Bennett Laura - Didn't I Feed You Yesterdayi

nonfictionBennett’t I Feed You Yesterday?Bennett is not a soccer mom or a PTA mom or a helicopter mom—and she’s certainly not mother of the year. Another breed of mother entirely, Laura is surely more Auntie Mame than June Cleaver. As a busy mother of six, Laura is on an impossible mission: raising a brood of fast-moving, messy, wild sons in the jungles of Manhattan. So what other choice does she have than to sit back, grab a martini, and let the boys be, er, boys?Didn’t I Feed You Yesterday?, Laura gives her irreverent take on modern motherhood and proves that a strong sense of humor and an even stronger sense of self are the mother’s milk of sanity. In a series of refreshingly candid and hilarious anecdotes, she unapologetically breaks every rule in the Brady Bunch playbook: She gives her kids junk food, plays favorites, and openly admits to having “a genetic predisposition to laissez-faire parenting.” Children, she observes, don’t need constant supervision from neurotic, perfectionist parents. Allow kids to make mistakes and entertain themselves and they’ll turn out just fine—even if you do sometimes forget to pick them up from school.the mayhem of a life among males, Laura celebrates the glories of womanhood with a generous helping of wit and style. She gives thanks to the fashion gods for the essentials—red lipstick, Manolo Blahniks, and Lycra shapewear—but reminds us that true style comes from an inner compass that points directly at oneself. In every aspect of life, Laura gives one simple, powerful piece of advice: “Dress like you want it or stay home.”honest, outrageous, and sure to raise a few eyebrows, Didn’t I Feed You Yesterday? is a riotously funny read—and it’ll go fabulously well with your new handbag.Bennett’T I FEED YOU YESTERDAY?Mother’s Guide to Sanity in StilettosFOR TAKEOFF

LONG AGO I WAS ON AN AIRPLANE WITH ALL six of my children. We were in that purgatory part of the trip between the use of electronic devices and the use of electronic devices. The plane was still being prepared for takeoff, but the area around our seats was already a disaster. Katrina herself couldn’t have made such a mess so quickly. The floor was littered with crushed Goldfish and the wrappers from candy bought as appeasement gifts while waiting to board the plane. My husband was in the row behind me with our middle two children, who were engrossed in the age-old argument over the window seat. His row was equally trashed. My two oldest sat across the aisle from me, all wired up like cyborgs, both of them gripping their respective iDevices, the sound of music leaking through headphones momentarily suspended, the sound of clicking thumbs ditto. They simultaneously looked over at me with withdrawal and longing, somehow expecting me to amend the FAA’s policy on airwaves.noticed over the cacophony that a woman in an ill-fitting polyester pant suit was standing in the front of the cabin, making strange hand gestures and trying to tell me something. I also noticed that she was holding an oxygen mask. My interest was piqued and her droning words came into focus.

“When traveling with children, please secure your own mask before assisting a child.” Clearly, this woman was an oracle.other passengers seemed to have missed her message, but it made such clear sense to me: provide yourself with oxygen first, or you will be of no use to your children. If you run your own life, pursuing your own successes and coping with your own failures, you won’t find yourself dwelling on missed opportunities or attempting to undo mistakes on the backs of your kids. Yeah, I thought, if Mama Rose had spent more time pursuing her own career, wouldn’t Gypsy have been able to keep her clothes on?oracle went on to say something like “The nearest exit might be behind you,” which, I have to be honest, didn’t ring as clearly as the oxygen advice, but that was okay, I’d already gotten way more out of this trip than I could have imagined. I gained a sense of sanity: come what may, if I chose to do what I needed for myself, rather than trying to gauge beforehand what my parents, my mate, my friends, or society expects of me, I would be far more likely to make better choices, and to be happier with them. I not only learned that but also got the invaluable advice to remove my Manolos before exiting the plane onto a blow-up ramp. Equally important information if you simply don’t want to puncture your life raft, or lose your favorite shoes in the ocean.a mom in the twenty-first century can be a mixed bag of ugly. There are so many opinions about the job you’re doing, offered freely and yet at great cost. There are books and blogs and radio programs and mom groups and lactation consultants and magazines and on and on. Never has there been so much accessible and contradictory information floating in the ether of parenting, and never has the concept of “my way or the highway” been so brutally administered. We have collectively micromanaged our pregnancies and written our superfluous Birth Plans and succumbed to the pressure of feeding our kids 100 percent organic hand-milled baby food using a reduced carbon footprint. These unrealistic goals have created a population of neurotic mothers whose neurotic kids inevitably end up at my house on a playdate.have chosen a more retro approach to parenting. For one thing, I have six children, a very old-fashioned number. And by having so many I have discovered one of the great secrets to being a perfect mother: there is no such thing.the day my mother picked up her first Dr. Spock guide to the onslaught of the How to Expect What Your Baby Expects of You types of titles, there have been scores of books on every facet of the parenting equation. When I was first pregnant, twenty years ago, times were different. There were no Internet chat rooms or message boards where women felt free to demoralize other mothers. But with each child I’ve produced, there has come an increasing tide of perfectionism that has slowly overtaken basic human instinct. Don’t get me wrong; I like a healthy, well-adjusted child as much as the next person. But do I really need an owner’s manual? Don’t you just turn it on and fix it when it’s broken?me crazy, but it seems to me that the spike in postpartum depression has occurred hand in hand with the increase of parenting advice available to new moms. The plummet of hormones and the uptick of expectations cross over each other in the most fragile of environments—a healing mother and a helpless, squalling bundle of nerves. Childbirth sucks, and it’s frankly a miracle that we’re not all dead from it—it’s no wonder some women walk away with invisible scars to go with the visible ones. But childbirth is a cakewalk compared to motherhood. The women I know who keep focused on their own survival typically break through the web of high-strung mothering that has unfortunately become the norm. Why on earth would a complete stranger ever ask you whether you breastfed or not? I might be a throwback, but I think who sucks on me and how often in the privacy of my own home is my business.have consistently put my neck on the chopping block, both as a mother and as a woman—most famously during a stint on a reality show called Project Runway, where people compete to be the next top fashion designer. I had zero related experience when I auditioned for the show, but I loved watching it so much I thought, Why not me? I got myself in the room, and went further than I could have ever imagined. Through my actions, I showed my kids what was possible, and though they may have gone unbathed those few weeks I was away, I assure you they survived.am frequently asked, How can you possibly manage six children? And work? And look so put together? When pressed, I will admit that my approach is twofold: I always take care of myself, and I parent my children my way, not the way others expect me to. I get my oxygen first. When I stop and think about it, I often find that my worst days are in direct proportion to how far I let myself drift away from that yellow plastic mask. Motherhood is the hardest job in the world. Around kid number four I realized that the only way to survive it is to have a sense of humor. After all, the tragic often becomes comedic in the retelling.PORTRAIT

