IF BY MODERN-DAY STANDARDS I HAVE A LOT OF CHILDREN, then by New York City standards I have single-handedly created a population explosion and ruined any chance for other families to attend private school due to my abuse of the sibling preference policy. A family of eight in Manhattan is practically grounds for forcible commitment to Bellevue. How could we be so crazy?
To me, having six children is completely normal. I don’t really get couples who choose to stop at one or two. That’s like going to Vegas and only playing one hand of blackjack, or throwing the dice twice. My curiosity gets the best of me: I want to see what genetic cocktail Lady Luck has to offer.
As if I needed another reason, every package of eight-pound baby comes with a special toy surprise—a designer handbag, an art deco bracelet, or a pair of fabulous shoes. My husband’s gifts are incentive enough to endure nine months of pregnancy. And I look at each occasion as my last chance. Once we get a new baby home and are faced with the added expense, I figure there will be no more gifts.
Having so many children was hardly a conscious decision, not something I set out to accomplish, but it has taken the pressure off all of the concerned parties. I don’t have to be so meticulous about every little thing. If I lose one somewhere, there are extras. We have an heir, a spare, another spare, and three more spares. I’m not really sure how that happened. Of course I know, technically, how it happened, and I admit I didn’t do anything to stop it. Sometimes it was a matter of “Oh, look, honey, the baby is walking! He has grown so fast. Time to have another!” Those were the planned ones. Then there was the time my husband, Peter, came to me with a urine-laden plastic stick emblazoned with a magenta plus sign and asked, “Is this yours?” I replied, “I’m pretty sure it’s yours.” That was a surprise one.
Planned or not, however each one came about, on most days I am happy to have them. And so I find myself with six dependent souls and the responsibility of getting them safely from infancy to adulthood with minimal mental damage to them or me. Of course if one of them gets into drugs, or we run into the occasional disability, it’s no big deal. I don’t have all my eggs in one perfect little basket; I don’t need every child to be a straight-A, Ivy League–admitted music-and-sports prodigy. I have the luxury of accepting each of them as they are, quirks, disabilities, genetic mutations, and all.
“Where did you get that?” I asked, waking from a nap to a familiar smell.
“I called Domino’s,” my daughter answered with a shrug. “Where did you get the money?” I probed, groggy and bewildered.
“The bottom of your purse.”
“Did you tip?”
“Twenty percent.” She winked, radiant with pride. “I got your favorite.”
Cleo was five years old. We’d been watching something on the television and I had dozed off, overwhelmed with fatigue-induced narcolepsy. It was a common occurrence for me in those days. I had been living in Texas and I wanted out of my marriage, so I formulated an escape plan based on higher education. When I was accepted to the graduate program for architecture at Columbia University in New York City, I took my daughter, left my husband, and moved north and east, suddenly becoming a broke, single working mother and full-time student. Cleo had spent the first four years of her life in a booster seat under my drafting table at the University of Houston; she would spend the next few lean, exhausting years in the first character-building situation of her life. And build character she did. There were days when we had to walk to school across Central Park because we didn’t have $1.50 to take the bus, but being penniless and raising a kid by myself never felt like obstacles. I was living in Disneyland for grown-ups, swinging from chandeliers with Cleo right beside me, fixture for fixture. Of course there were times when she was the adult, a doppelgänger of Tatum O’Neal in Paper Moon right down to her little banged haircut.
“Get up, Mom, you’ll be late for work,” she would prod.
“You’re not going out with that loser again, are you?” she would accurately judge.
“You are not leaving the house in that dress,” she would scold. I barely had time to parent—much less overparent—but, thanks in good part to my abject neglect, Cleo has grown into an independent, self-sufficient, and fearless adult.
