Hell Is Other Parents

by Deborah Copaken Kogan

  “Ready to screw?” Paul said with a smile, bounding into our bedroom with his paper bag full of nuts and bolts.

  “Dad, gross!” said Jacob. He was at that age when everything we did and said was wrong. It’s an inevitable stage, I know, but that didn’t make it any less painful or poignant. “Oh, god, look at Mom’s pictures!” he said, energized by the gore. “There’s like exploding brains.”

  “Where?” said Sasha, coming into our room in her pajamas, carrying Leo. “Ugh, Mom. That’s so sick.”

  “Na na! Na na!” shouted Leo, meaning “Turn Nirvana on right now or I’ll throw myself on the ground and scream.”

  “Which one do you want?” said Sasha, opening up You-Tube on my browser. “Come As You Are’ or ‘Where Did You Sleep Last Night?’”

  “No I doh ha a guh,” said Leo.

  “No I don’t have a gun? That’s ‘Come As You Are.’” Luckily Sasha speaks Leo and can translate. She leaned over and sniffed him. “Uh-oh. I think his diaper needs changing.”

  “I’ll change him if you get rid of Lucas’s poop in Jacob’s room,” I said.

  “Oh, no, not again,” said Sasha.

  “Yes again.”

  “Fucking dog,” said Jacob.

  “Jacob!” I said.

  “What? I’m sick of him pooping in my room.”

  “He’s a puppy,” said Sasha. “He’s still learning.”

  “No! I! Doh! Ha! A! Guh!” screamed Leo, trying to rescue his Ernie doll from under Lucas, who was humping it.

  “Wait ’til he realizes Kurt Cobain actually did have a gun,” said Jacob.

  “Let’s keep him innocent for just a little bit longer, okay?” I said. “There’s plenty of time for him to learn the world can stink a lot worse than his diaper.”

  The day after Jacob and I came home from Pakistan, he and his then-four-year-old sister had just finished eating cupcakes after dinner when Sasha started whining for another. “Sasha!” Jacob had scolded, standing up on his chair for added emphasis. “That’s enough! There are places in the world where there are no cupcakes.” As geopolitical lessons go, this seemed as good a place to start as any: there are places in the world where there are no cupcakes. And where there are no cupcakes, there is discontent. And where there is discontent, there is violence. And where there is violence, there is hatred. And where there is hatred, love gets lost. Sometimes forever.

  “Here,” Paul said, putting down his bag of nuts and bolts to pick up Leo, “I’ll change him. You help Sasha with Lucas’s poop. Then I don’t care who soils themselves, we’re screwing in this bed.”

  “Dad!” shouted the older kids.

  After cleaning up after our various creatures and properly disposing of their waste, Paul and I knelt on the floor of our bedroom and got to work. Nut by nut, bolt by bolt, we screwed in that bed, remaking it as sturdy and as strong as our aging muscles would allow. It still creaks on occasion, especially when the entire family piles in on Sunday mornings, but not so much that it’s bothersome. As marital beds go, it’s seaworthy enough, and if it loosens again, we’ll tighten it.

  Epilogue: Hitler’s Love Child

  I force my screaming two-year-old into his car seat, wedging my knee into his groin for leverage. My husband has to work this weekend, so it’s just me and the terrorist on a two-day journey from New York City to Freedom, Maine. My eldest, thirteen, is starring in his camp production of Little Shop of Horrors, and he’s written us a passive-aggressive letter saying he knows we weren’t planning on visiting this year—his father and I have dutifully made the journey to camp now four years in a row to visit him and his sister—but wouldn’t it be great if one of us could be there to see the show?

  “You’re insane,” said my husband. “How are you going to drive twelve hours by yourself with a two-year-old?”

  “Easy,” I said. I reminded him that I had once spent several weeks packed cheek to jowl with Afghan soldiers in the back of an open truck as snow and Soviet bombs fell from the sky; that I found my way in and out of the jungles of Zimbabwe, alone and without compass or vehicle; that I drove across the continent of Europe in a twenty-year-old jalopy with my psychopathic Romanian boyfriend after we’d broken up. How hard could it be to drive a toddler to Freedom?

