Didn’t I Feed You Yesterday?

by Laura Bennett

  Instead, I am awash in a sea of camouflage. I step lightly through my apartment in four-inch heels, as careful as a bomb defuser in a minefield, trying to avoid the neck-breaking toys scattered everywhere. Some items I recognize—bikes, skateboards, Rollerblades: typical childhood fare. Others scare the bejesus out of me, like the thing that has three wheels and requires swaying hips to propel it, and the sneakers with the hidden wheels that seem to pop up only at busy intersections and always at the moment when the light turns yellow midway through the crossing. I’m quite fond of the full-size scooters that fold up into sleek bundles worthy of Inspector Gadget, but these objects are more usually found perilously leaning against a wall, ready to slip into my path and carve a gash in my ankle at the slightest provocation. I had just gotten used to my constant terror of skateboards when Peik rolled into the apartment with his broken in half.

  “Oh, my God, it’s finally happened,” I said, putting a hand over my eyes. “You’ve killed someone with that thing, haven’t you?”

  “Chillax, Mom,” he replied, stepping up onto the board, swiveling his ankles gracefully, and moving the contraption over to the couch, stopping only when he had slammed it into the coffee table. “It’s my new wave board.”

  “As if your old skateboard wasn’t dangerous enough, you have to bring this thing into my house?” I yelled, but he’d already reinserted his earphones and was off showing the other boys how to kill themselves at twenty miles per hour in an entirely novel and irresistible way. I didn’t need to watch; I knew they were all drooling like a pack of knuckle-dragging Neanderthals being shown the wheel for the first time.

  As I picked my way back across the Mekong Delta to stock up on bandages for the inevitable “Mom! I’m bleeding!” about to be announced, I had to remind myself of the other danger, the one overhead. About three years ago I made a recording of my voice that says “Don’t play baseball in the house,” and Peter put it on a loop that now plays constantly. Even so, if my boys can find a way to nail me in the head with a small stitched leather projectile “by accident,” they will strive to do it. I dodge enough of these, and the next thing you know a basketball lands on my keyboard. After years of hostile negotiations with the downstairs neighbors, we have decreed that a basketball may not touch the floor—I have expelled many of these orange orbs from my house, yet, like cockroaches, they keep getting back in. Luckily this one was a blow-up version, so I took my letter opener and dispatched it to its next life. On my way into the kitchen to dispose of the corpse, I was nailed in the butt by a plastic hockey puck, which should have been the last straw; but, believe it or not, I have reached a level of Zen that will slowly evolve into Alzheimer’s, and then it is I who will crash my electric wheelchair into their furniture and maniacally throw balls at my grown children as they try to wipe dinner off my chin.

  IN THEIR WAKING HOURS, THE PACK NEVER STOPS MOVING. WHEN they are not attached to wheels or balls, they tumble through the apartment as a giant mass of wrestling bodies, usually with the large ones on the bottom and the small ones on top, continuing in this manner until one of them needs to file a grievance with the Don’t Bleed on My New Couch Department of I Don’t Care. If the injury sustained is serious enough, then we hunt down the child-appropriate Lenox Hill Hospital Frequent Flyer Card and head off to the emergency room. Split chins I will try to mend with crazy glue and butterfly bandages, but if that doesn’t staunch the bleeding I turn the damage over to the professionals. The triage doctors not only know us by names and birthdates but have also memorized our ten-digit insurance group number, just to make sure we have a speedy visit. And when the treated child returns home you would think he had won both the Purple Heart and the Silver Star. The brothers gather together and a hearty round of “I got more stitches than you did” and “Remember when you gave me this scar” begins. It’s like watching a Disney version of The Deer Hunter.