BY MODERN-DAY STANDARDS I HAVE A LOT OF CHILDREN, then by New York City standards I have single-handedly created a population explosion and ruined any chance for other families to attend private school due to my abuse of the sibling preference policy. A family of eight in Manhattan is practically grounds for forcible commitment to Bellevue. How could we be so crazy?me, having six children is completely normal. I don’t really get couples who choose to stop at one or two. That’s like going to Vegas and only playing one hand of blackjack, or throwing the dice twice. My curiosity gets the best of me: I want to see what genetic cocktail Lady Luck has to offer.if I needed another reason, every package of eight-pound baby comes with a special toy surprise—a designer handbag, an art deco bracelet, or a pair of fabulous shoes. My husband’s gifts are incentive enough to endure nine months of pregnancy. And I look at each occasion as my last chance. Once we get a new baby home and are faced with the added expense, I figure there will be no more gifts.so many children was hardly a conscious decision, not something I set out to accomplish, but it has taken the pressure off all of the concerned parties. I don’t have to be so meticulous about every little thing. If I lose one somewhere, there are extras. We have an heir, a spare, another spare, and three more spares. I’m not really sure how that happened. Of course I know, technically, how it happened, and I admit I didn’t do anything to stop it. Sometimes it was a matter of “Oh, look, honey, the baby is walking! He has grown so fast. Time to have another!” Those were the planned ones. Then there was the time my husband, Peter, came to me with a urine-laden plastic stick emblazoned with a magenta plus sign and asked, “Is this yours?” I replied, “I’m pretty sure it’s yours.” That was a surprise one.or not, however each one came about, on most days I am happy to have them. And so I find myself with six dependent souls and the responsibility of getting them safely from infancy to adulthood with minimal mental damage to them or me. Of course if one of them gets into drugs, or we run into the occasional disability, it’s no big deal. I don’t have all my eggs in one perfect little basket; I don’t need every child to be a straight-A, Ivy League–admitted music-and-sports prodigy. I have the luxury of accepting each of them as they are, quirks, disabilities, genetic mutations, and all.

“Where did you get that?” I asked, waking from a nap to a familiar smell.

“I called Domino’s,” my daughter answered with a shrug. “Where did you get the money?” I probed, groggy and bewildered.

“The bottom of your purse.”

“Did you tip?”

“Twenty percent.” She winked, radiant with pride. “I got your favorite.”was five years old. We’d been watching something on the television and I had dozed off, overwhelmed with fatigue-induced narcolepsy. It was a common occurrence for me in those days. I had been living in Texas and I wanted out of my marriage, so I formulated an escape plan based on higher education. When I was accepted to the graduate program for architecture at Columbia University in New York City, I took my daughter, left my husband, and moved north and east, suddenly becoming a broke, single working mother and full-time student. Cleo had spent the first four years of her life in a booster seat under my drafting table at the University of Houston; she would spend the next few lean, exhausting years in the first character-building situation of her life. And build character she did. There were days when we had to walk to school across Central Park because we didn’t have $1.50 to take the bus, but being penniless and raising a kid by myself never felt like obstacles. I was living in Disneyland for grown-ups, swinging from chandeliers with Cleo right beside me, fixture for fixture. Of course there were times when she was the adult, a doppelgänger of Tatum O’Neal in Paper Moon right down to her little banged haircut.

“Get up, Mom, you’ll be late for work,” she would prod.

“You’re not going out with that loser again, are you?” she would accurately judge.

“You are not leaving the house in that dress,” she would scold. I barely had time to parent—much less overparent—but, thanks in good part to my abject neglect, Cleo has grown into an independent, self-sufficient, and fearless adult.Cleo was nine, she announced at Thanksgiving that she was a vegetarian and would no longer be eating anything with a face. This is not that unusual, particularly among girls who love animals as fiercely as Cleo does. The only thing I take issue with is her choice of terminology. If she wants to be accurate, she should call herself a “pastatarian” or a “Cheeriotarian,” as I cannot recall an actual vegetable ever clearing her front teeth. Corn on the cob and French fries don’t count, in my opinion; they are starches, devoid of nutrients other than the dirt or the occasional corn worm that evades detection. If you ask her brother Truman to describe his sister, he will say, “She has big boobs and only eats cereal.”I met Peter, he instantly understood that Cleo and I were a package deal. Things moved quickly; we married, and in three years we had two more children. With the body count steadily growing, Cleo decided it was time to strike out on her own—she wanted to go to boarding school. It’s possible that she was too embarrassed by the repetitive proof of her parents having sex, and needed to get out of town, but I think the reason was more likely her insane love of horses. What horses do for girls is buy time, giving them a few extra years before they must discover boys. I do mean the “buying time” part literally, because those years don’t come cheap. Ever industrious, Cleo helped by mucking out the neighbor’s barn upstate in exchange for riding lessons. I was not at all surprised when she started on her own to research boarding schools that offered riding as a centerpiece of the curriculum, and more than a little relieved that we wouldn’t have to go through the grueling school application process in Manhattan. Being her usual assertive self, she compiled a list of options and set up appointments for the three of us to visit. She also filled out all the applications and wrote the necessary essays completely on her own. Talk about low maintenance. In the end she chose Foxcroft, a beautiful all-girl high school in Virginia, and achieved her double goal of riding every day and wearing pajamas to class.friends and family attended Cleo’s graduation, but I couldn’t be there, sequestered as I was for Project Runway. She wore a long white gown that I sewed for her. As I toiled in the workroom at Parsons, a captive of reality programming, I occasionally had enough mental acuity to think about Cleo. I realized that sending her off to boarding school was the greatest sacrifice I had ever made in my life. The moments I missed with her—watching her dress for a date or celebrate after a victory on the hockey field—are lost to me. She thrived, grew, cultivated friendships, and gained worldviews that have formed her life, and I was not a part of the process. It would have been selfish to keep her from leaving when she was clearly so ready, but it was nearly unbearable to let her go.

“You should get a job at Hooters,” Peik once told his big sister.

“You should get a job as Dad,” she shot back.hope I made the right choice to marry Peter and bear his spawn, because when I gave birth to Peik I suddenly had two of him. This would be the natural place to make a Pete and rePete joke, but I will spare you. Apart from his hair color, Peik is in every way—physical, emotional, habitual—a clone of his father. I know what you’re thinking: what kind of name is Peik? My husband once had a girlfriend whose brother was named Peik, and Peter loved the name more than the girlfriend, apparently. Some women would be offended by this connection to a husband’s past love life, but not me. I have no problem with the source of the name; what I do have a problem with is the name itself. Is it for a boy or a girl? How do I pronounce it? Does it involve that obnoxious “i before e” rule? I fear I have given my son a long and frustrating way of introducing himself to strangers.