  “Crackers! Crackers! Crackers!” Leo screams, with the same intensity as someone having his nails extracted with pliers.

  I’m prepared for this moment. I’ve worked my whole life toward this moment. From a shopping bag, I pull out a gigantic box of Pepperidge Farm goldfish crackers, bigger than the kid himself. “Is your mommy great or what?” I say, shaking the container, seeing my son’s eyes widen with awe.

  Then silence—glorious silence—fills the car.

  When people ask, as they inevitably do, what on earth we were thinking when we decided to have Baby Leo, nine and eleven years after his older siblings, we tailor the answer to our audience. To our friends dealing with infertility, we shrug our shoulders and change the subject. The childless-by-choice get: “He was an accident.” Our parents think he was planned. Our big kids think we had him to avoid getting a dog.

  It’s not that we get off on lying—at least no more than the average kindergartner—it’s just that the real story takes too long to tell. Plus, frankly? It’s a little embarrassing.

  Birth control and I have had a rocky history. I got knocked up at seventeen using a diaphragm. (Thank you, Planned Parenthood, for your help with that one.) I went on the pill after that, and then, after giving birth to my eldest two, I got an IUD so I’d never have to think about birth control again.

  Imagine my surprise then when, three years later, I found myself surrounded by a dozen ultrasound technicians and technicians-in-training, all of whom were called in to check out the freak show in room ten. “See,” said my technician, thrusting the prophylactic-covered wand deeper inside me and pointing to the distinct T-shaped shadow on the screen, “There’s the intrauterine device”—she then pointed to a blob—“and that’s the embryonic sac.” Audible wows could be heard, in stereo, but I was too busy gasping for air and thinking about the oral toenail fungus medication I’d been taking for over a month, the one with the label warning, in big red letters, CONTRAINDICATED FOR PREGNANCY.

  “You can have this baby,” said my ob-gyn the next day, “but it probably won’t resemble any life-form you’re used to seeing, assuming it’s not stillborn.”

  “Poor Gimpy,” said my husband, trying to make me laugh, contorting his hands and face into a monstrous creature and mimicking the voice of Charlie in Flowers for Algernon. “Help! Help! I’ve got an IUD stuck in my eyeball!”

  We scheduled the D and C for the following week and carried on with our lives.

  I went on the patch after that, but the increased hormones caused me to sprout a third breast under my armpit. Compared to the cancerous tumor my doctor originally feared it might be, I didn’t mind my mutant breast so much, but still. “Maybe you should lay off the estrogen for a little while,” I was told, and suddenly I was back to my trusty old friend from high school, the diaphragm.

  I broached the idea of a vasectomy with Paul, and he started ranting about Hitler. “What about our third kid?” he said, even though we’d planned to have just two. “We have to replace the Jews lost in the Holocaust.”

  “That’s ridiculous,” I said. “I’m not having a third kid to spite Hitler.”

  “It’s not about Hitler. It’s about the dead Jews.”

  “Well, I’m not having a third kid for them either. Besides, let’s get real,” I said. Though both of us were working full-time, guess which one of us had yet to meet the pediatrician or pick nits out of our children’s scalps?

  My husband promised to be more present. He began Freudian analysis to deal with his baggage: the father who’d abandoned him at birth; the mother who’d died when he was fifteen; the adoptive parents who’d survived the Holocaust. He took over cooking, bill paying, food procurement, and even the occasional pediatrici
an appointment. He began coming home from work in time for dinner. “So,” he said one evening, during this era of reformation, “what do you say about that third kid?”

  “No,” I said. “We’ve got a great family the way it is now.”

  This debate went on for eight and a half years, back and forth, back and forth, until finally, late one night when I was thirty-nine, and the window of opportunity was about to close, Paul came home from a business trip to LA, woke me up from a deep slumber, and made such a passionate, plagiarized plea for a third child—“If not now, when?”—I calculated where I was in my cycle and kept the diaphragm in the drawer. Let him have this one night, I thought. We’ll have a rational discussion about it in the morning.

