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
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
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
“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 and 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
“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