“Hi, I’m Peik.”

“Come again?”

“Peik. As in ‘bake,’ or ‘shake.’”

“Pike?”

“No, PAKE, rhymes with RAKE.”

“What kind of name is Pack?”

“It’s either high Scandinavian or low German, depending on the Google search return. Though my dad contends it’s Dutch for Peter. And it’s PAKE, not Pack.”

“Nice to meet you, Peck.”, Peik’s sense of humor is very dry and advanced beyond his years, no doubt because he was weaned on Monty Python. As a very small child, he would push a toy grocery cart around the apartment, calling “Bring out your dead!” in a lame British accent. Since his sister is seven years older than he, his early exposure to The Simpsons and then Family Guy might only have increased his odds of getting thrown into pre-k detention for trying to be the funny kid. I know it’s in vogue to obsess over a child’s “screen time,” but movies and television have helped develop and shape his sense of humor, and I personally find him very entertaining. And honestly, isn’t that ultimately what children are for? To entertain their parents? Not in an ex-child-star-turned-to-drugs kind of way, more like a shooting-at-their-feet-to-make-them-dance sort of thing.’s movements are lethargic even though his mind spins at warp speed. Always three mental steps ahead, by the time he enters a room he has assessed what will be asked of him and has already found a way out of doing it, usually by slipping off to his bedroom to mousterbate at his computer until food is served. I call this “the thinking man’s lazy.” I suspect he spends that room time Googling “how to torture younger siblings,” as he is definitely the family rabble-rouser. On the rare occasion when the house is at peace and all the other children are engaged in quiet activity, Peik will let out a rebel yell and run through the house with his pants around his ankles, distributing wedgies. This is the only time he moves his feet unasked. He also has an uncanny ability to push people’s buttons. Back when he was six, he taped fourteen-year-old Cleo’s zebra-striped bra and panties to the front door of our apartment building. In the middle of Manhattan. When she came home with a couple of friends she was so horrified she didn’t speak to Peik for—well, come to think of it, she still hasn’t spoken to him.panty raids aside, I never would have pegged Peik to be a player by the tender age of thirteen. He comes from two long lines of late bloomers. I was too busy drawing or sewing to notice that there were boys in the room until I was seventeen, and the fact that I resembled Olive Oyl, complete with the disproportionally big feet, kept even the most desperate boys at bay. When I found Peter hiding behind a dusty piece of bachelor furniture, he was fifty years old and had never been married, the ultimate slow starter.all the boys in the house, I’m not sure how Peik became the stud, enjoying his choice of available girls. If my six-year-old, Pierson, started chatting online with girls and setting up dates tomorrow I wouldn’t be surprised: at four years old, he announced, “My face is my fortune,” and carefully began choosing his school wardrobe. But Peik was a shy and apprehensive boy who refused to leave the safety of his stroller at the park. When he started pre-kindergarten, I had to sit in the school library every day well into January because he would cry if he realized I wasn’t on the premises. So how did he come to be the one roaming New York City streets with a girl on his arm? It can’t be his mastery of poetic language—Peik’s computer sits next to mine, so I have seen exactly how he lures in the next babe.: movee?: k: sat?: k: lol c u, it is certainly not his flowery prose that is charming the girls. Probably not his academic standing, either. While he is perfectly willing to study during school, his workday ends when the bell rings—an apathy reflected in his grades. Athletic prowess? Not so much—Peik’s the pasty-colored one with slumpy posture in the black skinny jeans, his fingers calloused from playing guitar. His handsome face? Yes, but only once he grows into those huge teeth and gets that hair out of his eyes. He does have a killer sense of humor, but I can’t imagine any teenaged girl finding wedgies or repeated “Death of Kenny” reenactments hilarious. Though Lord knows I think he’s wildly entertaining, so maybe a girl or two are on to something.’s not that I worry that anything untoward might happen. Manhattan is a great place to raise teens. This may seem like the big bad city, but it’s hard for kids to get into too much trouble here. They travel in packs, tend to hang out in public places, and, best of all, don’t drive. Believe me, Peik would much rather be in the suburbs where kids can have sex on the trampoline in the backyard after school.realize I’m showing all the signs of a mother lamenting the inevitable independence of her child, grieving the needy toddler so reliant on her. But I swear, I’m not. I have six children; I’ve been through this before with no problem. My daughter is twenty and has been away at college for three years now. There are four more boys after Peik, so I still have plenty of preschool graduations, holiday singalongs, and field trips to the circus coming my way. If you see me misty-eyed at a promotion ceremony from kindergarten to first grade, it’s probably only because I couldn’t defer my appearance.Peik was a small boy, he paid very little attention to me. His first word was “Cleo,” followed quickly by “Daddy,” and I would have to say that that is exactly the place and order of his loyalties, as much as he may love to torture his sister. I sometimes feel that, if he could have said them, “Hey, lady” would have been his next words. Now that he is a teenager, the distance between us is slowly and unexpectedly closing, taking me by sentimental surprise. I’m just starting to get to know the boy, so maybe that’s why I’m not so ready for him to be a man. Lately he has become more affectionate toward me, and often now takes my hand when we are walking down the street. The hand is still usually filthy, but I’m honored to hold it for as long as he will offer, calluses, warts, or infectious hand-borne diseases be damned.mentioned, my husband was fifty and had never been married when I met him, having had a series of long-term relationships that cracked apart at the mere mention of betrothal. It should have been no surprise to me, then, that when it came to naming children post-Peik, Peter would show signs of commitment anxiety. It seems his other exes didn’t have interesting enough brothers to continue what would clearly be seen as a pathological course of action. Our second son bore the brunt of this indecision, to the extent that the hospital warned us not to leave the premises until that child had a name. I called their bluff, and told them that if my insurance company wanted to foot the bill until my husband decided on a name, I would be more than happy to stay. Peter overthinks everything, so I knew it could be awhile. Typically, the hospital registers vital details with the government agencies that send you convenient little things like birth certificates and social security cards, but if you leave without naming a child, you are solely responsible. Had the administrative staff instead said to me, “You’re going to have to name him Red Tape if you don’t name him right now,” I might have understood the severity of the situation. Instead, though, we blithely left the hospital and proceeded to call the baby “the baby” for the next three months. He was finally named at a cocktail party by some of my oldest and drunkest friends. “Truman,” they chorused after a good deal of slurred deliberation. Hmm, I pondered: flaming gay New York prizewinning writer and socialite, or daring bomb-dropping presidential warrior? Not a bad range of options. “Truman” stuck fast, but it was many, many years before I screwed up the courage to face the bureaucrats and officially have his name changed from “Baby White Male.”all my children, Truman shows me the most affection, and has valiantly lived up to his honest and stalwart name. Perhaps because he breastfed until he was four years old, he has developed a disturbing fondness for skin-to-skin contact. At nine years old, he still throws himself at me for a hug and kiss when he gets home from school—did he just cop a feel? I would take his mother love as a compliment if he didn’t show most people the same level of affection. When he was five, we took him to see Momix at the Joyce Theater, an establishment known for its dedication to modern dance and the avantgarde. It was a beautiful performance, at the end of which the dancers left the stage and exited through the audience, waving to the crowd jubilantly on both sides. Truman, his small freckled face streaked with joyful tears, leaped to his feet and stopped one dancer in mid stride by embracing her tightly around the waist. I was simultaneously proud and jealous. But then I worried that someday this polymorphous perversity might be misconstrued as sexual predation, his face was so firmly pressed against her breasts. I have also noticed that he simply cannot pass the baby without unsnapping Finn’s one-sie (if he’s wearing one, which he typically isn’t), stroking that soft belly, and saying “Good baby, nice baby.” It’s sweet. But kind of creepy.is also our natural athlete; he can play catch with small children endlessly, delighting in their every move. And he is our greatest hope for higher education, because he fences. This sport is so obscure that it is actually possible to become nationally ranked, something that would never happen in basketball or baseball. Being nationally ranked in anything looks impressive on an application, and it’s surprising how many colleges have fencing teams. Of course, what I pay for lessons will never equal what he might receive in scholarship money, but if he is going to have an extracurricular activity it may as well be one that is going to give us a glimmer of breaking even. He works hard at school and always has a new and interesting dance routine. His best attribute though, is his red hair. He gets that from his dad, who is now famous for his Einstein shock of white hair but once was russet-locked. My red hair comes from a box at the drugstore, because I’m worth it. But because I have a ginger boy, only “Hi, My Name Is Rhonda” knows for sure.Baby White Male turned three, another boy was born, as if I needed another boy. Until I had Pierson, it seemed as though I was merely a genetically recessive host womb, designed to produce a child in your image. Naming this one took less time than naming Truman, but it was still a dithering affair. I suggested, as I had twice before, Peter, thinking it the quickest way to please my husband and get us out of paperwork jail. He was having none of that, but did agree to a derivation, and so we came up with Pierson: “Peter’s son,” in some decrepit foreign language. It was enough to buy our release from the hospital, and seemed like an entirely appropriate moniker, but eventually we realized he looks exactly like me.prides himself on being “sexy.” He is six and it is his favorite word. He uses it to describe himself, but also cars, skateboards, dances, food, girls, and shoes—anything at all. Our family has grown accustomed to his constant use of the word, but it tends to throw off strangers.

