I Can Barely Take Care of Myself Read Online Free PDF Page B

clothes right off. My mom and I satat the kitchen table, where she’d referred to me as a “trash bag” just a year before. We were having our first frank discussion about sex, without actually talking about sex. Actually, we’d talked aboutsex once—in 1985.
    In fifth-grade sex ed class, my teacher taught us what happens when sperm enters a woman’s fallopian tubes. Our homework assignment was to draw a picture of the opposite sex—or what we thought the opposite sex looked like naked. Then we were to write a paragraph underneath, from our best understanding, of what intercourse was and how babies were made. I told my mom about thehomework assignment and she teased me by chasing me around the kitchen table, asking to see what I’d drawn. I remember feeling disappointed in sex ed class. I’d had a vague inkling that sex was something that people did for fun, but the way it was being taught, it seemed like the teacher was dismissing that notion and instead presenting sex as something that two people do only when they want to makea baby. I half listened to the teacher explain how sperm meets egg, figuring, I don’t need to know this. I don’t think I’m having kids anytime soon.
    I think about raising kids now and how they’d have access to Facebook and actual real pictures of naked people on the Internet. I think about how my ten-year-old daughter would be nothing like me. I had no idea what a penis looked like, so that pictureI had to draw in fifth grade of a naked man looked like a Ken doll—just legs with no anatomy in between. My ten-year-old daughter probably would already have had a dick-pic sent to her cell phone by some little shit in her class. Would my ten-year-old daughter have to have a cell phone? I guess I could forbid her from having one—just like my mom forbade me from watching MTV because she thoughtmusic videos were too sexually explicit and directed by the devil. But then again, what if my daughter had to make an emergency call? There aren’t pay phones on every corner these days. If some creep in a van were to abduct her outside of school, my daughter wouldn’t be able to speed-dial 911 or text me. I can’t send a ten-year-old girl to schoolwith no viable means of communication. And whatif my ten-year-old girl was an early bloomer and had her period already? Would I have to teach her about safe sex or secretly slip a birth control pill into her oatmeal every morning? I know that when I was ten I was terribly horny for Bruce Willis and Michael J. Fox. Luckily, the boys at school whom I liked didn’t like me back, so my lust remained only a fantasy reserved for the hours that Moonlighting and Family Ties aired. But what about my imaginary daughter? What if the boys liked her back? Then they’d be screwing at my house after school while I was on tour doing comedy, and before you know it, I’d have a pregnant ten-year-old daughter and I’d be a grandmother and a mother to two people before one of them even turned eleven.
    I don’t understand what’s so great about having kids when I’mfaced with the fact that at some point my kids would disappoint me—just like I disappointed my parents. It’s the vicious cycle of life. It’s an absolute certainty that the babies that I’m not having would become horny teens who send pictures of their genitalia to one another on cell phones that I’m paying for.
    Eleven years later, I sat around that same kitchen table with my mom as she gave herversion of a mea culpa. “Jennifah, I’m reading a biography on Lauren Bacall. She had a lot of men in her life but she loved them deeply because she was passionate . . . about everything she did. She was a wond-ah-ful woman who was very talented.”
    That was my mom’s way of telling me that I was forgiven and that even though she’d never slept with a man before marriage, it was something that “thekids” and Hollywood legends were doing and maybe it wasn’t so abnormal or trash bag–like after