Hell Is Other Parents

by Deborah Copaken Kogan

  Hell Is Other Parents

  And Other Tales of Maternal Combustion

  Deborah Copaken Kogan

  In aching, loving, still-fresh memory of my father

  Richard D. Copaken

  1941–2008

  the benchmark against whom all

  Other Parents are unfairly measured

  and for

  Leo Copaken Kogan

  without whom most of these stories would

  either not exist or be really boring

  Contents

  Prologue: King of the Mountain

  The Bleeping Bleep Next Door

  Hell Is Other Parents

  Sundance Stage Mother

  A Sign of Love

  La Vie en Explose

  The Adolescent Vulcan

  Big Chills

  The Graveyard of Old Beaus

  Screwing in the Marital Bed

  Epilogue: Hitler’s Love Child

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Other Books by Deborah Copaken Kogan

  Copyright

  Prologue: King of the Mountain

  “You’re not going to just leave that tiny girl up there all alone, are you?” the stranger asks, his tone grave. He’s pointing an accusatory finger up at my daughter, Sasha, who—giggling and triumphant, her hair aglow with the last rays of the evening—has just scaled the summit of a gigantic rock. “She’ll fall.”

  I smile politely. I’m used to unsolicited parental advice by now. “No, she won’t,” I say, careful to keep my eyes on Sasha and on her more cautious older brother, Jacob, who’s leaning against the base of the rock, a safe thirty-odd feet below his sister, eating an ice cream sandwich and pondering the mechanics of subtraction. “She loves this rock. Knows every crevice. And she’s older than she looks.”

  Sasha is three. But at two foot nine and twenty-three pounds, she is the size of an average one-year-old. “Mommy, Jacob, look at me!” she yells. “I’m up so, so high!” She gives us a thumbs-up. Her face breaks into a smile. That smile is why we come to this rock. “Good for you,” Jacob shouts. “We’re so proud of you!” He’s four and a half, and twice her size.

  The worried onlooker, whose young boy (I know better than to judge age by size, but let’s just say the kid’s not yet five) has been climbing up and down the rock undeterred, mumbles something under his breath about not wanting to stand by and witness a disaster. Then, with dramatic purpose, he begins to climb up the side of the rock to rescue my daughter.

  “Excuse me,” I say, my voice now brusque. “I said she’s fine.” I’m sensitive about these things. I’m five foot two on a good day, and I’ve spent the better part of my life climbing my own mountains.

  But my anger, I’m starting to understand, has deeper roots.

  My daughter is hardly a pushover. She splutters vengeful Bronx cheers at all who insult her stature. She calls herself the King, she likes to wear sneakers because she says they make her look tough, she dreams of owning a motorcycle, and her favorite activity is sticking her hand in the mouths of large dogs. But in the past year, I’ve seen my tiny king punched, kicked, shoved, hit, and slammed over the head with various blunt objects at the hands of her fellow toddlers more times than I can bear to recall. It’s aggravating enough to have to defend my much-smaller-than-average daughter against the adults who, upon learning Sasha’s age, think nothing of saying, “Oh, my God, she’s so tiny!” within her sensitive earshot. It’s positively terrifying, however, to realize that because of her size my daughter might require more protection in more circumstances than any mother could ever provide. To accept the fact that there is no defense against human nature.

  During my last year of college and for a little while thereafter, I fell victim to a number of random assaults and muggings. A few were quite scary: a couple with guns, another with a knockout blow to the head, others with unwanted tongues shoved deep in the back of my throat. Until I had Sasha, I had always just chalked up these attacks to a mixture of my bad luck, naïveté, and gender. But now, watching my daughter get picked on just because she’s the runt of the group, observing the same old Lord of the Flies scenes blithely reenacted in the eternal petri dish of childhood, it has occurred to me that my own small stature might have played a far bigger role in my assailants’ choice of prey—and the sheer number of attacks—than I’d ever thought. I always knew being short was a slight handicap, an annoyance to be overcome. But dangerous? How’s a girl to scale that mountain?