When Cleo was nine, she announced at Thanksgiving that she was a vegetarian and would no longer be eating anything with a face. This is not that unusual, particularly among girls who love animals as fiercely as Cleo does. The only thing I take issue with is her choice of terminology. If she wants to be accurate, she should call herself a “pastatarian” or a “Cheeriotarian,” as I cannot recall an actual vegetable ever clearing her front teeth. Corn on the cob and French fries don’t count, in my opinion; they are starches, devoid of nutrients other than the dirt or the occasional corn worm that evades detection. If you ask her brother Truman to describe his sister, he will say, “She has big boobs and only eats cereal.”
When I met Peter, he instantly understood that Cleo and I were a package deal. Things moved quickly; we married, and in three years we had two more children. With the body count steadily growing, Cleo decided it was time to strike out on her own—she wanted to go to boarding school. It’s possible that she was too embarrassed by the repetitive proof of her parents having sex, and needed to get out of town, but I think the reason was more likely her insane love of horses. What horses do for girls is buy time, giving them a few extra years before they must discover boys. I do mean the “buying time” part literally, because those years don’t come cheap. Ever industrious, Cleo helped by mucking out the neighbor’s barn upstate in exchange for riding lessons. I was not at all surprised when she started on her own to research boarding schools that offered riding as a centerpiece of the curriculum, and more than a little relieved that we wouldn’t have to go through the grueling school application process in Manhattan. Being her usual assertive self, she compiled a list of options and set up appointments for the three of us to visit. She also filled out all the applications and wrote the necessary essays completely on her own. Talk about low maintenance. In the end she chose Foxcroft, a beautiful all-girl high school in Virginia, and achieved her double goal of riding every day and wearing pajamas to class.
Many friends and family attended Cleo’s graduation, but I couldn’t be there, sequestered as I was for Project Runway. She wore a long white gown that I sewed for her. As I toiled in the workroom at Parsons, a captive of reality programming, I occasionally had enough mental acuity to think about Cleo. I realized that sending her off to boarding school was the greatest sacrifice I had ever made in my life. The moments I missed with her—watching her dress for a date or celebrate after a victory on the hockey field—are lost to me. She thrived, grew, cultivated friendships, and gained worldviews that have formed her life, and I was not a part of the process. It would have been selfish to keep her from leaving when she was clearly so ready, but it was nearly unbearable to let her go.
“You should get a job at Hooters,” Peik once told his big sister.
“You should get a job as Dad,” she shot back.
I hope I made the right choice to marry Peter and bear his spawn, because when I gave birth to Peik I suddenly had two of him. This would be the natural place to make a Pete and rePete joke, but I will spare you. Apart from his hair color, Peik is in every way—physical, emotional, habitual—a clone of his father. I know what you’re thinking: what kind of name is Peik? My husband once had a girlfriend whose brother was named Peik, and Peter loved the name more than the girlfriend, apparently. Some women would be offended by this connection to a husband’s past love life, but not me. I have no problem with the source of the name; what I do have a problem with is the name itself. Is it for a boy or a girl? How do I pronounce it? Does it involve that obnoxious “i before e” rule? I fear I have given my son a long and frustrating way of introducing himself to strangers.
“Hi, I’m Peik.”
“Come again?”
“Peik. As in ‘bake,’ or ‘shake.’”
“Pike?”
“No, PAKE, rhymes with RAKE.”
“What kind of name is Pack?”
“It’s either high Scandinavian or low German, depending on the Google search return. Though my dad contends it’s Dutch for Peter. And it’s PAKE, not Pack.”
“Nice to meet you, Peck.”
Luckily, Peik’s sense of humor is very dry and advanced beyond his years, no doubt because he was weaned on Monty Python. As a very small child, he would push a toy grocery cart around the apartment, calling “Bring out your dead!” in a lame British accent. Since his sister is seven years older than he, his early exposure to The Simpsons and then Family Guy might only have increased his odds of getting thrown into pre-k detention for trying to be the funny kid. I know it’s in vogue to obsess over a child’s “screen time,” but movies and television have helped develop and shape his sense of humor, and I personally find him very entertaining. And honestly, isn’t that ultimately what children are for? To entertain their parents? Not in an ex-child-star-turned-to-drugs kind of way, more like a shooting-at-their-feet-to-make-them-dance sort of thing.