  Last week, Pierson came home missing one of his front teeth. It had finally fallen out at school, after weeks of him pulling on it and twisting on it and pushing on it and letting it dangle by a fleshy thread, but remaining completely incapable of just yanking the damn thing out. Someone had carefully placed the relic in a plastic tooth-shaped container and laced it onto a string around Pierson’s neck. In public school you’re lucky if they let you go to the bathroom, rinse the blood off the tooth, and carefully fold it into a brown paper towel. In private school they make jewelry out of the moment.

  “Hey, look,” Pierson said with a grin, walking over to Peik to show off this proud, if dubious, accomplishment.

  “Nice necklace,” he replied before cocking back his arm and knocking out the remaining front tooth. To be fair, Peik was really doing all of us a favor, as the tooth was already superloose and nobody wanted to go through the hell of another week hearing about Pierson’s teeth. It was so far gone the gum didn’t even bleed; Pierson just stood there, looking at the object in his hand until a lightbulb went on over his head.

  “Thankths,” he lisped to his brother before turning to me, pink with excitement. “Thith ith big, Mom! I lotht two in one day! Do you think the Tooth Fairy will give me a bonuth? I bet she hath never theen the liketh of thith before.” By bedtime the teeth were nowhere to be found, but the Tooth Fairy took pity and left a bonus anyway. I don’t mind her paying a premium for lost teeth, because the money she leaves ends up in the laundry room the next day and I just fold it right back into my purse, in wait for the next big tooth event.

  THE ONLY THINGS BOYS SEEM TO LOVE MORE THAN WHEELS, BALLS, and stitches are their own penises. Back in my day it was shocking when Michael Jackson and Madonna grabbed their groin in a music video, but these days my boys call that dancing. Every time they hear music, they clutch their crotches and hang on for dear life—it’s shockingly Pavlovian. I don’t have a penis, I don’t even like to say the word “penis,” and I will never understand the fascination my sons have with theirs or why they need to hold on to them like handles. Constantly. Everywhere I look around there is a boy who needs to put his pants on and his penis away. Like the little hominids in the American Museum of Natural History, they walk around completely exposed with no sense of shame. Even in their sleep, they’re captivated by their weenies: when I enter the room to wake them up in the morning, I am greeted with multiple woodies, all pointing at me as if I were a heroine in a demented Hitchcock film. I know it’s normal and natural and all that, but why me?

  Talking about sex with my boys is unfathomable, but when Peik came home from health class with a rubber and a banana as homework, I figured I’d better find my depth. The week before, he had brought home his crowd of boys and girls after school and gone into the boys’ bedroom, locking the door behind them.

  About an hour later, Peter prodded me. “Go in there and check on them,” he said.

  “No way. You go.”

  “It’s your turn.”

  “Cleo was my turn,” I said. “It will be my turn again when Finn is thirteen.” I went back to my sewing, and Peter went back to his stock market analysis. We were at a parenting stalemate: each pretending that they didn’t desperately want the other to be the one their child hates for having interrupted the teen orgy. A minute ticked by, then another.

  “Fine,” I said, losing this particular game of chicken. “What could they be doing, anyway? There are ten of them in there.” Under my safety-in-numbers nonchalance was a vivid image of the mythical rainbow party, as featured on Oprah. I meekly gave two knocks on the door, and an even longer two minutes later Peik opened it a crack, peering out with one wild eye.

  “What?” he snapped. I deserved that.

  “You need any snacks in there?” I held out the half-eaten bag of Goldfish crackers I’d grabbed on my way as an excuse, as though knocking in the first place weren’t humiliating enough. As far as I could tell, all the clothes were on and normal fourteen-year-old activities were under way: Web surfing, guitar strumming, truth-or-daring. Peik just glared at me. “Sorry?” I whispered a
nd he gave me a half smile of sympathy before snugging the door closed in my face.

