Didn’t I Feed You Yesterday?

by Laura Bennett

  Don’t get me wrong; I’m hardly the perfect school mommy. In fact, I think I’ve given new meaning to No Child Left Behind. My worst mommy crimes tend to happen when I forget where all my kids are. My friend Libby has had to call me several times at 8:30 P.M. because I’ve forgotten to pick Truman up from an “afterschool” hangout. I’ve also gone to Beau’s house to get Truman when he’s actually at Mason’s, and one time Peik went to spend the night at Gordon’s and it took me a couple of days to figure out that he wasn’t home. Of course Alicia knew where he was, but it didn’t even occur to me to ask her. Even little Finn has made his escape from my Alcatraz by slipping unnoticed down the elevator and into the lobby before being stopped by a neighbor.

  Luckily for me, my kids are very self-reliant around the apartment. They take this practice to the extreme when they are guests elsewhere—I’ve often been thanked at the late pickup time (when I’ve eventually remembered where that missing kid must be) for how gracious and helpful my son is, how he put his dishes in the sink or he played with the younger children while the mom took a shower, worked out, what have you. Still, as full as my house is, it probably wouldn’t hurt for me to do a head count around six instead of at eight-thirty, when Nicole is lining them up for baths.

  I NEVER UNDERSTAND THE MOTHERS WHO GET EXCITED JUST BEFORE summer break, as if getting to sleep for thirty extra minutes in the morning is worth having to take care of your own kids all day. Sure, camp helps, but there is no camp that can possibly accommodate all five of my boys. Besides, sleepaway camps don’t take toddlers. Not for three straight months, anyway.

  As September rolls around, I joyfully get the kids ready for school. I secure the necessary color-coded folders and three-ring binders. I stock up on loose-leaf paper and mechanical pencils. I fill out all the necessary forms and artfully forged vaccination records so that everything appears up-to-date. I dig out backpacks with operating zippers, and rotate summer clothes, providing easy access to back-to-school wardrobes. I line up nannies and mannies, reading tutors and homework helpers, because God knows New York City private school tuition is not enough to cover the actual cost of education. Armed with the appropriate pharmaceuticals, I can sit back and watch my carefully hatched plan spring into action: avoid the children during school hours at all costs.

  This fall I made it exactly one month into classes before having to set foot on campus. Not an easy feat, but between my husband, the afternoon nanny, and my oldest coming and going on his own, I was able to rig it so that others did the dropoffs and pickups. Then Nicole fell sick and I had to pick up Pierson. I didn’t know where his classroom was or who his teachers were. I spotted a familiar face, the father of one of my son’s friends.

  “Hi, Dan.”

  “Hi, Laura.”

  “How are things?”

  “Fine.”

  “If I were to want to pick up a child in first grade, what floor would I be on?” I asked sheepishly.

  “You don’t know where Pierson’s classroom is, do you?” Busted.

  There are mothers who wouldn’t dream of missing a moment of their child’s educational experience. They hover around the door of their first grader’s classroom and peek through the window at intervals to check for signs of separation anxiety, ready to leap in and assure their child that unconditional love is lurking nearby. I am not that type. Frankly, my six-year-old doesn’t need me to be, as evidenced by the first time he walked into his classroom, comfortable and confident, looked around, and said, “Where the hell is my cubby?”

  Here in the city we have an urban myth that families are forced to move out to the suburbs because their kids didn’t get into private school—they run screaming to the quiet hamlets of New Jersey or Connecticut to seek a decent public school. Much like the Hermès bag waiting list, this is pure fiction: I have never in my fifteen years here met one person who has waited two years for a purse or moved out of the city because of a catastrophic preschool denial. I do know people who have moved out because they thought the public schools sucked and couldn’t bear the thought of paying $32,000 for kindergarten, but never anyone who just walked away. Real New Yorkers don’t give up that easy.

