I became an aunt to my sister’s kid when I was six, but that was way different. My niece was never going to look across the backseat of Mom’s Chevy at where I was buckled into the booster seat and wonder why I hadn’t put a down payment on any property yet. She never questioned why her Adult Aunt was sneaking her lunch of neon-orange mac and cheese directly from the pot it had dried in because she didn’t have any food at home and her direct deposit hadn’t cleared the bank yet. I’m sure that Anna and her fine-ass Canadian husband had already started setting aside money for those lentils to go to college, but shouldn’t they have asked me if I was ready for kids? If I had enough Fun-Aunt money set aside for regular trips to the American Girl store? If I had the energy to pack up my apartment and move into a place someone had already childproofed? If I was ready to stop shouting swear words all the time?!
I am hCG-challenged and at an age when all my late nights and drunken partying is dangerously toeing the line between “fabulous and exciting” and “sad as a motherfucker.” The age at which the sluts I used to drink too much and cry with are all dressed like Kohl’s ads, driving sport utility vehicles with roof racks affixed to them, and having stable relationships with men who wear sensible shoes and make wise investments with their beer money. Goddamn it, is there anyone left who wants to be drunk at three in the afternoon and go get manicures?! I see you, potential new friend: banging terrible dudes, drinking backwashed beers some stranger just left on the bar, and basically whiling away your early thirties pretending that your life is an extended episode of Sex and the City when all of a sudden, BOOM. Every vagina within a ten-mile radius is pushing out an eight-pound screaming red ball of human who will eventually need braces and many winter coats. And you and I are still eating cheese fries and jelly beans for dinner.
I swear, now that I am finally beginning to come to terms with being that special kind of pigperson who is barely treading water while being neck-deep in a frothy sea of embossed wedding invitations heaved at me by my so-called friends, it seems others have come up with a whole new way to make me feel like an emotionally stunted teenage boy: THEY ARE CREATING NEW PEOPLE. No big deal, right? Yes, everybody knows somebody who was pushing a stroller to class in the ninth grade. But back then it was like, “Too bad you have to take your baby to gym class, I’ll just be over here wearing my velvet choker and sobbing to Liz Phair.” Now it’s like, “Girl, you are making me feel like a lesser human being.” My dead parents aren’t around to harp on me about my slow grandchild production, and while I am grateful for that little bit of orphan silver lining, no one told me that, having already survived a series of teenage years during which bodysuits were the rage, my thirties would be another unimaginable assault on my very low self-esteem.
The twins started kindergarten last fall, and every year, I am still one day early or two days late for their birthday. I forget when they’re within earshot and say mean things about dead people or recount in excruciating detail the highlights of my most recent gynecological exam. My friends and frenemies all have little ones now, and I’m not any smarter or feeling any more put together, plus when I visit them I can’t set my bag down anywhere for fear of dropping a metal flask onto some tiny soft skull. If “it gets better,” I’ma need to know when. I suppose I could just wait for all their children to drop out of dental school and stab a convenience-store employee while trying to steal a box of real Sudafed before I feel haughty and superior about my choice to let everyone else do the breeding, but with my luck these little dudes are going to grow up to be, like, funny and charming Instagram models who automatically take my arm when we’re walking in the snow. I hate them already.
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You can’t tell by looking, but I was a nanny for a while in high school and through my early twenties. It was just like The Help except swap in liberal white guilt and Land Rovers for Jim Crow and cotton gins. The most important thing I learned was the difference between the boxed-macaroni-and-cheese parents and the holistic-kale-anti-vaccination parents. Macaroni moms are the easiest to be around, obviously. Because, duh, you can totally let their kids zombie out in front of the TV and order a sausage pizza. I am not good enough to be around my no-screens-in-the-house flaxseed friends. For real, I can’t be having your kid in our adult conversation because you don’t want him to get high on Sesame Street and fruit snacks. GO AWAY, BABY. And I have neither the intelligence nor the patience to navigate the kid aisle at Whole Foods while trying to find the gluten-free, carob-sweetened, agave soy organic vegan oxygenated wheatgrass bites or whatever so that my newest nephew has something to snack on while trying to stay alive for two hours in my apartment. I might put my knives away and hide the porn, but educational toys and petroleum-free jellies are not within my purview.
You need to know all this stuff, of course, because some of these new moms will lose their impacted shit on you if they catch you pouring anything other than Hawaiian volcanic water into their child’s bath. Yes, that same person you watched pull a disgusting dollar bill from between a stripper’s ass cheeks with her teeth will now try to break your jaw for serving her kid some cheese with hormones in it. And she’s not wrong, she just needs to understand that I don’t know what the fuck a heart of palm even is, Katy. That’s why I took the boy to McDonald’s. THEY SERVE APPLES NOW, SHIT. And I’ve changed plenty of cloth diapers in my day, but it is not humanly possible for me to stay on top of all the ways I might be destroying your young offspring. There’s only so much reading and interacting I can do, parents!