Exploiting My Baby Read Free

Knox? People magazine reportedly paid a record $14 million for the first photos.
    Watched TLC lately?
    I remember when it used to be all home decorating shows (back when I was scratching for my seat on The View , I used to host TLC’s While You Were Out ). Now it’s mostly shows about babies and families with many, many babies, including the Duggars, who have nineteen kids with “J” names, including Jedidiah and Jinger.
    Don’t worry about the crazy monikers. They won’t get bullied in the schoolyard because (1) Jesus loves them and (2) They are homeschooled.
    Why this obsession of ours? Aside from the miracle of childbirth being inherently interesting (a living, breathing entity squirms right out of a human vagina—it never gets old!), and the thrill of seeing some tiny starlet get fat and then thin again (how Jessica Alba or Gisele Bündchen or any other celebrity lost their baby weight sells magazines every time), and the soothing sense that even our most kick-ass power women (Madonna, Katie Couric, Christina Aguilera, Sarah Jessica Parker, Michelle Obama, Hillary Clinton) had a baby yen, there is also just this: Moms are so ... maternal.
    Welcome to facile conjecture-ville, I hope you’ll have a pleasant stay.
    Mothers know things. They have superhuman strength. They are selfless, protective, gentle and sacrificing. Not my mother exactly—who should have named my brother and me Burden and Buzz Kill for how much she dug being a single parent—but in general, who wouldn’t want to be imbued with these qualities in the eyes of the public?
    Did I want to be the girl with one dead ficus and two perhaps overly adored cats? Did I want to be the woman who forgets birthdays, remembers petty grudges and drives around in an unwashed car littered with empty water bottles and crumpled scripts for jobs she didn’t get?
    Or could I use not only a whole new fan base, but also a wealth of new topics to mine for material?
    Hell, yes.
    So, I certainly didn’t have a baby to help my career. But it shouldn’t hurt.

one
    When It Comes to Conception, Porn Is Good and The Secret Is Bad
    I can’t let you in ’cause you’re old as fuck. For this club, you know, not for the earth.
    DOORMAN, KNOCKED UP
     
     
     
    S o, I’m thirty-eight. I’m arguably “old as fuck,” and my husband and I decide it’s time to pull the goalie. In the same second we decide to have a baby (after much debate, the nature of which I’ll get to later), I also quietly resign myself to being infertile. I am not only “AMA” (Advanced Maternal Age; saw it written on my medical chart once and felt like Grandma Moses) but I’ve also had an STD, thanks to the stand-up comedian I dated for a year when I first moved to Los Angeles.
    Yes, I am going to talk about the clap. Because listen, I don’t want you to panic if you’ve had an STD or two and have seen the other side of thirty-five. Having kids later in life is the new thing, so don’t sweat it.
    Before the physical part of this equation, let’s get into the mental part. If you have a horrible attitude, and have made the presumption, like I did, that conception is never going to happen for you, please don’t be conned into thinking your crappy attitude about fertility can ruin your chances of conceiving. That seems to be the conventional wisdom tumbling out of the mouths of crypto-spiritual clowns. They try to shame you into thinking your thoughts either make you sick or heal you. In a way, it would be nice if it were that simple, but my uterus has proven that theory wrong. Way wrong.
    All I did—and I did it like it was a full-time job—was worry and obsess about being infertile.
    Thankfully, the uterus is impervious to “bad vibes” and the universe had bigger fish to fry than punishing me for being such a bummer with my parade of negative thoughts. The Secret isn’t total bullshit, but in my experience, it’s close.
    Allow me a brief detour into both my twenties and my scarred