  Jon and Kate and their eight little goslings claim they are able to raise their family with the strength and courage they receive from God. That may work in the suburbs of Pennsylvania, but here in the city it takes money to raise a gaggle. Lots of money. The reality is that New York is an extremely expensive place to live, but that doesn’t mean those who make it here are necessarily rich—we may earn bigger salaries, but we also have bigger bills. It’s simply a matter of scale, and our scale is incomprehensible when compared to the suburban lifestyle. What with having to pay to park our car in a garage a taxi fare away from our front doors, or pay the grocery store to deliver the food that we don’t have the luxury of throwing into the back of the SUV, the little things add up nearly as fast as the big ones, like rent, or mortgages, or a Larsonterages. This is where couples eventually choose to game the system: keep the big-city paycheck, but live a few commuter rail stops away from the burn rate of Manhattan. In the end, though, this means one parent gives up a hard-won career, because once in the suburbs you must spend quality time becoming part of a community—volunteering at the school library, coaching Little League, organizing bake sales. In the city we use our second incomes to pay people to do that crap for us. I’ve never once in fifteen years baked a cupcake for a classroom birthday. Why would I, when Cupcake Café can do it better, cheaper, and faster? And if I’m going to stay in the city, I’m going to buy the best education I can afford, just as I would go to Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center if I found a lump, and not some rinky-dink hospital that doesn’t have “cancer” right there in the name.

  The private school application process is daunting, but I’d say the panic is caused by parents: if every family would simply apply only to the three schools they are most interested in, instead of applying to ten schools and clogging up the admissions process, everyone would get what they want in some measure. I have even seen families turn down a school acceptance because they decided they couldn’t afford it. Did they think a winning lottery ticket was in their future? Was Aunt Selma going to die and mention little Johnny in her will? Was the school going to hold an unprecedented tuition clearance sale? Why are these people clogging up the system? I actually don’t know anyone who didn’t get their kid into private school if that’s what they wanted. There are enough spaces to go around.

  Believe me, if the process were easy, and people could just walk into the hallowed halls of the school of their choice, check in hand, New York parents would not be interested. We expect to have to win.

  “EXECUTE YOUR ENEMIES. LEAVE NO SURVIVORS,” A MENACING voice intoned over the cacophony of warfare coming out of the TV connected to the Xbox.

  “What was that?” I exclaimed, turning from my desk toward my son. Peik was hunched over the controls, oblivious to the world. I do allow them to play war games, but even I have my limits. I draw the line at executions.

  “Turn it off!” I yelled, getting up from my chair.

  “I can’t,” he claimed, not looking at me. “I am in the middle of a mission, and I can’t save now.” I have heard this excuse before.

  “I said, turn it off.” Peik casually reached over to the remote and pressed the mute button without losing the spray of bullets coming from his avatar’s AK-47.

  “Turning the sound off is not turning the game off!” I shouted. “Turn it off now.” Only when I made a move for the power button, and he feared he would lose everything, did Peik pause the game and come over to me.

  “But, Mom, you know that I have to get to mission nine or I won’t be able to upgrade to an M-16. With an M-16, I could blow my enemies to hell.”

  “Halfway to hell with an AK-47 will do just fine.” I looked him in the eye, unblinking.

  “Okay, okay,” he said, throwing his hands up in the air and retreating to the boys’ room, no doubt t
o log on to yet another game on the Internet.

  With five boys comes violence; there’s just no way around it. They make guns out of jumbo crayons or potatoes, or just their damn fingers. They play violent games of their own devising, so I can’t just expect my kids not to indulge at all. For quite a while I tried to keep up with all the videos, DVDs, games, iTunes downloads, and other media streaming into my kids’ heads. This was a full-time job. Eventually I decided that I would check in every once in awhile, but that I wasn’t going to let it drive me crazy. Denying the boys these outlets just makes them forbidden fruit. I would rather they learn to make choices and set limits for themselves. There are elements of pop culture that are violent and cruel, fast paced and sexual, but it’s their culture; who am I to deny it to them? My mom let me watch Love, American Style.

  SCIENTISTS AT RUTGERS UNIVERSITY HAVE RECENTLY ISOLATED THE gene that causes overprotective motherhood. I kid you not. Genetically engineered mice without the gene, known as on-coprotein 18, were slow to retrieve roaming pups and showed no concern when the pups interacted with unknown peers. By contrast, mice with the gene, or “helicopter mice,” made sure that their pups ate lunch in a peanut-free school and called them on their cell phones three times a day.

