EVERY NOW AND THEN, I’LL HAVE ONE OF THOSE days where I walk my feet off all over New York City, chasing down some fabric, picking up one kid, handing off another, meeting with a producer, going on an interview, having lunch with a friend, and dropping a pair of run-down Manolos at shoe rehab. At the end of that kind of day, I will enter my apartment to find at least five children and often twice as many, various adults, an unstable rabbit, and a tortoise named Frank. When I step off the elevator and into this wall of noise, the phrase “Women and children first” usually ticks across my brain, reminding me that there is a chance of rescue. Maybe this happens because the length of the place looks remarkably like the Titanic, tipped up on one end and spilling its sliding contents into the swirling subarctic waters below. Or it may just be an involuntary mantra that keeps me from jumping ship. Don’t get me wrong, I thrive on being in the center of a chaotic storm—I did grow up in New Orleans, after all.
People expect our home to look like one of my husband’s projects, which are featured frequently in magazines like Architectural Digest. He has an impeccable eye for simplicity and elegant, understated touches in the spaces he designs. In stark contrast, our loft bears a greater resemblance to the projects. I am always amused by the look of surprise when someone comes to our apartment for the first time. Once they’ve tripped through the obstacle course of scooters and skateboards, backpacks and discarded winter coats around the threshold, they come face-to-face with the one item that defines our space: the sofa.
This sofa was a big purchase for us. It was a special order from one of the fancy upholsterers that my husband uses for his clients, a rich brown leather with real down cushions for extra comfort. We waited four months for it to arrive. I watched nervously as the deliverymen maneuvered it into the freight elevator. When they finally got it into our apartment, I sniffed the air around it, taking in the distinct smell of new. They set it in place and began to unwrap it. Once revealed, the sofa was perfect, gorgeous, a giant Manolo for my ass.
That was twelve years and a few babies ago. The poor thing still sits there, a shred of its former self. The luxurious leather, so soft it was almost suedelike, didn’t hold up well to vomit or leaking sippy cups. Within a year, the seat cushions were cracked and torn and I had to make fabric covers for them. When holes began to appear on the arms and backrest, we resorted to the ultimate white-trash fix-all, duct tape. When we were having guests over and trying to make the place look nice, my husband would apply a fresh coat of tape.
Any attempt I have made to have nice furniture has failed miserably in the face of my whirlwind of boys. The pair of Barcelona chairs I dreamt of owning since I studied Mies van der Rohe in architecture school sits deteriorating, buttons gone and foam chunks oozing from the once beautifully tufted leather cushions. In a feat that impressed even me, my kids managed to destroy the matching table, somehow getting the seventy-five-pound piece of glass off its graceful chrome base and smashing it. The Jacobsen swan chairs with their smooth swivel action and hand-upholstered wool seats are now so encrusted with indeterminate substances that the color has turned from a warm red to a unnamable shade of grunge. My tall, slender Mackintosh ladderback chair has been knocked over so many times that the grid is no longer orthogonal. The seventeenth-century fruitwood bombe chest that my husband inherited from his mother now has gouges all over the wood where multiple wheeled objects have repeatedly slammed into it.
It’s not just the furniture that has been marked by the destructiveness of my minions. Our once-pristine white walls now have a wainscoting of scribbles at child-height; the blank canvas is just too much for budding artists to resist. Nonremovable stickers of a special industrial grade pepper the windows. Behind every door is a crater where the knob slammed into the sheetrock during a game of chase.
About six years ago, I reluctantly cried uncle and turned the apartment over to the kids. Kitchen appliances are buried beneath notices of field trips past and present, and artwork I can’t be caught throwing away. Every television sits in a nest of the tangled miles of cords and controllers it takes to power the various video game systems. Several swings and a punching bag now hang from the ceiling. Overflowing baskets of sporting equipment and bins of headless action figures inhabit every corner. A life-size coffin, perfectly acceptable at Halloween but a bit macabre any other time of the year, serves as a coffee table because we have no place to store it.
Sometime in the future, when my children have homes of their own to destroy, I will have a beautifully furnished apartment. It will be as fabulous as the interiors my husband designs for his clients, with all of the classic twentieth-century furniture I covet. But for now, IKEA is all my kids deserve.
