Bee - I know I am, but what are you?

i know i am,
but what are you?

SAMANTHA BEE

Gallery Books A Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc. 1230 Avenue of the Americas New York, NY 10020 www.SimonandSchuster.com

Copyright 2010 by Samantha Bee

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Certain names and identifying characteristics have been changed.

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First Gallery Books hardcover edition June 2010

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Designed by Jaime Putorti

Manufactured in the United States of America

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Bee, Samantha.
I know I am, but what are you? / by Samantha Bee.1st Gallery Books
hardcover ed.
p. cm.
1. American wit and humor. I. Title.
PN6165.B44 2010
814.6dc22
2010002477
ISBN 978-1-4391-4273-8
ISBN 978-1-4391-5529-5 (ebook)

To my wonderful family, whom I love dearly, and especially to my children, who I hope will never write a book about me.

i know i am,
but what are you?

Every once in a while I think about what my life would be like if my parents had stayed together and not separated while I was still a baby. Obviously it would involve a regular commute to the maximum-security penitentiary to visit whichever of them had committed the murder that signaled the official end to their marriage. Something relatively insignificant would have pushed them to the brink. Perhaps my mother wouldnt have been able to tolerate sorting through my fathers soiled gym bag to do his laundry one more time, or my father wouldnt have been able to handle my mothers growing interest in founding a pioneer-style ecovillagewhatever the trigger, one of them would have snapped.

The surviving parent would sit happily in their cell, content to be free of the shackles of the doomed relationship, and secure in the knowledge that it had been a justifiable homicide. Their new life would be such a relief that they would dive hungrily into something formerly out of character: a study of medieval French literature or raku pottery classes. Embracing their reinvented self with gusto, they would send misshapen vases and epic poems home at Christmastime, to the bewilderment of their grandchildren. Only the penal system would really blame them for their crime. Anyone who had known them would have thought, Oh yeah, makes sense. They were a terrible couple. Im amazed they didnt try to kill each other years earlier...

I come from a long, magnificent tradition of divorce, dating back to the time when nobody was doing it, when it was shameful and nearly impossible to get one. Our family legacy of failed marriage dates back to the era in which women whose behavior vaguely pushed the boundaries of social acceptability were automatically considered either mentally deficient or, more likely, hookers. If you wanted to be an actor, for example, that was just an artsy way of saying, I do it for money. If you opted to have a job, then you may have been a career gal by day, but everyone knew it was probably just a front for your nighttime hookering. And if you dared to get a divorce, then you were indisputably a hooker, and God bless the poor husband who had to put up with you for so long, you horrible floozy

The women in my family were often suspected of this kind of sluttery, but the glorious truth is that they mostly just loved to marry sadists. Men who liked to beat them up physically or psychologically, drink up all the food money, start a side family, and then proceed to drink up all their new familys food money, too. It was quite a collection of gentlemen that the women on both sides of my family had collectively cast aside. Im sure they would have endured any tawdry accusations with relish if those accusations had been accompanied by divorce papers.

Dating from well before the turn of the twentieth century if there has ever been a successful, happy marriage in my family lineage, I have yet to hear about it. When I rack my brain, I cant think of a single adult, other than myself, in my immediate or extended family who has not been painfully divorced at least once, usually twiceeven the gay ones. This inspires tremendous confidence in my husband.

My maternal and paternal great-great-grandmothers both divorced their husbands, and later went on to marry different kinds of sex perverts; my grandfather left my grandmother for his secretary and her family; my parents got divorced, and their second marriages and/or common-law relationships fell apart; a whole bunch of aunts, uncles, and cousins all split upwhich leaves us with a portrait of a shattered family and some very robust hybridized genes. And this is just the tip of the iceberg. After the nuclear winter, all thats going to be left standing are cockroaches and Bees.

Our family tree has been hit by lightning so many times, were really more of a charred, ungroomed topiary hedge of misfits trying to figure out how were related. Nobodys really sure what to call anybody else at family gatherings. Are you an aunt? Can I just call you Debbie? Are you a cousin? Oh, so youre related to the lady who was standing in front of the shed during the baby shower? So then... am I technically allowed to fool around with your son at the family reunion? Whoops, too late, I already did.

But after all the heartache and confusion, and cousin-on-cousin make-out sessions, getting to have a stepmother like the one I have was the single best result anyone could have hoped for. In keeping with family tradition, my parents threw in the towel when I was an infant, after a long and uneventful high school romance and subsequent teen pregnancy. The fact that they followed through with the pregnancy at all seemed to be their own inept form of teen rebellion, though of course, for obvious reasons Im grateful for it. Although I officially lived with my mother, I saw my dad on weekends, and my grandmother and great-grandmother were there to fill in the gaps. And though I adored my parents in a way that bordered on adulation, there were many, many of those gaps.

My mother never remarried out of the sheer terror that she would again be saddled with someone like my father. My father, suffering from a similar terror that he would again be saddled with someone like my mother, opted out of the dating pool entirely by marrying her polar opposite. Sensing that there might be a shortfall in the area of competent parenting, my father was sure that his freshly ratified marriage offered the kind of stability that his child deserved.

It must be terrifying to be thrust into the position of stepparent, but my stepmother, Marilyn, was game and jumped into it full steam ahead with little regard for its perils. I was certainly not the kind of child she was used to, but she seemed confident that she could provide me with the kind of wholesome family experiences almost no one who is