  I am certain that I was born without this gene. Now I understand why I let my kids ride bikes without helmets and eat snacks replete with preservatives and artificial colors while other mothers are making their teenagers use safety scissors. I have a genetic predisposition to laissez-faire parenting. The fact that I buy my children trampolines, go-carts, and motorcycles so they stay out of my way on weekends is not my fault. I have a disease.

  It has nothing to do with the fact that I have six children aged twenty years to twenty months and couldn’t possibly care for them and remain sane without a team of nannies, mannies, tutors, therapists, and cleaning ladies. I am not lazy; I have the biochemical markers of a bad mommy. My mother passed on this genetic propensity to me. She allowed my brother and me to roam the neighborhood unsupervised with a gang of kids until the streetlights came on. She never stopped us when we chased the mosquito man’s truck as it blew a cloud of DDT into our smiling faces. We were allowed to ride in the back of a station wagon without seats, much less seat belts. And we watched cartoons! Violent cartoons in which coyotes dropped anvils from red stone desert cliffs on passing roadrunners.

  And to think for all these years I thought alcoholics were just undisciplined whiners who wouldn’t take responsibility for their own actions. I totally get it now. Being a bad parent is a hereditary trait, no different from my green eyes or my dyed red hair. It’s part of my DNA and has been passed down to me from generations of mothers who let their children fall behind in their immunizations, eat frozen dinners, and languish, forgotten, on playdates.

  The truth is, my children are a bit Lord of the Flies. Given the chance, they do tend to run around like savages, half naked and covered in mud. I like it that way. I choose not to expend outrageous amounts of energy trying to get them to sit still when they will find a way to drive me nuts anyway. I find them funny. I don’t want a bunch of buttoned-up, beaten-down miniature adults. My parenting style may be very different, but is it any less valid? I’ll do my thing and you do yours.

  Usually, though, I think it best to seek out friends who have similar parenting styles. Because that’s all this really is, in the end: a matter of style. Every parent does the job a little differently, and I consider myself blessed when I stumble on people who can enjoy our chaos for what it is.

  We recently had a couple over with their children, a “playdate” if you must, and there were seven kids buzzing around the apartment. These people were new acquaintances of ours. We hadn’t been forced by proximity or similar-aged children into spending time with them, but instead had chosen to do so because of their appeal as adults. They had brought a lovely bottle of champagne, which we drank, and for a few hours we sat around and chatted and got to know one another better. Swirling around us was a virtual hurricane of activity. Balls were flying, swings were swinging, action figures were acting. Computers all over the house were pumping out iTunes, or the drone of World of Warcraft as keyboards went tick, tick, tick. The smaller children would occasionally look over at the television to pick up a clue from Blue, while the projector beamed wrestling matches from Nacho Libre up on the wall. One of my children decided to serve cheese and crackers to our guests, especially the lady, and insisted on preparing the delicacies with his grimy little hands. There was a potty incident—there always is—and my four-year-old came shooting through the room in full Superman regalia, right down to the floor-length cape and bright red boots. At one point we had to separate my youngest boy from her youngest girl so as to terminate some tribal mating ritual known only to toddlers.

  This all might sound a bit annoying, but my guests were not affected by it in any way. They knew how to laugh and seemed to be enjoying our combined cluster of boisterous children. I like these people. Mind you, there were seven kids between the ages of twenty months and twelve years barreling through our loft, but no one ever had to yell at anyone or level a time-out or complain about any injustice. (Well, who would dare, with Superman himself in the room?) For the most part the adults were being adults and the children were being children. The evening was very old-fashioned, really. It reminded me of the times my parents would visit with relatives or neighbors: my brother and I would run off and play with other kids’ toys in other kids’ rooms, knowing our parents were somewhere in the house, having adult time, which was boring. I spoke with one of my cousins the other day, and he said to me, “Laura, I still remember when you were eight and you would put on your Wonder Woman costume and run around the house like a crazy person, cape flowing out behind you. Do you remember that?”

  Yes, I remember that. I still don the occasional costume.