“Did he just say sexy?”works his sexy image: he always makes sure he has his gorgeous curly brown hair styled with product, and he’s been choosing his own clothes since he was born: screaming when I would hazard to diaper him with Barney instead of Elmo. He did have a point. Lately, his carefully cultivated look requires an abundance of flames and skulls: his signature motifs.

“Mom, today I am Emo.”

“I thought you were Goth.”

“That was this morning.”

“What happened to yesterday’s Sk8r boy? I was kinda getting the hang of him.”

“Oh, he’ll be back, don’t worry. Would you like to see my show?”painstakingly creating a new look, he will pull two Nelson benches together to form a catwalk, and give us his best runway strut. When he receives a compliment on his leather motorcycle jacket, he responds with a wink of his mischievous light green eyes. If Truman is voted most likely to be a sexual predator, Pierson would be voted most likely to be gay—and that is fine with me, because God knows I could use another feminine force in this house.loves to shop and hates to bathe, eat, or sleep. When I hear new parents talk about how the baby doesn’t sleep through the night, I have to strangle the bitter laugh that would reveal the doom I’ve faced with this child. I am such a light sleeper that I practically lie awake waiting to be awakened by him, eager to show me which outfit he plans to wear to school.of Pierson’s proud distinguishing factors is that the second and third toes on both his feet are connected, sort of webbed halfway up. I guess when you are one of so many siblings anything that sets you apart is something to embrace, even if it is a mild genetic mutation. Normally, I would find an attribute like this disturbing, like the human version of a six-toed cat, but I have to admit that on this handsome child, it is kind of sexy.a “What were you thinking?” move, a year and a half after Pierson, Larson was born. Exhausted from caring for the four previous children, and clean out of ideas, we took the easy way out and went with “Laura’s son.” Naturally, he looks exactly like Peter. Now I have three of him.

“Hey, Lawa, can you get me some owpol jus?”

“Sure, and you can call me Mom.”is an outrageously outgoing little four-year-old, whose relentless friendliness drives him to strike up conversations with everybody. However, because of developmental speech problems, his conversations tend to be a garbled stream of excited rhetoric, generally responded to with “What?” or a confused smile. When he was less than two, Larson’s adenoids were enlarged and infected, and his ears filled with a viscous fluid as a result of a series of undetected ear infections. He clearly has a very high pain threshold: he rarely peeped about anything hurting him. Apparently, if you can’t hear very well, speaking can be tricky. Once he had surgery to remove the residual junk from the infections and started speech therapy he quickly made great progress, though the exact extent of his disabilities has never been clear.doesn’t seem to bother him in any way. Larson spends his cheerful days surfing YouTube with the alacrity of a teenage boy and obsessively changing from superhero costume to superhero costume while begging for NRFB MIB Blue’s Clues items he finds on eBay.Larson has been designated a child with “special needs,” he has an entourage—an ear, nose, and throat specialist, a pediatric prosthodontist, occupational therapists, speech therapists, and play therapists. It is a supporting cast with Larson as the shining star. We have also learned that when you can’t breathe through your nose because your adenoids are enlarged, you breathe through your mouth, and your tooth enamel pays the price. We had Larson’s decaying little front teeth capped, and ten minutes later he knocked one out by accident. With his ear-to-ear smile and one large center tooth he is very much the perfect, living comic strip character. The Larsonator.a while we weren’t sure what was “wrong” with Larson—as in, why he didn’t seem to progress the way the other children had. Yes, there was the physical problem, but there was also a time when we didn’t know if that was all there was to it. He had a too-happy, goofy quality about him. Autism was ultimately ruled out because of his intense desire to communicate. He went through quite a few tests, including one for intelligence quotient. The administrator asked Larson to point to the butterfly picture in a book. He responded by getting up and performing an entire dance. He started by squirming on the floor like a caterpillar, and then rolled up in a blanket, unrolling from the blanket, opening his wings, and then flying off, fluttering around the room with a large grin on his face. The tester looked at me—I swear she had tears in her eyes—and gently told me that because he did not point to the two-dimensional drawing he had failed the question. I blinked. She blinked. Larson fluttered some more. I looked at him and held my tongue. We all knew in that moment that he was going to be fine, whether the test results indicated intelligence or not. At first, I felt angry that the test had to be so rigid, but I couldn’t blame the administrator. She saw what I saw. In the next moment I felt incredibly grateful, knowing all the difficulties that mothers go through to help their children survive far worse than a delay in speech. If this is all I get, I thought, then I’ll take it and run for the hills.of my children have inherited some degree of artistic ability, but Larson’s is different. His brain had adapted to the speech problem by rapidly increasing his skills with pencil and paper. Even when he was as young as two, he would watch a show on TV and then go and draw everything he saw. In detail. Okay, I thought, he’s my Rain Man. We knew there was something bright in there, it just had some trouble getting out, and his more unusual quirks, such as insisting he wear his pants backward, every single day, or the fact that a tiny loose thread would drive him so nuts he would eventually cut up the entire garment, gave us pause. Larson was always very talkative, but his baby babble developed into a language of his own. Now that he’s had a year of intensive speech therapy, we know what he was trying to say, and it goes something like this:

“Lawa, Twuman isn’t pwaying by da ruwes, and Piewson hit da baby, and in da udder woom Peik is pwaying wid da mouse agin and you debinetly tole him not to. Oh, and Petew cawed to say he’d be wate fow dinnew.”other words, he’s a tattletale. He’s constantly commenting on the injustices and broken rules around him, not because he expects us to do anything about it, but just to let us know he’s watching every last one of us.finally, there is Finn, which stands for Finis, Finito, Finished. We got Pierson and Larson’s names wrong; I really really hope we got this one right. As he is still so young, I haven’t been able to peg his personality, but he seems to be a happy boy—very rough-and-tumble—and he never shies from the action. If his brothers are wrestling, he will climb right to the top of the pile. If they are on our homemade stage, rocking out, Finn will grab the closest thing to a guitar he can find—a piece of pizza, for instance—and join in the jam. Finn will find his way to the middle of everything, from a dance contest to a fencing bout.he is beloved by his brothers, this boy is no angel, which is probably why he fits in so well. I was sitting at my desk working on an article when I heard a series of dull thuds coming from the kitchen. I decided I had better go investigate, and sure enough I found Finn up to his usual trouble. He was standing in front of the fridge in his diaper with a dozen eggs, dropping them to the floor one by one like a B-52 bomber.

“Why eggs?” I asked as he got ready to lob another. The look on his face was pure satisfaction.

“Look at this mess, Mom!” Pierson scolded when he entered the kitchen to check out why I was going postal. “You just had to buy a new baby, didn’t you? Now he’s bad and we are all stuck with him.”still call Finn the baby, and probably always will, though at almost two years old, he is starting to talk. He’s also my only blondie, with a tuft of curly hair that makes me want to card it and knit a tiny sweater. Finn is my celebrity baby. As my pregnancy became increasingly obvious during Project Runway, much of the chatter surrounding the show focused squarely on my giant belly, and viewers got a kick out of watching me sew myself into larger and larger glam wear. When he was born, People magazine did a two-page spread on him. In fact, when we were still in the hospital watching CNN, his little name ran across the ticker! Even Peter, notoriously hard to impress, was thrilled. Apparently, by nerd standards the crawl is the ultimate sign that you have arrived. Now that I think of it, my contestant agreement for Project Runway was so intrusive, the network may actually own him. I should probably be receiving child support from the producers.HAVE A FAVORITE CHILD. I HEAR YOU GASPING IN HORROR. I ACTUALLY believe every mother does, but won’t admit it. It’s the dirty little secret of motherhood. Why is it so horrible? It’s not Sophie’s Choice or anything. I’m not saying I don’t love all of my children equally, just that I don’t always like all of them, at least not every day (or week, or month, or year).have favorite shoes, movies, and foods; why not a favorite child? It’s not as though I won’t help you with your homework if you’re not my favorite. The task is just less insufferable for me with some of my children than with others. My children know I play favorites; they actually compete to be held in my highest esteem. We call their rank order the List.

“Don’t do that,” I say, “you’ll go to the bottom of the List.”

“If I rub your feet, will I go to the top of the List?” Truman says, willing to work for it.

“Just put me at the top,” says Peik, angling for a freebie.

“Mom, I’m paying my own way through college,” Cleo helpfully points out. “I’m working two jobs and saving my education fund to start up a business when I graduate.” There is a pause. “Where am I on the List?”

“I sure do love you,” Pierson says, applying himself to me like spray tan. “There isn’t a List, is there, it’s just me, right?”

“Lawa, Pake is twying to gib me a wedgie,” Larson says, not really understanding what’s going on, but smart enough to take his brother down a peg.

“Gaga baga dada mama ist,” Finn squeaks.prefer certain childhood stages to others, and by virtue of being in one of the preferred stages, a child can find itself higher on the List. I find babies cute and innocent, while teenagers seem hell bent on ruining my life; I’ll forgive a ruined dozen of eggs more quickly than a lost-for-the-fifth-time cell phone.of my kids operate like me, so I understand them better. These are the ones who, less intellectually gifted, work harder to succeed. Some of my children are better suited to my husband’s personality: he totally gets them, while I stand there dumbfounded. I find nothing more frustrating than a child who is superintelligent but uses that intelligence to find ways to beat the system.you swear you have no favorite, and think you are fooling your kids, you’re wrong. Kids are short; they aren’t stupid. I find that, just as personalities are formed partly by birth order, they are also formed by preference order. I know a woman who thought her brother’s name was MySonPaul, she was so clearly not her mother’s favorite. Today this woman is a successful publishing executive, driven by her childhood striving to be on top. Her brother still lives at home.only am I convinced that this competition is healthy, but I would also venture to say that overprotective mothering does more damage. So bring me that List, and who wants to give me a back rub?’ve given up hoping for another girl, and have really gotten the swing of a houseful of men. But don’t think even for a minute that I don’t wonder what would happen if we were to go bananas and throw the dice again. People say I’m crazy when I tell them I’m open to just one more. Really—six, seven, eight, what’s the difference? Peter and I are already grossly outnumbered. We have no current plans to have any more children, but if we did get Finn’s name wrong, we would just throw another kid on the pile with the rest of them and it would be as well loved, exquisitely neglected, and—we hope—entertaining as all the others.DESTINY

, PETER IS SHOWING A DISTURBING INTEREST in card tricks. He learns them from videos on YouTube.

“Come see this, kids,” he says as he tries to get the five boys to gather around. After the first chorus of “How’d you do that?” and “Do that again!” they typically lose interest and move back to their video games, TV shows, and guitars.

