Didn’t I Feed You Yesterday?

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 Hermes 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 Cafe 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 to 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