  This incident clarified my need to have an open dialogue with my eldest son. Determined to overcome my fear, I turned to the Internet. Cleo had been so much easier; she learned everything on the street, like a normal child, and brought the information home to me without embarrassment. Besides, she has parts I understand and sympathize with. Period? No problem. Wet dream? Gross. The advice I found in the ether was disheartening. Start early, one site suggested: “When teaching your toddler where his nose and toes are, include ‘This is your penis’ in your routine.” Great; now I needed to teach the toddler something he clearly already knew as a birthright? Thanks, Mr. Internet. “Use the correct terms to avoid confusion. Say things like ‘Girls have a vulva and a vagina, and boys have a penis and testicles.’” What’s so confusing about “weenie”? Do balls really need to be called testicles? I tried this approach and started only using the word “penis”—so as not to be confusing—but my attempts went awry by way of my kindergartener’s principal’s office.

  “Why did you say ‘penis’ in the middle of circle time?” Mrs. Mackenzie asked Larson.

  “I just had to” was his reply. Her solution? He was required to come to her office five minutes early every day and say “penis” as many times as he needed to get it out of his system. Then he could return to class and join in good clean fun. After three days, his Tourettian outbursts stopped and he resumed his routine. Perhaps I can find a website that tells me to say things like “This is how you masturbate,” and the boys can then go on a cleansing routine of getting that out of their systems once and for all, as well. But hey, who are we kidding? In a world where “penis” is still considered a curse word in kindergarten, are we really getting anywhere when it comes to talking openly about sex with our children?

  I could have quit, but I take my motherly responsibilities seriously, so I pushed on. Another site blithely suggested, “If you feel uncomfortable talking to your children about sex, recruit an uncle or a male friend to discuss the subject with your child,” as though Amber alerts were merely a ruse to slow down traffic on the thruway. All this advice did for me was conjure up images of Chester the Molester and Jeffrey Dahmer. Okay, I’ll be sure to try that one. Maybe I could ask a “male friend” along the lines of my husband, I thought. He’s got a penis. I looked over at him, asleep on the couch in front of a Formula One race, remote in one hand, the other lightly resting on his crotch. How did these people ever come to be in charge of the world? This is something I often ask myself. How did men surpass women in status, power, and wealth? These questions come from a place of love, mind you. I live with far too many of them to survive day-to-day existence while harboring any ill feeling. But I will admit that I don’t understand men, and that I consistently find women to be the more capable sex. As early as the age of two, girls leave boys standing bewildered in their dust as they speed along the social, emotional, and intellectual racecourse of life.

  Cleo did everything earlier and better than any of the boys; as a group, they were slow to walk and talk, refused to give up breastfeeding at a reasonable age, and were impossible to potty train. They still can’t take a poop without yelling for help, and they can’t even manage to get all their urine consistently in the toilet. Can anyone explain why it is so hard to pee into something the size of a platter with something the size of a cocktail sausage? If I had known good aim violated the laws of physics, I would have trained them to sit down while they pee. They can sit when they poop, so clearly it’s not out of the question. I have noticed that most of them stand in front of the toilet, hands on their hips, penis thrust in the direction of the toilet as they release their man water. “Oh really?” I yell at them. “You choose this moment to not touch the damn thing!?” How is this evolved? How is this the dominant gender?

  Since Cleo was four she has fixed herself meals, uncomplicated things like breakfast and small snacks. I can’t begin to imagine one of my boys—much less Peter—taking such proactive measures to conquer hunger.

  “Mom, can I have some cereal?” Peik asks me every single morning.

  “Sure,” I say.

  Like clockwork, fifteen minutes later he starts whining. “Mom, I’m hungry. Aren’t you going to get my cereal?”

  “Is your arm broken?”

  “Don’t you love me enough to feed me?”

  “Didn’t I feed you yesterday?” I rejoin, petting him like a prize Pekingese. “Isn’t that proof enough of my undying love for you, my oldest son, the fruit of my loins, the jewel in my crown?”

  “Okay, okay.” He sulks off, rolling his eyes. “I’ll get it myself.”

