your show(s). Thanks for everything you�ve done for me�and for hiring me twice. Before you hired me the first time I was temping in a windowless room. I love you.

Thanks to everyone at Chelsea Lately�especially the printer by my desk for printing out the first completed manuscript. Everyone else�thanks for reading things in advance and telling me this isn�t a piece of shit that should be thrown away: Chris Franjola, Brad Wollack, Heather McDonald, Fortune Feimster, Sarah Colonna, Jeff Wild, Sue Murphy, Tom Brunelle, April Richardson, Josh Wolf, Dan Maurio, Steve and Andrea Marmalstein.

Thanks to my immediate family for just being you: Ron, Joan, Linda, and Gail; and my nieces and nephews, Buffalo, Ali, and Zac. Thanks to my extended family for just being you. If I list you all by name, this will turn into an encyclopedia. I love you all.

Thanks to my friends who were part of this book, from the child-having to the child-free. I appreciate your reading early drafts and sharing your stories. Margaret Morse, Andrew Donnelly, Sharon Houston, Morgan Murphy, Tami and Tara Fitzkoff, Shauna Beland, Teri McDonald, Paul F. Tompkins, and Janie Haddad-Tompkins. Thank you to everyone who has ever had me on their podcast.

Thanks to �Mr. Bergen.� I still have the card.

Jen Kirkman is a stand-up comedian as well as a writer and regular roundtable guest on Chelsea Lately, and one of the stars of the hit spin-off mockumentary show After Lately. Jen�s latest stand-up album, Hail to the Freaks (released May 2011), hit no. 13 on the Billboard comedy album charts. Her debut album was 2006�s Self Help. Jen is also well known for her role as the narrator in the cult-hit series Drunk History from Funny or Die/HBO, which won the jury prize in short filmmaking at the Sundance Film Festival. Every month, Jen makes a storytelling appearance on Paul F. Tompkins�s podcast, The Pod F. Tompkast, which was hailed by Rolling Stone as �the best comedy podcast of the moment.� Jen has performed stand-up on Conan, John Oliver�s New York Stand-Up Show, The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson, Late Friday on NBC, Comedy Central�s Premium Blend, and the BBC�s The World Stands Up. Jen was also a cast member of VH1�s sketch show Acceptable TV. She did many voices on the Cartoon Network�s Home Movies as well as Current TV�s political cartoon SuperNews! Entertainment Weekly has twice named Jen as a comedian to watch and the Huffington Post has named her one of the top ten comedians to follow on Twitter. Jen tours as a stand-up and is based in Los Angeles.

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First Simon & Schuster hardcover edition April 2013

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Designed by Esther Paradelo

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Kirkman, Jen

I can barely take care of myself : tales from a happy life without kids / Jen Kirkman.�1st Simon & Schuster hardcover ed.

p. cm.

1. Kirkman, Jen, 1974� 2. Comedians�United States�Biography. 3. Television comedy writers�United States�Biography. 4. Childlessness�Humor. 5. Adulthood�Humor. I. Title.

PN2287.K672A3 2013

792.702'8092�dc23

[B]��2012033097

ISBN 978-1-4516-6700-4

ISBN 978-1-4516-6701-1(ebook)