Fully Baked: A Messy Memoir by Rosebud Baker Courtesy Simon & Schuster It was fitting that I found out I was pregnant at 30 Rock, because that’s where I learned how to operate with zero sleep, and learned that no matter how badly you want something, it might not happen for you when you want it to.
Convinced after two miscarriages that my uterus was basically decorative, I had started IVF during season 48 — a fun little process that made me want to murder my husband. I was storing fertility drugs in my office mini fridge, hiding used needles in my office trash can like a drug addict, bloated like a tick, hormones turning me into a werewolf, and what was Andy’s contribution? Jerking off into a cup while scrolling through his phone.
Related Stories
Movies 'SNL' Breakout Ashley Padilla Joins Emma Stone, Chris Pine in Romantic Comedy 'The Catch' (Exclusive)
Lifestyle The Man Who Invented Marilyn
“Good luck, honey!” he said to me while handing his sample to the nurse.
Then, after all the needles, the hormones, and the money we’d never see again, I got pregnant the old-fashioned way: spousal rape. I’m kidding. It was consensual. (But I love a historically accurate joke!)
The IVF had nothing to do with it. It happened during some forgettable Tuesday night quickie where we were both half-asleep and fully clothed.
The anxiety hit like a freight train after that. Would this one stick? Would the baby make it past the first trimester? Past the second? And then when they did, it was on to: Would they turn out like me? Would I turn out like me? How the FUCK, after having a baby, would I get back to being myself?
I’d fought so hard to become this person who’d earned a spot in the SNL writers’ room and on stages around the country. Survived my sister’s death. Crawled out of alcoholism. Escaped “Whiskey Fists” Cain who, I shit you not, opened a boxing gym after we broke up — so I guess we both found our purpose. I’d built a career, landed my dream job, was pregnant, and once again, found myself staring at the ceiling, about to punch through to . . . what? The complete erasure of everything I’d built?
Ten and a half months after taking that test, I’d find out.
Minnow was in her bassinet. Six weeks had passed since my C-section, and even though I technically had two weeks of maternity leave left, I felt like I needed to be back at work. Nobody said that explicitly, but I couldn’t get a straight answer about how much time people typically took off. It seemed like they didn’t take any. I was told a story about a writer who was still making edits to a sketch while in labor and bouncing on an exercise ball.
So I returned, anxious to get back in the game. I had grown an entire human being inside my body and brought her into the world. I should have felt like a God. Limitless. Invincible. A creator of life itself. Instead, I felt an unfamiliar mix of apathy and abject fear. Fear because I couldn’t get myself to care the way I had even six weeks prior, and apathy because, well, I’d been through a paradigm-shift.
My writing suffered. The sketches I submitted didn’t make it to the table read. I lost confidence.
One day before we were about to go on a mid-season break, a male colleague asked if I had any plans.
I opened my mouth to answer, but all I could summon was a heavy sigh.
He clocked my hundred-yard stare and replied, “Oh that’s right, you’re a mom now,” before turning to ask someone else what fun things they would be doing over the break.
I was there, but I wasn’t. I felt like a coat rack.
I made it through season 49, but I was pretty disappointed with my output, so I threw myself back into stand-up. I was working on my second special, this time for Netflix. I’d filmed the first half of it at the Comedy Cellar when I was eight and a half months pregnant. Now, I planned to go back there, eleven months after Minnow was born, and shoot the other half. The idea was to cut both performances together — two total hours — into one hour of edited material. I hoped it would give a funny, accurate, and honest depiction of pregnancy and postpartum life. I honestly wasn’t sure if it would work, though. If it didn’t, my backup plan was to put out the postpartum hour by itself.
After shooting the second set, I was asked back to SNL for the fiftieth anniversary season as a writer for “Weekend Update” instead of as a sketch writer. This was actually a huge win. It was my favorite part of the show, and the joke-dense segment was in my comfort zone as a writer. I felt like I knew what I was doing in a way I never had with sketch. I felt useful on “Weekend Update,” not just every once in a while, but every day. It was also a job that I could perform while juggling the release and promotion of my special, which was slated to come out in the middle of season 50. Thanks to an incredible editor named Kelly Lyon, the two separate hours of stand-up cut together beautifully for the special. Kelly had done parody commercials, music videos, and digital shorts at SNL; edited all of John Mulaney’s specials; and was herself a mom. In February 2025, The Mother Lode debuted on Netflix. It was an hour of comedy that packed so much of my life into it and covered a set of highly sentimental life experiences without ever feeling sappy. I was proud of it in a lasting way that rarely happens for me with the things I make.
After it came out, I sensed something beginning to shift in how I thought about my work, and my ambitions.
I loved SNL, but it wasn’t mine.
Stand-up was.
Minnow was.
And if there was ever going to be a middle path — a way to balance motherhood and my career — I was going to have to be the one to carve it.
In June 2025, after season 50 wrapped, Andy, Minnow, and I embarked on a European stand-up tour.
The logistics were fun. Minnow was almost two, and we updated our riders (the list of things venues provide for artists) to include crayons, a ball, and some paper. I’d wait backstage with Minnow while Andy performed, then he’d bring me up, I’d hand him our toddler like the crown jewels, and we’d switch places.
Tag-team parenting meets tag-team comedy.
