by Tina Fey
Also, there are many moments of my work that are deeply satisfying and fun. And almost as many moments of full-time motherhood that stink like Axe body spray on a brick of bleu cheese.*
So what did I do about the kid’s nails? I hope you don’t think I let my little one walk around with sore fingers.
I did the logical thing, or at least what counts as logical in the fancy life I have made for myself.
First thing in the morning while my daughter was on the potty I would cut her nails before I left for work.
At first she didn’t want to (understandably, since she was used to it hurting a little), but I convinced her by cutting the nails almost all the way left to right and then letting her have the honor of pulling the clipping the rest of the way off. The process was preposterously slow, but we were huddled together and we told stories as we went. This is one of the weird things about motherhood. You can’t predict that some of your best moments will happen around the toilet at six A.M. while you’re holding a pile of fingernail clippings like a Santeria priestess.
It’s three years later now, so I’d like to believe the household communication has gotten easier.
For example, I can whisper to my now five-year-old kid, “Tell Jessie not to cut your nails so short. Bye!”
and run away. My daughter and I can have real conversations now. I told her that I didn’t like it that the mommy in the book was a witch. That it hurt my feelings. And she looked at me matter-of-factly and said, “Mommy. I can’t read. I thought it was a Halloween book.”
The Mother’s Prayer for Its Daughter
First, Lord: No tattoos. May neither Chinese symbol for truth nor Winnie-the-Pooh holding the FSU logo stain her tender haunches.
May she be Beautiful but not Damaged, for it’s the Damage that draws the creepy soccer coach’s eye, not the Beauty.
When the Crystal Meth is offered,
May she remember the parents who cut her grapes in half
And stick with Beer.
Guide her, protect her
When crossing the street, stepping onto boats, swimming in the ocean, swimming in pools, walking near pools, standing on the subway platform, crossing 86th Street, stepping off of boats, using mall restrooms, getting on and off escalators, driving on country roads while arguing, leaning on large windows, walking in parking lots, riding Ferris wheels, roller-coasters, log flumes, or anything called “Hell Drop,” “Tower of Torture,” or “The Death Spiral Rock ‘N Zero G Roll featuring Aerosmith,” and standing on any kind of balcony ever, anywhere, at any age.
Lead her away from Acting but not all the way to Finance.
Something where she can make her own hours but still feel intellectually fulfilled and get outside sometimes And not have to wear high heels.
What would that be, Lord? Architecture? Midwifery? Golf course design? I’m asking You, because if I knew, I’d be doing it, Youdammit.
May she play the Drums to the fiery rhythm of her Own Heart with the sinewy strength of her Own Arms, so she need Not Lie With Drummers.
Grant her a Rough Patch from twelve to seventeen.
Let her draw horses and be interested in Barbies for much too long, For Childhood is short—a Tiger Flower blooming
Magenta for one day—
And Adulthood is long and Dry-Humping in Cars will wait.
O Lord, break the Internet forever,
That she may be spared the misspelled invective of her peers And the online marketing campaign for Rape Hostel V: Girls Just Wanna Get Stabbed.
And when she one day turns on me and calls me a Bitch in front of Hollister, Give me the strength, Lord, to yank her directly into a cab in front of her friends, For I will not have that Shit. I will not have it.
And should she choose to be a Mother one day, be my eyes, Lord, That I may see her, lying on a blanket on the floor at 4:50 A.M., all-at-once exhausted, bored, and in love with the little creature whose poop is leaking up its back.
“My mother did this for me once,” she will realize as she cleans feces off her baby’s neck. “My mother did this for me.” And the delayed gratitude will wash over her as it does each generation and she will make a Mental Note to call me. And she will forget.
But I’ll know, because I peeped it with Your God eyes.
Amen
What Turning Forty Means to Me
I need to take my pants off as soon as I get home. I didn’t used to have to do that. But now I do.
What Should I Do with My Last Five Minutes?
So here we are near the end of the book, and I have a question with which I need your help.
What should I do with my last five minutes? It feels like my last five minutes of being famous are timing out to be simultaneous with my last five minutes of being able to have a baby.
Science shows that fertility and movie offers drop off steeply for women after forty.
I have one top-notch baby with whom I am in love. It’s a head-over-heels “first love” kind of thing, because I pay for everything and all we do is hold hands.
When she says, “I wish I had a baby sister,” I am stricken with guilt and panic. When she says,
“Mommy, I need Aqua Sand,” or “I only want to eat gum!” or “Wipe my butt!” I am less affected.
I thought that raising an only child would be the norm in Manhattan, but my daughter is the only child in her class without a sibling. Most kids have at least two. Large families have become a status symbol in New York. Four beautiful children named after kings and pieces of fruit are a way of saying “I can afford a four-bedroom apartment and $150,000 in elementary school tuition fees each year. How you livin’?”