Because the existing furniture is one notch short of disposable, and there is nothing of value left to break, our loft is the perfect place to have big parties. There’s our annual Halloween bash. The “Viva Las Vegas” party is admittedly a cliché but still always a favorite, especially when there are at least twenty little kids running around dressed like Elvis. “Party Like a Rock Star” headlined forty kids in faux-hawks with inflatable guitars crammed on a stage lip-synching Led Zeppelin. “If You’re Indicted You’re Invited” saw an amazing array of favorite criminals, from O. J. Simpson to Jean Harris. Vincent “the Chin” Gigante showed up in his robe, on Heidi Fleiss’s arm. One of my personal favorites combined the themes of all the other parties into one name—Michael Jackson. People came as any version of MJ from the little black boy belting “ABC” to the child-molesting plastic-surgery victim dangling a baby off a hotel balcony.
As much fun as this apartment is, it also has its drawbacks. It’s an open-plan loft, so we basically live in one big room. There are two bedrooms, one large and one small. The large one is filled with bunk beds that are not specifically assigned. First come, first served—if you want to sleep on the bottom, then go to bed first. The smaller bedroom harbors Peter, the baby, and me, but not always in that order.
Because the bedrooms leave little space for activities other than sleeping, everything else—with the exception of bathroom things—happens out in the open, and often we are in a state of Too Much Information.
Finding space around here can prove challenging. I wind up hiding in that fallback safe haven, the bathroom. What’s not to love about a room designed for one that has a locking door? And who can possibly argue with the reply “Not now, I’m on the toilet”? If things get too overwhelming, I just schedule myself a dentist appointment. There is nothing like a root canal to secure some guilt-free me time. One medicated hour in the chair with no disturbances can be pure bliss, and as a special bonus, I get to leave with a Vicodin prescription.
Constant proximity to my family is not a problem for now, but may become one in the very near future. I fear man smell the way some people fear snakes or spiders, and because I have five boys, my fears are not unfounded. An older boy named Oskar lives in our building; when he was going through puberty, I could literally smell him move past our floor in the elevator. My thirteen-year-old hasn’t yet fallen headlong into the fetid depths of puberty, but one stroll down the seventh-grade hallway gives me a hint of what I am in for, and it doesn’t smell pretty. It is the putrid hormonal byproduct of boys turning into men.
“Why do you all smell so bad?” I asked Peik after I was safely outside the building and once again able to breathe through my nose.
“You mean this?” He struck a superhero pose. “I busted in there, and with one flex the smell of man bounced off the walls.”
“Put your man smell away already,” I said, trying not to laugh at him.
In an attempt to ward off the inevitable, I have tried to stock up on odor-blocking body products, the way John Birch Society members fill their basements with canned food, but in my heart I know there isn’t enough Old Spice High Endurance Long Lasting Stop Smelling Up My Damn House Deodorant Stick in the world. And really, what is more disgusting, the stench of newly minted manhood, or the stench of newly minted manhood with a side order of “Mountain Fresh”?
I’ve done the math. Assuming man smell lasts for only two years—and I trust it is temporary, because my husband doesn’t stink—by the time all five of my boys have passed through the noisome years of puberty and I can take a deep breath in my own home, the year will be 2023.
Mini-men aren’t the only thing with an off smell in this loft. Our apartment could double as a petting zoo. I have successfully denied the kids anything large that would really require care, like a dog or a cat, but the small animals keep making their way into our household. We have a goldfish named Bubble Bath who swims in a vase on the kitchen counter, completely ignored by whichever child asserted that he would “prove I can take care of a dog” by receiving the fish. It was a short stroll to the hamster request. Ours is an insomniac who spends his nights running on a wheel that squeaks, and his days attempting to chew his way out of his ten-gallon glass aquarium home. I have applied countless rounds of WD-40 to that little circus ride, but the urine-induced rust just doesn’t seem to respond and the nightly squeaking continues. He is not a friendly creature—none of my five boys dares to handle him.
If Hamster is unfriendly, our rabbit can only be described as downright vicious. Princess started out as a “class rabbit,” which makes her sound more appealing than she is. She came home for Christmas vacation one year and never left. Small wonder the teacher never put in a call of concern regarding Princess’s whereabouts. Again, I have no idea what child conspired against me to get another mouth into the house, but none of them seem particularly interested in taking the kind of loving ownership necessary to overcome Princess’s issues. I was not there for her formative years, so I don’t know the root of her problems, but she has so much anger and is so aggressive that the killer rabbit from Monty Python and the Holy Grail is a Muppet in comparison. Princess roams free because we are afraid to come in direct physical contact with her. She has a cage where food, water, and a litter box are provided for her, but she enters only at her own discretion. Once while I was working on my computer, intent on my keyboard and semi-oblivious to my surroundings, I sensed something moving off to my left.
“Mmmm, Cocoa Puffs,” Peik said.