We became true playground connoisseurs. Berlin, Amsterdam, London — we hit every slide and swing set. Out of fear of a lawsuit there’s no way you’d ever see a trampoline built into a sidewalk in New York City, but in Berlin they were everywhere. At Kensington Gardens, we spent two hours searching for Winnie the Pooh’s house, checking every tree hollow, while a suspicious Minnow looked for a tiny door she could knock on.
We taught Minnow to say “Money!” instead of “Cheese!” for photos, because I’d heard somewhere that Joan Rivers once recommended it, and we thought that was hilarious. We hadn’t fully considered the optics of American capitalists wandering around Europe during the second Trump administration with a toddler screaming, “MONEY! MONEY! MONEY!” at every photo opportunity, but the looks we got were priceless.
When I got home, I went to see Bill Burr perform in Glengarry Glen Ross, and I ran into his co-star Bob Odenkirk backstage. Bob wrote at SNL in the late eighties and early nineties.
“You still there?” Bob asked me.
Much like when I meet another recovering alcoholic, I feel an ease when I’m talking to someone who has written on the show. We’ve been through the same shit, spent hundred-hour weeks in the same windowless room.
“Yeah. Well . . .” I said.
“What are you at, four years?”
“Yeah.”
“That’s when I left.”
“How did you do it?”
He said, with incredible simplicity, “I just knew I really wanted a shot at performing, and I didn’t see it happening there.”
There’s nothing like the clarity of hearing your own thoughts come out of someone else’s older, wiser, and far more successful mouth.
I didn’t return to the show for season 51. In a funny way, writing at SNL was almost a direct analogy for early motherhood. Working on the show and becoming a mom were dreams I hardly believed would ever happen. When they did, I wanted to soak up every moment, but was so sleep-deprived that my brain couldn’t form new memories. Creatively, my world expanded. Socially, it contracted. I saw the same walls every day, and the same people inside of them. Sometimes, my relationships outside of those walls suffered — but to balance it out, my relationships inside those walls suffered too! Yet, when I walked out of 30 Rock — right as I was finishing early motherhood — I wished I’d appreciated the time a little more, and that the magic of it all had lasted a little longer. Both experiences bonded me to the people I shared them with in profound ways that could never have happened otherwise.
SNL changes everyone’s life who is lucky enough to touch it, but it changed mine in every conceivable way. With good health insurance I was able to give birth and take my kid to the doctor. I was able to get professional help figuring out I had postpartum depression — something I didn’t do until right before I left the show, which underscores how much I was white-knuckling it through those last two years. I started taking Wellbutrin, which allowed me to put into perspective so much of the pervasive guilt and alienation I had felt in my personal and professional life. I even got approved to buy an apartment by a co-op board, who would’ve assumed I was part of some money laundering scheme if it weren’t for Lorne writing my recommendation letter.
I used to fear that a stand-up comedy career and motherhood were too fundamentally demanding to coexist in my life. That each required too much from me, physically, to sustain doing both. But I’ve learned too much about myself to worry about that anymore.
I got sober; I left my abuser. I worked my ass off in comedy, put out two hour-long specials, wrote this book, and was on the staff of America’s last remaining comedy institution. I grew and gave birth to a person who is completely dependent on me. I was ripped open, sewn up, and returned to work before the stitches dissolved. I put in twelve-hour days, came home, and learned the language of a person who had no language to speak. Then I taught that person an entire language. I never knew if I was doing any of this with any degree of skill. I just hoped that it would all work out.
I don’t believe that women are put on this earth to be mothers. I believe the choice to become a mother is equally as courageous as the choice not to be. It’s important to me that my daughter knows that — that all women know that. We’re creators, and whether we create children, ideas, music, businesses, cults, crimes, scams, cures for disease, or even just new ways to agitate people, I think we should take pride in that.
To me, the point of creative endeavors is discovery. Sometimes they’re an attempt to discover the world; more often, they’re an attempt to discover ourselves. I mostly do the second one. At the risk of sounding navel-gazey, I see my whole life as an effort to get closer to figuring out who I really am and what I really think. It’s not a process with a finite ending. A part of me wishes it could happen in a linear way — that there would be a point of arrival at a nice, clean moment I could hold up like a photograph, witness my fully baked self, and say, “There she is! All done! She figured it out!” But I know it doesn’t happen that way. The closest I’ll get to reaching final form is when Andy pulls the plug on his mean and filthy wife. Until then, I’ll keep exploring, keep following my own instincts. Even when they threaten the stability of the present moment.
That’s what I believe living a creative life is about: being willing to sacrifice some degree of comfort for the sake of discovery, for the sake of what you love. It’s not comfortable to cart a toddler from state to state, country to country, to get onstage and perform my little idea-puzzles, trying to find a diamond in a pile of rocks. But I also think there’s more to it than that. I’m modeling something for Minnow that I want her to see, which is that life is worth examining.
People sometimes look at us on the road together and ask: “How do you tour and do standup with a toddler? It seems so exhausting!”
They aren’t wrong. I’m often exhausted.
But how lucky am I, to be exhausted by love?
Excerpted from FULLY BAKED: A Messy Memoir by Rosebud Baker. Copyright © by Rosebud Baker. Reprinted by permission of Gallery Books, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, LLC.
THR Newsletters
Sign up for THR news straight to your inbox every day
Subscribe Sign Up
