I Can Barely Take Care of Myself by Jen Kirkman Read Free Book Online

that for a girl who doesn’t want babies, living with your parents in your early twenties is the best free birth control around.

2. Misadventures in Babysitting
    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 sternvoice 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 youngestout 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-geekbaby 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’ housesare 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 tellingme that in the next room there was a monster on the loose? I’d yell back, “Of course there’s a monster underyour 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 fatefulafternoon, 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