  Sasha, to her credit, has learned to fight back. She has perfected the icy stare, the defensive stance, and the bloodcurdling screams that usually send her foes running for their mommies. But these are preschoolers brandishing sticks in a playground. I shudder at the thought of my daughter, fifteen years hence, walking all alone on a darkened street. The man, now halfway up the rock, hears the shift in my tone, understands that I’ve finished with social pleasantries and stops his attempt to rescue my daughter. Climbing down, he stares at me, incredulous. “Well, if she were my little girl—”

  “She’s my little girl,” I say. “But thanks for your input.” You see, sir, beyond keeping her locked inside, which I would never do, or enrolling her in tae kwon do classes, which I might do, there isn’t much else I can do to protect my daughter from danger, particularly the dangers that her size entails. Yes, she might lose her footing; she might even fall. But I’d much rather that she learn how to right herself than keep her from climbing to the top of her beloved rock, up there so, so high, the only place in her world where she’s the biggest thing on the horizon.

  I wrote the previous essay in the summer of 2000, when I was still green enough as a parent to believe that the incident described would stand out as a bell curve outlier in the spectrum of parent-to-parent interference.

  But the years passed, and the incidents accumulated: the mother who chastised us for using salt; the truck driver who hurled unprintable epithets through his window at me and my then-eight-year-old while we were stopped at a red light, because he felt I shouldn’t drive my kid around the city on a scooter; the private school parents who said we were permanently damaging our then-six-year-old by yanking her out of the hothouse and into public school; the former colleague who equated allowing my son to pursue his dream of becoming a professional actor with child abuse; the father who couldn’t abide my little girl having a sleepover with his little boy (“They’re only eight, sure, but you never know…”); the friend who, staring down at my belly, eight months swollen with child number three, said, “Are you sure you really want to have a third? We thought about it, but we ultimately decided it was a bad idea.”

  We’ve chosen to raise our family in Manhattan, on income insufficient to the task, so clearly we are gluttons for punishment. We live, all five of us, in a two-bedroom apartment: my son Ja-cob, now an eighth grader, occupies a five-by-seven-foot closet/ laundry room; my daughter Sasha, a sixth grader, shares her small bedroom with her two-year-old brother, Leo. We traverse sidewalks, every day, choked with strollers and parents and kids, all meandering through the crowds on their way to equally teeming schools and playgrounds and museums and offices, all quick to offer scorn and criticism in the guise of helpful advice, shopworn parables, the strategically raised eyebrow. We stand shoulder to shoulder with one another on buses and subways, trying not to step on our neighbors’ toes, failing to keep our flailing toddlers from planting kicks in each other’s groins.

  But having spoken with friends who’ve chosen to raise their cherubs in less expensive, less populous, less blatantly striving cities, it strikes me that my family’s experiences—the daily frictions with other parents, the snap judgments that are made either implicitly with a condes
cending look or explicitly with a loud bark—are not unique to my city. Or to me. Or to my children.

  The stories in this book are all, preposterously, true, with the normal caveat that many of the names have been changed to protect the innocent. And the not-so-innocent. And the blatantly guilty.

  You might even recognize some of these characters. Even if you’ve never met them.

  The Bleeping Bleep Next Door

  I am not a Trekkie, but I did want my Grandpa David to love me. To earn his affection—or at least a pat on the head—required sitting by the foot of his easy chair watching Star Trek, even if you weren’t really a big fan of the floor or the show. Grandpa David was a man of few words, which required an almost Vulcan level of taciturnity on a grandchild’s part, meaning you weren’t allowed to ask what was going on with the Romulans unless you wanted to be told to run off and help Grandma Kate in the kitchen, where you could bang every pot and pan with a spoon and sing “Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head” at the top of your lungs in pig Latin for all Grandma cared, she was just happy to have the company.