Now, I’m not really one for status symbols. I went to public school. I have all my original teeth and face parts. When left to my own devices, I dress like I’m here to service your aquarium. But the kid pressure mounts for other reasons.
The woman who runs my local toy store that sells the kind of beautiful wooden educational toys that kids love (if there are absolutely no other toys around and they have never seen television) asks me,
“Are you gonna have another one?”
A background actor on the set of 30 Rock will ask, “You want more kids?” “No, no,” I want to say. “Why would I want more kids when I could be here with you having an awkward conversation over a tray of old danishes?”
The ear, nose, and throat doctor I see about some stress-induced canker sores offers, unsolicited: “You should have another one. I had my children at forty-one and forty-two. It’s fine.” Did she not hear the part about the stress-induced canker sores?
My parents raised me that you never ask people about their reproductive plans. “You don’t know their situation,” my mom would say. I considered it such an impolite question that for years I didn’t even ask myself. Thirty-five turned into forty faster than McDonald’s food turns into cold nonfood.
Behind door number two, you have the movie business. Shouldn’t I seize the opportunity to make more movies in the next few years? Think of the movies I could make!
Magazine Lady—The story of an overworked woman looking for love… whose less-attractive friend…’s mean boss is played by me… when Bebe Neuwirth turns it down.
The Wedding Creeper—An overworked woman looking for love sneaks into weddings and wishes strangers well on their wedding videos, only to fall in love with a handsome videographer (Gerard Butler or a coatrack with a leather jacket on it), despite the fact that when they first met, they knocked over a wedding cake, causing an old lady (Academy Award™ winner Jane Fonda) to rap.
Next, a strategically chosen small part in a respectable indie dramedysemble called Disregarding Joy, in which I play a lesbian therapist who unexpectedly cries during her partner’s nephew’s bris. Roger Ebert will praise my performance as “brave to grow that little mustache.”
Finally, for money, I play the villain in the live-action Moxie Girlz movie opposite a future child star who at this moment is still a tickly feeling
in Billy Ray Cyrus’s balls.
How could I pass up those opportunities? Do I even have the right to deprive moviegoers of those experiences?
These are the baby-versus-work life questions that keep me up at night. There’s another great movie idea! Baby Versus Work. A hardworking baby looking for love (Kate Hudson) falls for a handsome pile of papers (Hugh Grant). I would play the ghost of a Victorian poetess who anachronistically tells Kate to “Go for it.”
I debate the second-baby issue when I can’t sleep. “Should I? No. I want to. I can’t. I must. Of course not. I should try immediately.”
I get up to go to the bathroom and study myself in the mirror. Do I look like someone who should be pregnant? I look good for forty, but I have the quaggy jawline and hollow cheeks of a mom, not a pregnant lady. It’s now or never. This decision cannot be delayed.
And what’s so great about work anyway? Work won’t visit you when you’re old. Work won’t drive you to get a mammogram and take you out after for soup. It’s too much pressure on my one kid to expect her to shoulder all those duties alone. Also, what if she turns on me? I am pretty hard to like. I need a backup.
And who will be my daughter’s family when my husband and I are dead from stress-induced cankers? She must have a sibling. Hollywood be damned. I’ll just be unemployable and labeled crazy in five years anyway.
Let me clarify. I have observed that women, at least in comedy, are labeled “crazy” after a certain age.
FEMALE WRITER: You ever work with
MALE AGENT: (dismissive) She’s crazy now.
FEMALE WRITER: You know who I loved growing up?
. What about her for
this part?
MALE WRITER: I don’t know. I hear she’s pretty batshit.
FEMALE WRITER: I got a call today from
.
MALE PRODUCER: Ugh. We had her on the show once. She was a crazy assache. She wanted to see her lines ahead of time. She had all these questions.
I’ve known older men in comedy who can barely feed and clean themselves, and they still work.
The women, though, they’re all “crazy.”
I have a suspicion—and hear me out, ’cause this is a rough one—I have a suspicion that the definition of “crazy” in show business is a woman who keeps talking even after no one wants to fuck her anymore.
The only person I can think of that has escaped the “crazy” moniker is Betty White, which, obviously, is because people still want to have sex with her.
This is the infuriating thing that dawns on you one day: Even if you would never sleep with or even flirt with anyone to get ahead, you are being sexually adjudicated by these LA creeps. Network executives really do say things like “I don’t know. I don’t want to fuck anybody on this show.” They really do say that stuff. That’s not just lactation-stopping dialogue on Entourage.