Peik’s movements are lethargic even though his mind spins at warp speed. Always three mental steps ahead, by the time he enters a room he has assessed what will be asked of him and has already found a way out of doing it, usually by slipping off to his bedroom to mousterbate at his computer until food is served. I call this “the thinking man’s lazy.” I suspect he spends that room time Googling “how to torture younger siblings,” as he is definitely the family rabble-rouser. On the rare occasion when the house is at peace and all the other children are engaged in quiet activity, Peik will let out a rebel yell and run through the house with his pants around his ankles, distributing wedgies. This is the only time he moves his feet unasked. He also has an uncanny ability to push people’s buttons. Back when he was six, he taped fourteen-year-old Cleo’s zebra-striped bra and panties to the front door of our apartment building. In the middle of Manhattan. When she came home with a couple of friends she was so horrified she didn’t speak to Peik for—well, come to think of it, she still hasn’t spoken to him.
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.
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.
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 before, 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.
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.
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.
I HAVE A FAVORITE CHILD. I HEAR YOU GASPING IN HORROR. I ACTUALLY believe every mother does, but won’t admit it. It’s the dirty little secret of motherhood. Why is it so horrible? It’s not Sophie’s Choice or anything. I’m not saying I don’t love all of my children equally, just that I don’t always like all of them, at least not every day (or week, or month, or year).
I have favorite shoes, movies, and foods; why not a favorite child? It’s not as though I won’t help you with your homework if you’re not my favorite. The task is just less insufferable for me with some of my children than with others. My children know I play favorites; they actually compete to be held in my highest esteem. We call their rank order the List.
“Don’t do that,” I say, “you’ll go to the bottom of the List.”
“If I rub your feet, will I go to the top of the List?” Truman says, willing to work for it.
“Just put me at the top,” says Peik, angling for a freebie.
“Mom, I’m paying my own way through college,” Cleo helpfully points out. “I’m working two jobs and saving my education fund to start up a business when I graduate.” There is a pause. “Where am I on the List?”
“I sure do love you,” Pierson says, applying himself to me like spray tan. “There isn’t a List, is there, it’s just me, right?”
“Lawa, Pake is twying to gib me a wedgie,” Larson says, not really understanding what’s going on, but smart enough to take his brother down a peg.
“Gaga baga dada mama ist,” Finn squeaks.
I prefer certain childhood stages to others, and by virtue of being in one of the preferred stages, a child can find itself higher on the List. I find babies cute and innocent, while teenagers seem hell bent on ruining my life; I’ll forgive a ruined dozen of eggs more quickly than a lost-for-the-fifth-time cell phone.
Some of my kids operate like me, so I understand them better. These are the ones who, less intellectually gifted, work harder to succeed. Some of my children are better suited to my husband’s personality: he totally gets them, while I stand there dumbfounded. I find nothing more frustrating than a child who is superintelligent but uses that intelligence to find ways to beat the system.
If you swear you have no favorite, and think you are fooling your kids, you’re wrong. Kids are short; they aren’t stupid. I find that, just as personalities are formed partly by birth order, they are also formed by preference order. I know a woman who thought her brother’s name was MySonPaul, she was so clearly not her mother’s favorite. Today this woman is a successful publishing executive, driven by her childhood striving to be on top. Her brother still lives at home.
Not only am I convinced that this competition is healthy, but I would also venture to say that overprotective mothering does more damage. So bring me that List, and who wants to give me a back rub?
I’ve given up hoping for another girl, and have really gotten the swing of a houseful of men. But don’t think even for a minute that I don’t wonder what would happen if we were to go bananas and throw the dice again. People say I’m crazy when I tell them I’m open to just one more. Really—six, seven, eight, what’s the difference? Peter and I are already grossly outnumbered. We have no current plans to have any more children, but if we did get Finn’s name wrong, we would just throw another kid on the pile with the rest of them and it would be as well loved, exquisitely neglected, and—we hope—entertaining as all the others.