  One night, Grandpa arrived home later than usual from the VA hospital where he worked as a surgeon, which meant the Enterprise was already midflight by the time we turned on the TV. Worse, if you were a seven-year-old trying to figure out the plot, Kirk was wearing a vest, Uhura was practically naked, and Spock had a goatee and was torturing Chekov in an agony booth. Which, Vulcanwise, made no sense. “Why does Spock have a beard?” I asked.

  “Shhh,” said Grandpa.

  I shushed. Then: “Kirk and Spock sure are acting weird.”

  “It’s a parallel universe,” said Grandpa. “Shhh.”

  “What’s a parallel universe?”

  “Why don’t you run off and help Grandma in the kitchen, hmm?” Grandpa David said.

  My grandparents’ one-bedroom apartment in the East Village had the same layout as my Great Aunt Ruth’s two floors below, so that evening when I popped my head into the kitchen, which was just like Ruth’s, only with the toaster in a different spot and less Scotch, I answered my own question. Parallel universes, I decided, must be like Kate’s and Ruth’s kitchens: identical containers holding completely different realities. In the former, a long-suffering wife to an underpaid doctor, who favored ketchup as an alternative to spaghetti sauce; in the latter, a high-functioning alcoholic who’d left her only husband after a week, when he brought his mother on their honeymoon.

  I found myself revisiting this concept late one night thirty-three years later in the delivery room where I was giving birth to my third child, as loud wails of “Motherfucker shit fuck Jesus holy fucking shit owwwww I can’t fucking take this shit fucking cunt ass motherfucker!!!!!” came shooting out from the room next door.

  “Huh. Listen to that,” I said to my husband.

  Paul, who’d been trying to nap in a chair, pulled the Times off his face. “Maybe she has Tourette’s,” he said.

  I was now four centimeters dilated and feeling, for the first time in nearly six weeks of protracted preterm labor, the soothing relief of numbness. In fact, up until the cursing began, sometime after midnight, I’d actually been on the brink of sleep, something that had eluded me during the entire previous month and a half I’d spent in and out of the hospital, pumped full of drugs, or confined to bed, contracting every five to seven minutes. I couldn’t understand, I told the nurse who’d come in to check my vital signs, why, in this day and age of advanced pain relief, anyone would choose not to get the epidural. “What’s not to understand?” said Paul. “Some women get off on the martyrdom.”

  The nurse let out a chuckle. “Not this one,” she said of the potty-mouth next door. “Trust me, she’s feeling no pain. I saw the needle go in myself. But she’s sixteen. Teenagers always get the epidural. And they always scream.”

  “Really?” I said. “Why?”

  “I don’t know,” said the nurse. “They just…do. They must copy it from the TV or something.”

  “Fuck this shit!” yelled the girl.

  “I hope we don’t have to share a room with her,” said Paul. Eleven and nine years earlier, when we’d had our first two, we were able to afford private rooms. But now, because the price of a private hospital room, like the cost of all things real estate–related in New York, had gone up exponentially, because my novel hadn’t sold, because after eleven years of raising children in New York City we were stone-cold broke, we were either going to have to take out a mortgage to be able to afford it or share.

  I bet you know where this story is going. But first, the birth.

  My most excellent ob-gyn, whom we’ll call Dr. D because I don’t want her to get in trouble for reasons that will soon become clear, walked into the delivery room around 2:00 A.M. Sunday morning. “Six centimeters,” she said, extracting her hand and removing her rubber glove with a tidy snap. “Great!” But her words did not match her expression.

  “What’s wrong?” I said. I specifically chose Dr. D because of her no-nonsense, nonalarmist approach to medicine. Even when alarm bells are called for, she remains refreshingly calm. Six weeks earlier, for example, when I’d showed up at her office both in labor and denial, she (calmly) walked me outside, called my husband on my cell phone, hailed a cab, instructed the driver to rush me to the emergency room, and, cognizant of our financial difficulties, since we hadn’t paid her in six months, slipped him a ten.