“Peter,” I say to him in an indignant tone.

“What?” he replies, all innocent.

“What? What? Card tricks? What the hell are you thinking? Do you know what this means?” I almost shout. “Who does card tricks, Peter? Think! Old men! That’s who does card tricks. This officially makes you an old man!”I can take some solace in the fact that he learns these tricks on the Internet, a venue not normally associated with the oxygen tank crowd, the truth is that performing card tricks is second only to writing letters of complaint and carrying an AARP card as a true indicator that you have officially arrived at old age. It is not that I mind if Peter is old. I actually like being married to an older man; it makes me feel young by comparison, and it means that no matter how old I get I’ll always be a babe to him. It is true that at least his letters of complaint are usually about the inefficiency of an interface or a flaw in the calculation system of a financial website, but card tricks still cross the line.seems like a lifetime ago. I was living in Houston, and one of my girlfriends came to visit. Kathryn and I had worked together folding panties at Victoria’s Secret, but then her husband was transferred and they had moved to Kansas City.

“Let’s go get our fortunes told,” she said, telling me about this guy in Houston she had heard of who was reported to be the real thing. I demurred for myself—I don’t need a roadmap to navigate my life—but agreed to drive Kathryn to an address an hour across town, not such an unusual distance in the urban sprawl of Texas. We arrived at a typical-looking apartment complex with no discernible universe-shaking auras, located the proper apartment, and were shown into what could have passed for any retiree condo south of the Mason-Dixon Line. No red velvet curtains with thick gold fringe, no crystal balls, not even a single neon sign flashing promises of the future being unlocked. Nope, just beige décor and an equally beige-looking guy in his late thirties. After awkward hellos, he showed me to a beige couch while he and Kathryn retreated to a breakfast nook table graced with nothing more supernatural than a deck of tarot cards, the one and only indication that spirits were about to descend on suburbia.a presence nearby, I found nestled next to me against a beige pillow a tiny, ancient, beige Chihuahua. She moved a little, arthritically, and waggled what looked like long, stringy moles hanging from her grayed jowls. The psychic lovingly introduced us, and I felt that though this guy was probably a fraud, he must at least be a good person to care for such an unfortunate little creature.’s reading began with a gathering and a shuffling of the deck. I didn’t really pay much attention to the peek into Kathryn’s future, as Hanging-Mole Dog transfixed me. I didn’t mind sharing the sofa with it, but I was definitely trying to avoid physical contact. I was interrupted from my task when the psychic cleared his throat. I looked up and saw him staring at me.

“I see you in the future in upstate New York or Connecticut with a man who has blue eyes, white hair, and a mustache,” he offered me from the cosmos. “Living in a raised ranch house.” He stopped talking. Apparently that was all the great otherworld had for me.

“Wow, okay, thanks,” I said. He then turned his attention back to Kathryn. I grew up in the South and had lived there all my life. At that moment, I certainly had no plans, immediate or otherwise, to move to the Northeast. I hadn’t even heard of a “raised” ranch house before; it’s not something they condone in architecture school, and it didn’t sound like a future home to be excited about. In fact, I had heard “raised ranch” as “razed” ranch, as in “no longer standing,” or “bulldozed,” or even worse, “demolished by an ugly-house-hating tornado.”father has blue eyes, white hair, and a mustache, so I assumed there was some kind of weird Electra mixed signal being sent. I was married to a man with dark hair, dark eyes, and no mustache, and he wouldn’t have been thrilled about the outside chance that any of this revelation might be true. I filed it under “Never mind” and eventually put the whole episode behind me.years later, I was living in the Northeast. A new acquaintance invited me to her house for a dinner party. These were my freewheeling newly single days—wine, roses, dinner parties, dates with lots of eligible bachelors, quiet nights at home with pizza and Cleo. Sure, I said, I’d love to. I’m always up for meeting a new roomful of people. I’m like a human party favor—throw me into a group of unknowns and I’ll have met everyone by the end of the evening. I put on my discount Donna Karan, strapped on some sexy heels, and made my way to an address down in SoHo. Outside the building I noticed a man just standing there, looking up at the parapets, looking down at the sidewalk, then pacing back and forth.

“Excuse me,” I said, eyeing him for a bit and deciding he looked the type, “are you here for the party?” He nodded. “Would you like to ride up with me?” He smiled and said yes. We chatted in the elevator; we chatted in the foyer; we chatted during drinks before dinner; we chatted until we were seated. He was easy to converse with. He was also an architect, but we didn’t discuss architecture, which was a huge relief because “What’s your favorite building in New York?” between architects is as tired as “What’s your sign?” for the rest of the trolling population. When dinner was called and we all gathered around the table, I saw his tiny place card off down the table, next to what looked to be another single woman; the company around me soon carried me away into other possibilities. I was popular in the room that night, and I lost sight of my pre-dinner friend until it was time to leave. As the other guests were saying their goodbyes to our hostess I sought him out to share a cab uptown.next day I was in my office when a Peter Shelton called. The name didn’t ring any bells.

“Hi, this is Peter,” he said. “We met last night. I’m doing a modified bed check.”

“A bed check?”

“Yes, I’m calling to see if you took Mr. Deep Pockets up on his offer to go to the Cowgirl Hall of Fame gala in Fort Worth.”

“Oh, please,” I huffed, as though I had never had any intention of going on this jaunt. I was a bit surprised that Peter had overheard that particular tidbit. The truth was, in my newly single dating days I was up for anything; but I had a set of architectural drawings to get out of the office, and Mr. Pockets’s private jet was leaving soon. I glanced at the clock. No dice. I was about to cut my losses and engage Mr. Shelton in some date-driven witty banter when the phone went dead. My office was being wired for a new computer system, and a guy with a tool belt poked his head in my door and said, “Oops.” I looked at the phone in my hand and mused over Peter’s choice of the term “bed check.” When I had first moved to New York and left my first husband back in Texas he would brokenheartedly call at all hours, an activity my close friends and I began referring to as “bed checks.” I placed the phone back in the cradle and looked at the clock to see if maybe I could still swing liftoff.days later, my friend Julie offered to take Cleo to a movie. Free babysitting for a single mother is not an opportunity to miss. I phoned the hostess from the dinner party to get Peter’s number, and without regard for the Rules I bravely dialed it.

“Would you like to go for a drink tonight?”

“How about tomorrow? I have to work late.”

“No, it has to be tonight. What time are you done?”

“Ten?”