  They can’t overcome hunger, and yet they are given the red phone, the suitcase with the codes, the absolute power of world nuclear annihilation. That seems practical.

  Sometimes I think Truman may be my one bright spot—my chance at being shown that men aren’t all nincompoops. But as bright as he is, he can never, ever, ever do his homework without a cattle prod pushing at him.

  “Mom, I have to do my homework,” he says, hours after the initial broadcast about how he needs to do his homework.

  “Okay,” I say again, “So do it.”

  “I need you to help me.” He slumps in front of the unopened book, the blank notebook. I walk over and uncrumple the moist homework assignment sheet clutched in his hand, put the pencil in his other hand, and open the textbook to the page designated. I then walk away.

  “There. Now I have helped you. Let me know when you’re actually doing it and get stuck. Until then, you’re on your own.”

  I never even knew that Cleo had homework until it came back to the apartment in her backpack, all dolled up with stars and stickers. She never once asked me to acquire special materials for her school projects; she was completely self-sufficient.

  After about an hour of sitting in front of his homework, playing air drums with his pencils, Truman Moms me again.

  “Mom, I think it says here that I need to build a diorama of a Native American village for social studies class. I think it says that it’s due tomorrow.” He doesn’t meet my eyes, and his start to faintly glisten.

  “How long have you known?” I ask him.

  “That’s not fair,” he says. “What difference does that make? It’s still due tomorrow.” He is about to burst at this point. Of course, I have known for a week, because another kid in his class has a mother who practically does the projects for her child—or, more precisely, enlisted the help of other moms with an email blast that started with “Do any of you sew?” I can’t let my boys off that easy; what if I’m not around the day they need to put together their own assault rifle in a godforsaken trench somewhere because some male heads of state couldn’t work things out?

  I let Truman suffer in silence one long moment more before pulling out my magic bag of pipe cleaners and felt. “Go get the glue gun,” I say, and his face instantly brightens. I figure he did stay up with me all those nights watching Project Runway and encouraged me to go audition, so staying up into the wee hours to build a replica of Manhattan is the least I can do in return.

  The multitask gene clearly rests on the X chromosome, as I know of no men who can do more than one thing at a time. Peter routinely gets up from the sofa and wanders into the kitchen for a snack, not even thinking that it might be a good idea to carry with him on his voyage the detritus from the snack he made fifteen minutes earlier. He can amass up to ten coffee cups around his home workspace before Zoila corrals them into the dishwasher. He is a highly intelligent, award-winning architect, but he can never leave the house on time in the morning because he can never find his keys. I can’t even count the times per week he has to put out an all-points bulletin on his eyeglasses. It would make sense to develop a system by which he could remember where these essential items are. A hook by the door? A string on his glasses? A chain that connects his wallet to his belt loop? And his kind run the world?

  How many
times while I’ve expressed my concern over some alarmingly backward behavior in one of my guys has a sympathetic mother said, “Well, you do know that Einstein didn’t speak until he was four?” And how many of these mothers have only girls? Five minutes of observing Larson’s preschool class is all the proof I need that little girls are superior. They complete sentences and play elaborate games of imagination, assigning roles to one another with alacrity. With an innate understanding of exactly what they want, the girls take charge of the room, organizing cubbies and dressing themselves in color-coordinated outfits, complete with shoes they have actually tied themselves. Peik still needs Velcro. Who tied boys’ shoes before that clever invention? Off in a corner, a clutch of boys is calling each other monosyllabic names as they play with a blue train with a face. Have you noticed that girls have the good sense to avoid toys that endlessly go in circles to nowhere? Trust me, I know I’m not dealing with Einstein in any of my boys; I don’t need to be comforted by the not-so-novel idea that a slow starter can end up on the path of genius. Besides, I bet that Einstein had his mother tie his shoes on the way out the door to college and that she was still wiping up the linoleum around the toilet every time he paid her a visit as a grown man.