  Nine months later, despite assiduous use of the diaphragm during the rest of that month, Leo was born.

  “Uh-oh,” I hear from the backseat, followed by another fingernails-extracted-with-pliers wail, then: “Crackers! Crackers! Crackers!” I look into the rearview mirror to assess the damage. My son is holding the gigantic Pepperidge Farm box upside down, peering into the void for the goldfish that are now dumped all over the floor of the backseat, as if on the deck of a trawler. He starts to scream and thrash, causing his blankie, which he calls “wadi,” to fall out of his car seat as well.

  I pull over to the shoulder and put on my hazard lights once again.

  Suffice it to say, about halfway into our journey in the Little Car of Horrors, I am reduced to playing the Herman’s Hermits song “I’m Henry the VIII, I Am,” on automatic repeat, for four hours straight, just to placate the terrorist. “Again! Again!” shouts Leo when I try to vary the musical fare, and it becomes a philosophical question regarding the lesser of two evils: which is worse, a child’s ear-splitting screams or “I’m He-ne-ry the Eighth I am, He-ne-ry the Eighth I am, I am…”? I’m not saying I chose the right answer, only that I chose an answer, which means that now, every time I hear that song, I have a Pavlovian response to it that rivals Alex’s to Beethoven’s Ninth postaversion therapy in A Clockwork Orange.

  We finally arrive in Freedom, which truly feels at this moment like just another word for nothing left to lose, on the afternoon of the second day, both of us frazzled and exhausted. Though it’s taken us a few extra hours, due to multiple stops along the shoulder of I-95 to retrieve wadi or a fallen cookie or to mop up the apple juice from Leo’s lap, we still have plenty of time to spare before the show begins, so after hugging my big kids and taking a tour of the glassblowing shack—during which I wonder whether blowtorches, children, and dry wood have any business commingling—I immediately set out to find a place for Leo to nap, so he won’t cause a ruckus during the performance.

  We decide to use my daughter Sasha’s bed in her cabin, but just as the baby’s drifting off to sleep, Sasha’s counselor walks over to us. “I’m sorry,” she says. “He can’t sleep here. It wouldn’t be fair to the rest of the girls.”

  I have no idea what this means. “Fair?” I say. “How so?”

  “Their parents aren’t here. They might get homesick,” she says.

  Never mind that this makes no sense. Sasha’s been coming to this camp since she was seven years old. She’s now eleven. Her bunk mates have been coming since they were eight or nine. They’re now twelve and thirteen.

  I gently explain to the counselor that I’ve been traveling for two days, just to see my son’s performance. That the baby needs a place to sleep or I won’t actually be able to see the performance.

  “You could go find a nice, shady place under a tree or something,” she says.

  I silently, uncharitably curse her future motherhood, hoping some humorless camp counselor in her early twenties tells her to put her toddler down for a nap on dirt after she’s driven with him for two days. “That only happens in paintings,” I say. “Two-year-olds don’t actually fall asleep under trees in real life. You sure I can’t just let him sleep here?”

  “I’m sure,” she says.

  So I wake up my toddler and carry his now exhausted and apoplectic body to the infirmary, where I convince the camp nurse to allow Leo to fall asleep in one of her sick beds—so what if the last kid in it had strep?—and he takes a full two-hour nap.

  The musical is scheduled to begin at 7:00 P.M. in the red barn. Sasha, Leo, and I arrive fifteen minutes early to stake out our spot. Leo is in a great mood, having slept adequately and eaten a proper dinner of chicken and corn, and I’m congratulating myself on having weathered the journey and made it to this moment. Yes, it was more arduous than covering the Soviet retreat from Afghanistan, but I’m here, damn it. My dad once interrupted a complicated international legal negotiation with the government of the Marshall Islands to fly all the way back to Maryland to see me perform in my sixth grade play. I’ve never forgotten that gesture. In fact, of all the sacrifices my parents ever made, this is the one that stands out the clearest.