“Perfect.”took Cleo to the movies and Peter and I went to a bar near my apartment for martinis. I wore the dress and shoes from the night of the dinner party—it was my best outfit, and honestly, the man didn’t notice. Probably because he still wears the same clothes he wore in boarding school, nametags intact, but also because he just doesn’t get hung up on superficial details. Owing, no doubt, to the martinis, I don’t really remember much from that first date, except Peter sitting in the gutter trying to tie the tiny ankle strap of my high-heeled shoe., breaking every other rule in the dating book, he ignored both my drunkenness and my high-maintenance footwear and called the very next morning to invite me for the weekend to his house upstate. With my child. Who does that? Let’s see, I thought. Fifty years old, never married, no children. Two possible explanations: severe commitment phobia or gay. What did I have to lose? I certainly wasn’t ready for a second husband, and really, what single mom doesn’t need all the gay help she can get?drove. There were two things I had kept from my marriage: my daughter and my Porsche 911 (a girl’s got to have a sexy getaway car). I was going broke paying for a garage in New York City, so this was my big chance to show off the Porsche. The weekend found us speeding up the Palisades Parkway, headed to Peter’s house in Cold Spring, New York.

“So what kind of a house is it?” I asked, curious about what style a fellow architect might have chosen.

“Nothing fancy.” He sounded slightly embarrassed. “Just a raised ranch.”immediately turned the wheel to the side of the road and threw on the brakes. I got out of the car, walked around to Peter, leaned down, and looked in at him. Blue eyes. Mustache. White hair. I looked up at the side of the road and saw the “Welcome to New York” sign. Peter and Cleo both just stared at me. Raised. Flicking. Ranch. The entire beige-infused psychic episode came flooding back to me with amazing clarity.

“You are my destiny,” I told him. I didn’t stop to think about how a fifty-year-old bachelor would take such a revelation. It just popped out. Peter continued to sit there. He didn’t get out of my car and run away down the Palisades. I returned to my side of the car and drove off (into the sunset). We have never looked back.’S MOTHER TOLD ME THAT HE WAS GAY. I GUESS THAT’S WHAT A mother tells herself after watching fifty years of her son’s failed relationships. Or she could have seen the destiny on the wall and was looking to scare me off. The reason might have been the location of our first Big Date: Africa, a marked upgrade from Peter’s usual helicopter ride over Manhattan. Or perhaps what troubled her was the fact that we didn’t bother to get married before we had Peik. Anyway, something about me threw her, and all the other people in Peter’s life, way off. They came just short of telling me I “trapped” him by getting pregnant. After all, a determined bachelor who had slunk away from three engagements—once, after the invitations had gone out—must have been tricked by a pretty determined hussy. I can see trapping a man with one pregnancy, but five? The man is obviously a willing participant. Even so, one of Peter’s past loves still describes him as the love of her life. Others continue to call and write or stop by his office to catch up with him. I get the feeling they all see him as the one that got away, and I’m pretty sure they’re on to something.being said, picture this: you’re walking down the halls of an ivy-covered institution of higher learning, or perhaps the robotics-parts aisle at the local Radio Shack. You see a man of average build, with shocking Einsteinian white hair and round tortoiseshell spectacles, from behind which peer magnified round blue eyes. There is a brushy mustache and a toothy grin. The man is dressed in vintage nutty-professor wear: tweed jacket, detached suede elbow patches, wrinkled chinos cuffed over Converse Jack Purcell sneakers. A carefully constructed, haphazard disheveled state. This man is the mad scientist right out of central casting. Now tell me, does your mind jump to “God, what a catch!”? Or do you think, “What the hell is the six-foot redhead in the sexy dress doing with him?” Well, in either case, it was—and is—love. Peter once told me that he had been waiting his entire life for me to come along. As the beige spirits predicted, I had no choice in the matter—he is my destiny.AGAIN, MRS. SHELTON MIGHT HAVE HAD A POINT. ONE DAY I was paging through the arts section of the newspaper and spotted a sure loser.

“Oh, look,” I told Peter, “another all-star-cast movie. Those never work. Something called The Women.”

“The Women?” he asked, looking up at me through his glasses. “That’s not new. It’s a remake of the 1939 classic starring Joan Crawford, Rosalind Russell, Norma Shearer, and Joan Fontaine.”

“How do you know that?” I asked, stunned by his offhanded remark, and not a little scared by the list of women—gay icons, each in her own way.

“How do you not?” he said, a small amount of disdain in his voice. I reflected on how his mother once told me he was “light on his feet.”

“He’s one of the boys, you know,” she imparted. “One of the boys.”, thank God he’s also a pyromaniac, because his utter love of all things incendiary marks him as completely not gay. Whenever we travel through states where fireworks are legal, he stops at the roadside stands and stocks up. He keeps a stash in the basement of our country house and brings a few out on special occasions. On Truman’s birthday, a rocket Peter had lit took off flying on the horizontal, aimed squarely at Peter. He caught the noise over his shoulder and immediately started running through the field. In his defense, the rocket did look as though it were heat seeking. We all watched from the house, laughing hysterically as he ran like a girl to avoid the explosion of color. He later claimed that he was going for the laugh, but he wasn’t very convincing, sweating and huffing as though he’d just run a marathon of fear. Okay, maybe not completely not gay.have found a way to use some of Peter’s, let us say, more feminine traits to my advantage. He is always willing to help me with the design of a dress, and he is never leery of carrying my purse at a party, he is so secure in his manhood, or lack thereof. I think he secretly likes the sparkle of the tiny Judith Leiber clutch against his old Rat Pack black tuxedo. Even more amazing, though, is his complete lack of hesitation when I send him out for tampons or yeast infection cures.

“Here,” he says, handing me a bag. “I got you the Monistat three-day capsules with the external cream, and the one-day treatment from Vagisil that comes with the cool comfort wipes. I wasn’t sure which you’d want, and they both sounded like viable possibilities.”’ve always been aware of how much smarter Peter is than pretty much everyone around him, including his wife and offspring. I used to chalk this up to the age difference (eighteen years, but who’s counting), but lately I’ve had to admit that he is simply always right. I have come to accept this truth, which makes it no less annoying. Because he is smart, he assumed his children would be as well. He was a bit disappointed when the test scores started rolling in.

