We Are Never Meeting in Real Life.

by Samantha Irby

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 ...