  Other parents of young thespians start arriving in the barn, and we smile at one another and nod knowingly—long trip, our faces and rumpled clothes say, but it was worth it—and wait for the performance to begin. The lights dim. My daughter grabs my hand. My two-year-old settles in my lap, sitting perfectly still. My teenage son steps out onstage, owning it.

  Then, suddenly, Leo breaks the fourth wall. “Jacob! Jacob! Hi! Hi, Jacob!” he starts to shout, standing up in my lap and waving maniacally to his big brother onstage. Jacob tries to ignore him, but it’s hard. The audience twitters. The other parents, some having driven longer distances than I, shoot me irritated sneers. Jacob himself shoots me a pleading look: control him. “Jacob! Jacob! Hi!” Leo yells again, his tone now desperate. My path to the door, which had been clear before the campers descended upon the barn, is now completely blocked by young audience members crammed one next to the other on the floor. “JA-COB! Hi! Hi! Hiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii!!!!!!!!”

  I try reasoning with my two-year-old. When that doesn’t work, I resort to threats. “Be quiet,” I whisper, “or you won’t get any ice cream after the show.”

  “Ice cream! Ice cream!” Leo shouts. “Outside! Outside now! Hi, Jacob! Hi!” He’s still trying to catch his brother’s eye. “Ja! Cob! Hi!”

  The other parents in the room now clearly hate me. They glare at me and roll their collective eyes. What business does she have bringing a two-year-old to a performance? their pursed mouths ask. Does she realize how long it took us to get here? For that matter, what business does she have having one in diapers while the other two are going through adolescence? What’s wrong with her? What was she thinking? Okay, so maybe I’m just projecting those last three thoughts.

  “It’s Hitler’s fault!” I want to shout, but instead I simply stand up and drag my kicking, screaming, replacement Jew across the sea of young campers, stepping on fingers, toes, the occasional water bottle and flashlight, until I reach the door of the barn, and when I get there, I realize I’ve left the diaper bag back at my seat.

  Leo, now sprung from the hot and stuffy barn, is positively gleeful, completely forgetting his older brother’s slight, dipping the tip of his wadi in mud puddles and picking up rocks and weeds and scraps of paper and an old bottle cap and anything else he finds in his field of vision. I try to stand at the door of the barn, half-in, half-out, so I can keep an eye on both kids, but I soon realize that this is impossible. Just as I turn my back on the baby to hear Jacob belt out “Suddenly, Seymour!”, Leo falls into a mud puddle, chest first, and starts to bawl.

  The kid is completely caked in mud, from his hair down to his sneakers, and I definitely smell something malodorous in his diaper, but what really bothers Leo is that his wadi is now soaked. So he runs over and hugs me for comfort instead, and now I’m covered in mud too, and the audience starts to clap, and the play is over.

  It’s over.

  I feel like crying. I feel like screaming. I feel like throwing myself on the ground and having a Leo-style tantrum. I still have another hour or so of driving east on poorly marked country roads, in th
e dark, to a friend’s house, where I’ll sleep for the night, then I have to wake up the next morning, wrangle Leo back into his car seat, and drive the ten/twelve/fourteen hours back, however long it takes us, to get the rental car back before 10:00 P.M., so I don’t have to pay for an extra day: all this, for a musical I never even got to see.

  “I’m so sorry,” I say to my eldest, when it’s time to leave.

  “It’s okay,” says Jacob, ruffling Leo’s hair. “He’s two. He doesn’t know any better.”

  “Hi, Jacob!” says Leo, waving maniacally again.

  “Hi, Leo!” says Jacob, hoisting his little brother into his arms and smothering him with kisses.

  “I know it’s okay,” I say, “but I came all this way and missed the whole thing.”

  “True.” Jacob shrugs. Smiles. Puts his brother on the ground and throws an arm around me for comfort, the way I used to when he’d fall into mud puddles as a toddler. “But you came. And I appreciate it.” He wrinkles his nose. “What’s that smell?”

  “Oh, yeah, sorry about that. Sasha has the diaper bag.” I pick up Leo and search the crowd for my daughter and the diapers. “Hey, you want to go get some ice cream?” I say. “We can go to that same place we went last year.”