“Sorry,” I said, handing him a pre-k admissions score sheet. “I’m average. I diluted your gene pool.”houseful of average doesn’t bother me at all. I have seen many a person with a genius IQ have difficulty navigating day-to-day life. Peter is one of these types, always misplacing things and being mildly disappointed in the world around him. It can’t be easy for him, and if he were a people person, I’m sure it would bother him more. He has wonderful social skills, but prefers not to use them. Peter’s carefully cultivated “crazy professor” demeanor is an attempt to ward off normal discourse, particularly with strangers. He also has this way of looking at you with crazy horse eyes, which is sort of off-putting at parties.recently read about prosopagnosia, a brain malfunction that interferes with facial recognition. Peter has this. We can be at a party thrown in his honor, stocked with blood relatives and lifelong friends, and he will still tug my sleeve and whisper “Who is that?” in my ear as a colleague of twenty years walks up to us to say hello. I have to say “Hi, David, how are things at the Architectural Digest? Peter just loved the spread on the Ford project. Didn’t you, dear?” We’ve got it down to a Mad Libs formula, where the sentence is pretty much the same, and I just fill in the personalizing blanks. If I go too far away from Peter, he pinches my arm. I like to think of it as a love bite.doesn’t rely only on his scary eyes and wacky hair to excuse him from being social; for many years, he used smoking. It worked brilliantly—he could step out of a conversation or a meeting, or exit between courses at a boring dinner party, and hide away for the eight minutes it took to drag one down. He had this funny little habit of putting out a cigarette by rolling the cherry off the end. He then put the butt in his pocket; by the end of the day his clothes would be full of stinking shriveled trash. One day he was in a meeting with clients when little twirls of smoke started coming out of his pocket. A smoldering butt had combusted and ignited the accumulated garbage. When Peter realized what was happening, he tried to get up and leave, but by then his jacket was on full-tilt-boogie fire and he was fast becoming a ball of tweed and flames. His clients started screaming in Italian, as Italians are prone to do, running at him and patting him down as someone else threw a glass of water at his chest. This was the man responsible for building their corporate headquarters. Talk about a career on fire.HAS GROWN ACCUSTOMED TO BEING MISTAKEN FOR THE boys’ grandfather when he’s out with them. He may be old enough, technically, but he does not sit on a hill smoking a pipe, watching me child-mind from afar. He is lithe and energetic, and a natural athlete. Peter has perfect posture and extremely elegant hands. He is so graceful that he can make bowling look like ballet. But for all his finesse, he is fiercely competitive. There is no such thing as a friendly game of croquet for Peter, and we have learned not to play board games with him because of this drive to be on top.unlike some younger fathers, who are still building their careers, Peter never hesitates to put us first. Yes, he does card tricks, he runs like a girl, he has an überannoying habit of overintellectualizing everything. But he never complains about the cost of my shoes; for that alone, he is a keeper. I love the fact that, as an older father, Peter has his work/family priorities firmly in place.day a few years ago I was in Union Square with Peik and Truman after school. They were with their skateboarding pack, executing jumps and spins and other death-and police-defying acts of wonder. Truman, being five, was drifting into the larger space of his big brother, and acting very much like an eight-year-old in every way, until Peik had had enough of sharing his friends and boxed Truman out. Not one to sulk, Truman looked around for new fun and noticed a troupe of break-dancers getting warmed up. He loves break-dancers, and we often go on adventures in the subways at night to watch them perform. Knowing what was about to happen, I got out my phone.

“Peter,” I said, “you have to get to Union Square with your video camera. Truman is about to dance.”

“I’m in a meeting with the lawyer.”

“Really, Peter. Believe me. You must get this on film.”

“I’ll be right there.”the time he arrived, Truman was being introduced to the crowd as part of the crew. The dancers lined up one by one to take their solos. Sure enough, they sent Truman out for his turn. Truman stepped forward in his preppie rugby shirt and carrot-orange hair and executed a series of spins and worms and even the Michael Jackson crotch grab. I laughed until I cried, watching that performance. Peter was thrilled to have preserved the moment. He looked up at me and mouthed, “Thank you.”pointed down at my new alligator Manolos and mouthed, “Oh no, thank you.”WITH THE HEAVY LIFTING

KIDS? AND YOU WORK? HOW DO YOU DO IT?

“Well, our oldest is away at college, so there are only five left at home” is how I usually deflect the astonishment from people I meet on the street. “And we have help.”

“Oh, you have help.”is where the problem lies. Perhaps people assume that if I have help, then I must be rich, and hating rich people has become the latest American pastime, so they must hate me. Or perhaps because my life was made very public for a short time, during which I was nicknamed “Bad Mommy,” they think that this gives them the right to judge my choices.any case, people love to beat me up over the fact that I have help. Being raised with nannies doesn’t seem to have adversely affected my kids at all. In fact, all their therapists say they are very well adjusted.an otherwise innocuous interview for Parents.com, during which I spoke about how I juggle work and family, I mentioned the girls who help me with my children. In the South, where I come from, “girl” is a term of endearment. I call all women “girl,” regardless of age, race, or sometimes gender. This tidbit was buried in a five-screen click-through about style and girdles and whatnot, but for some reason Jezebel.com, a women’s website that is part of the Gawker group, linked to the article with a squib about how disrespectful it was of me to refer to professional child-care workers as girls. I’d been targeted by this particular website before, so I wasn’t taken aback by the hostility. What did surprise me was how many of Jezebel’s readers are stay-at-home moms, who actually have the time to read, post, and then have lengthy conversations among themselves about how bad I suck as a mom. Who’s watching their kids? The hatred spewed from keyboards all across America.: If you can’t take care of your kids without almost round the clock help from multiple individuals then WTF? Either you had too many damn kids and didn’t bother to think about it as you were popping them out or you are incompetent.the pain of childbirth does not make me love my children more; that’s why God invented epidurals. Changing every diaper, cooking every meal, and doing every pickup and drop-off will not make me love them more, either. Choosing not to do so hardly makes me incompetent.then there was this type:: I cry inside every time I wait for the subway next to a child and his nanny. I will be raising my kids, thankyouverymuch, even if I have to pull teeth to keep any semblance of a career in tow.. You’ve got to love an idealist willing to perform unlicensed dental procedures for the sake of being with her kids. But would she rather see a totally stressed-out mom pushed to the brink of frustration? A dicey thing if said mom is standing on the edge of a subway platform.comments were virulent—one reader even went so far as to post a testimonial saying she had seen me calmly sit by as my children terrorized an airport terminal. She included in her story the details that my kids were tackling and baiting each other, that I occasionally slung a curse at them, and that Peter was detached and “had completely given up on his family and quite possibly life itself.” She did go on to mention in a later comment that the boys were well behaved on the plane, but she never considered that perhaps I was operating from a plan.(or maybe worst) of all, she accused me of dressing the boys in various hues of Polo Ralph Lauren shirts. I ask you, why would I ever spend good money on something like that when L. L. Bean features just as many colors for half the price? Doesn’t that nice lady know what kind of shoes I could buy with the difference?I am certainly no stranger to angry comments. I take full responsibility for everything I say and the wrath that comes along with it; I just didn’t expect a website that once featured a blogger called Slut Machine to go so self-righteous and judgmental on a woman because she has help. I guess I should be thankful the folks at Jezebel aren’t calling me Sextomom.me, I’m not at the spa while someone else is rais

Date: 2015-02-28; view: 931