Sibling 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.
Of 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.
Peik: movee?
Girl: k
Peik: sat?
Girl: k
Peik: lol c u
No, 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.
It’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.
I 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.
When 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.
TRUMAN
As 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.”
Of 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.
Truman 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.
PIERSON
When 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 b
efore, 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.
Pierson 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?”
Pierson 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?”
After 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.
Pierson 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.
One 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.
LARSON
In 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.”
Larson 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.
This 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.
Because 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.
For 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.
All 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.”
In 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.
FINN
And 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.
Although 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.”
We 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.
Didn’t I Feed You Yesterday? Page 2