(To any exec who has ever said that about me, I would hope you would at least have the intelligence and self-awareness to know that the feeling is extremely mutual.) It seems to me that the fastest remedy for this “Women Are Crazy” situation is for more women to become producers and hire diverse women of various ages. That is why I feel obligated to stay in the business and try hard to get to a place where I can create opportunities for others, and that’s why I can’t possibly take time off for a second baby, unless I do, in which case that is nobody’s business and I’ll never regret it for a moment unless it ruins my life.
And now it’s four o’clock in the morning.
To hell with everybody! Maybe I’ll just wait until I’m fifty and give birth to a ball of fingers!
“Merry Christmas from Tina, Jeff, Alice, and Ball of Fingers,” the card will say. (“Happy Holidays” on the ones I send to my agents.)
I try to think about anything else so I can fall back to sleep. I used to cling to the fact that my mom had me unexpectedly at forty, only to realize a couple years ago that I had the math wrong and she was thirty-nine. A world of difference, in my insomniac opinion.
My mom was conceived in the US, born in Greece, and brought back here as an infant. Because of this, she never gets jury duty.
She grew up speaking both languages, and when I was in elementary school she volunteered to be a classroom aide because a lot of the Greeks in our neighborhood were “right off the boat,” as she would say, and needed a translator. My mother knew the language and the culture. Sometimes the teachers would ask her to translate bad news. “Please tell Mrs. Fondulas that her son is very disruptive.”
And my mom would nod and say in Greek, “George is a lovely boy.” Because she knew if she really translated that, the kid would get a beating and the mother would hate her forever out of embarrassment.
Little kids’ birthdays in my neighborhood were simple affairs. Hot dogs, Hawaiian Punch, pin the tail on the donkey, followed by cake and light vomiting. (Wieners, punch, and spinning into barfing would later be referred to as “the Paris Hilton.”)
I would always complain to my mother after the Greek kids’ parties because they served Italian rum cake.
Covered in slivered almonds and soaked in booze, Italian rum cake is everything kids hate about everything. No one even ate it. It just got thrown away.
Cake Time is supposed to be the climax of a birthday, but instead it was a crushing disappointment for all. I imagine it’s like being at a bachelor party only to find that the stripper has overdosed in the bathroom.
After a couple years of this nonsense my mom explained to me that the reason the “Greeky Greeks,” as she called them, got the Italian rum cakes was because they were the most expensive item in the bakery. They wanted the adults at the party to know they could afford it. Anyway, is that what I’m trying to do with this second-baby nonsense? Am I just chasing it because it’s the hardest thing for me to get and I want to prove I can do it?
Do I want another baby? Or do I just want to turn back time and have my daughter be a baby again?
Some of you must be thinking, “Well, what does your husband want? He’s a part of this decision, too, you know!” He wants me to stop agonizing, but neither of us knows whether that means go for it or move on.
Why not do both, like everybody else in the history of earth? Because, as I think we have established in this book, things most people do naturally are often inexplicably difficult for me.
Secondly, the math is impossible. No matter how you add up the months, it means derailing the TV
show where two hundred people depend on me for their income, and I take that stuff seriously. Like everyone from Tom Shales to Jeff Zucker, I thought 30 Rock would be cancelled by now.
I have a great gynecologist who is as gifted at listening as she is at rectal exams. I went for my annual checkup and, tired of carrying this anxiety around, burst into tears the moment she said hello. I laid it all out for her, and the main thing I took away from our conversation was the kind of simple observation that only an impartial third party can provide. “Either way, everything will be fine,” she smiled, and for a little while I was pulled out of my anxious, stunted brain cloud.
One time my mom babysat a set of the Italian Rum Cake Kids while their parents went to a wedding reception. This was the first time this nice couple had gone out alone since their children were born. Their parents dropped them off after the ceremony. Little Christo and Maria were still all dressed up. Christo wore a tiny black suit and a white shirt. Maria wore a red velvet dress and cried in the playpen from the moment her parents left until the moment they returned. My mom tried everything to console her, food… The end.
After a couple hours of this, seven-year-old Christo was beside himself. He had never been babysat before. How long was this fuckery going to go on? His sister was hysterical. He paced around our living room, now in his shirtsleeves and black pants. Pulling his golden curls nervously, he looked like the night manager of a miniature diner who had just had a party of six dine and dash. He ranted to his baby sister in Greek, “
,
vreh βρε Mapia!” This sent my mother running into the
dining room laughing hysterically. I chased her. What? What did he say? Roughly translated it was “Oh!
My Maria! What is to become of us?”
His overdramatic ridiculousness tickled my mom in such a specific way that she was doubled over in the dining room, hoping the kids wouldn’t see that she was laughing so hard at them she peed a little. A phenomenon I now understand on all levels.