  In my house, things haven’t really changed that much since the days of Please Don’t Eat the Daisies, when the kids ran wild as the adults orbited around them, looking smart in their tea dresses and dapper suits. Jean Kerr didn’t spend too much time worrying about how to raise her children; she mostly just got out of their way and then wrote about them so she could have a mental room of her own. I think maybe Nora Ephron nailed it in I Feel Bad About My Neck, when she wrote about how parenting as we know it is a modern phenomenon. There used to just be parents, now there is parenting. Somewhere between June Cleaver and Bree Van de Kamp there must be an explanation for how we got to a place where toddlers eat sushi.

  FABULOUSLY GLAMOROUS

  “I say dress up every day. You never know when you are going to meet your next husband.”

  I WANT TO BE AUNTIE MAME WHEN I GROW UP. I WANT TO have an apartment with a sweeping staircase that I can descend daily, to be greeted by my dedicated staff and adoring assistants. I want to act as if money means nothing to me, because I am above concern with such things. I want to don glamorous cocktail dresses at five, and drip with jewels. I want to age gracefully, live without regret, and take full advantage of every opportunity that comes my way. I want to position myself in history as a gay icon, and that takes style.

  Thanks to certain considerate movie directors, I have a very clear how-to guide. I have a ways to go—particularly in the “sweeping staircase” and “adoring assistant” departments—not to mention that Mame had one polite boy and I have five of the insane variety. Still, this clear picture is helpful in setting the standard for my personal style. Would Mame wear wrinkled capris and an ill-fitting T-shirt to her nephew Patrick’s kindergarten performance at school? Would Mame show up at a black-tie affair in some plain-Jane dress and fade into the woodwork? Would Mame put her heirloom diamond cuff in a safety deposit box to languish, unused? Would she, at the lowest financial moment of her life, just give up on style and not dig to the bottom of her resourceful little soul to make sure she turned heads when she entered the room? Hell, no, and neither would I.

  Style is not about money. It’s abo
ut making a conscious decision to present yourself to the world in a particular manner. Does my style say my kids have taken over my life and I haven’t had sex in decades? Or does it say I’m fabulous, and these boys are going to have a hell of a time finding a girl like dear old Mom? Style is about having a clear understanding of who you are and what you want out of life. It’s about trusting your instincts and conveying your personal message. Style knows no age or size. It’s easy to dismiss those with great style by saying “If I had a ton of money, I would have great style, too.” I beg to differ. Gabrielle Chanel, an orphaned and penniless girl in France at the turn of the twentieth century, didn’t let the poor-house atmosphere stop her from becoming Coco. In fact, it may have helped. At this point in my life, I have more than I ever dreamed of, but it hasn’t always been this way. Back when I was a struggling single working mother, I still dressed with great style. I feel lucky that I had to do more with less. It taught me a valuable lesson: money is by far the most overused accessory. You actually need very little to have great style.

  I have too many kids and too little time, but I still manage to maintain a level of style. I dress up every day. It keeps me from getting sucked under. When you are forty-five years old and have six children, it’s a slippery slope to sweat pants and a minivan. Dressing well actually takes very little effort, but it makes a huge difference in the way I feel and the way others feel about me. It is just as easy to pull on a simple dress or tailored trousers as it is to pull on a pair of tatty mom jeans. I have worked out a simple system that makes it easy to dress nicely every day and takes just a small amount of extra time. Think of it as developing a uniform.

  First, you need to find the cinematic version of yourself. I don’t expect the full frontal glamour of Auntie Mame to be for everyone; it takes a lot of guts to leave the house with your neckline plunging to your waist. I recommend instead that you find your own icon of cinematic style. How about the understated chic of Audrey Hepburn as Holly Golightly in Breakfast at Tiffany’s? If you are looking for casual elegance, take a page from Katharine Hepburn’s fabulous oeuvre and dress like you’re vacationing On Golden Pond. Catherine Deneuve is the ultimate in retro sophistication in Belle de Jour, though I can’t recommend her career choice. How about the menswear look of Diane Keaton in Annie Hall? I love the smart sexiness of Rene Russo in The Thomas Crown Affair and the theatricality of Jennifer Hudson as Effie White in Dreamgirls. Once you’ve chosen your fashion film, take your cues from your leading lady. Most movies will show your character dressing for all occasions, and don’t forget to watch for hairstyles and accessories.