  “Nothing’s wrong,” said Dr. D, unable to meet my eye. “Everything’s fine.” Her expression was unusually tense, pinched.

  “Everything doesn’t look fine,” I said.

  Dr. D pressed her lips between her teeth and took a deep breath, clearly weighing the pros and cons of speaking. Then, softening, she exhaled and lowered her voice to a whisper. “Oh, okay. I just got a call. The head of obstetrics was sitting at home, studying the patient log on his computer….”

  “At two A.M.?” said Paul.

  Dr. D nodded. “He wanted to know what I was doing inducing a patient at thirty-six and a half weeks.”

  “Did you tell him I’ve been in labor for six weeks?” I said.

  “Yes.”

  “That I haven’t slept a single night in those six weeks and that I’ve lost five pounds?”

  “Yes.”

  “Motherfucker!” screamed my neighbor.

  My doctor tried to keep her game face but cracked a tiny smile. “Don’t worry,” she said. “You’re dilating beautifully, and that’s all that matters.”

  I am not a natural dilator. In fact, I’m one of those women who would have died during childbirth before the advent of Pitocin. I needed it during my first delivery, when my cervix refused to open several hours after my water had broken and my contractions had progressed to a minute apart. I needed it during my second delivery, despite two weeks of preterm labor. So a week and a half earlier, when the pain was becoming unbearable, I’d gone in to Dr. D’s office and begged her just to give me the Pitocin already and put an end to my misery. “Please!” I’d said. “I can’t take these contractions anymore! The baby’s over thirty-five weeks. He’s cooked. Let’s do it.”

  “I’m sorry,” she’d replied. “I can’t induce before thirty-nine weeks.”

  “Thirty-nine? What do you mean?” I reminded her that we’d yanked Sasha out at thirty-seven.

  “That was nine years ago.”

  “What, the rules have changed?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  Of course they had. The rules of parenthood are always changing. When Jacob was born, we were told to put babies to sleep on their sides. Twenty-one months later, when Sasha arrived, we were led to believe that you might as well have the tombstone preengraved if you dared to place your child in any other position than on her back. Of course, neither of my children ever slept more than an hour on either their sides or their backs, so after three weeks or so of sleepless nights with the first and one with the second we said to hell with the experts and put both babies to sleep on their stomachs, where they
slept like proverbial babies instead of like babies going through heroin withdrawal while having their fingernails extracted with pliers.

  “Don’t worry,” said Dr. D. “You’re strong. I know you can make it to thirty-nine.”

  But by my next visit, at thirty-six weeks, even nonalarmist Dr. D was looking alarmed. The rings under my eyes had turned black. I was barely cogent. I could no longer eat. The contractions had increased to three minutes apart. Forget heroin withdrawal and fingernail extraction: At this point, Lynndie England could have been holding me on a leash naked in a vat of pig guts and cockroaches while Romulans poured water up my nose, and it would have felt, by contrast, like a spa weekend.

  “Please!” I begged. “Give me the Pitocin. I can’t take it anymore!” If I’d had State secrets to give away, no question I would have.

  Dr. D sighed. She couldn’t just schedule a thirty-six-week induction, she said. “But…”

  “But what?”

  “But your contractions are coming every three minutes, right? Which means…” She raised her eyebrows, as if waiting for me to fill in the rest.

  “Which means…?” I felt like we were in one of those movies where a normally upstanding citizen is trying to tell the Mafia guy to kill his wife without ever using the words shoot or dismember.

  “Which means,” said my doctor, “let’s say you were to show up at the hospital on, oh, I don’t know, this Saturday? Late in the afternoon, when things are quiet, and I’ve finished my errands? And let’s say, theoretically of course, that you were to walk in and explain to the nurse processing admissions that you were having contractions….” She paused again, waiting for me to fill in the words.