We’re out of Cocoa Puffs, I thought as I continued to click away on an assignment. And then it hit me. I turned in slow motion from my desk to see my son’s mouth closed, jaw moving.
“NOOOOOO!” I yelled as I snapped out of my trance. But it was too late. Realizing what he had eaten, Peik started spitting and running through the house screaming. I suspect that child is off breakfast cereal for life.
My favorite pet is Frank, short for Frankentortoise, a five-year-old red-footed tortoise who, like Princess but for entirely favorable reasons, has free rein of the apartment and a “Don’t ask, don’t tell” potty policy. Don’t ask me where he does it, because I can’t tell you. Though the children have offered his poop to guests, luckily none has ever eaten tortoise turds. Frank recognizes people; he especially loves Zoila, who is always happy to give him a handful of the real Cocoa Puffs that Peik now refuses to eat.
We also have a very large, very noisy cage of tiny finches in the front of the loft. Despite their distance from the bedrooms, I can hear them in the wee hours chirping in harmony to Hamster’s machinations at the very first hint of daylight. I am surprised they have the intelligence to do so, because we started with a pair, and those fecund little birdstards have multiplied into what is undoubtedly the most inbred, genetically mutant tribe since the Kennedys. By rough count at least forty birds have been created in the past twelve years. Currently there are twelve, which seems to be one too many because one of them is pecked at by his friends so often that his neck is slowly becoming devoid of feathers—he looks like a sad little man, flying slowly behind the flock as they swoop from one end of the ten-foot-long antique bird cage to the other in synchronized flight. They might eventually kill him. This is what happens when you live in one room with too many inhabitants. We could put him in his own cage, but he would then likely die of loneliness. It’s Manhattan survival in miniature.
A FRIEND OF MINE ONCE TOLD ME THAT HER MOTHER HAD SCOLDED her for “overscheduling” her two children. Here’s the thing about having children in Manhattan: there is no such thing as overscheduling, and anyone who calls you out on it is jealous because their town doesn’t offer the variety of afterschool lessons and experiences our town does. If New York City is Disneyland for adults, then it is freaking Epcot Center, Disney World, and Space Mountain for kids. There is no end to the things a child can learn and experience here. Filmmaking? Kendo? Basketweaving? Rock climbing? Sculpture? Oboe? Interpretive dance? We have it all.
My kids don’t have too many extracurricular things going on, because lessons tend to be expensive and add total chaos to my schedule, but I do make sure each child has a unique activity that corresponds to his talents. Peik has his music, Truman has fencing, Pierson has male modeling, and Larson has art.
One afternoon, Larson was working on a paint-a-tie-for-your-dad kit I had picked up for him at Jack’s 99 Cents. Because Larson is surrounded by some of the most amazing art and architecture in the world, he has developed a great deal of personal style and artistic ability. He was distracted from the project, though, by a favorite SpongeBob episode on the television, so he didn’t do his best work. He didn’t seem to think Peter would mind, though, and presented the result to him just as we were headed out to the Tribeca Ball, a benefit for the New York Academy of Art. Peter stripped off his ancient Hermès tie and put Larson’s on, much to our son’s delight. A few hours later, at dinner, the grande dame of art herself, Eileen Guggenheim, leaned over to Peter from a table away.
“What artist painted your tie?” she said, barely touching a finger to it.
“An outsider who goes by the name of Larson,” Peter said in all seriousness, though there was a glint in his eye.
“Ah,” she replied, leaning back to her own table, but only after giving him a knowing look, one that said she had heard of this new artist, and he was going to be a big success.
AT A COCKTAIL PARTY NOT LONG AGO, I STARTED CHATTING UP ANOTHER guest. She was a typical New York Upper East Side socialite, attractive, sleekly dressed, perfectly coiffed hair, in her mid-forties, with just a tad too much Botox as evidenced by her huge, motionless forehead. We ran through the customary small talk about where we live in the city and what we do; I told her about my ridiculous living conditions, which led to comparing notes on children. I went on a bit about my six, their various activities, and basically how challenging it is to keep the kids all alive, which is clearly the main objective of any parent.
“Yes,” she said, “I know how hard it is to keep your little ones out of harm’s way. Why, just this past month I almost lost my baby, Lily.” She paused to take an exaggerated breath.
“Go on,” I encouraged, moved by this terrible admission and at the same time dying to know all.
“Well, it was just heartbreaking to have to spend Christmas in the intensive care ward when all the other darlings were at home, waiting for Santa.”
“You poor thing.” I opened my eyes wider in what I hoped looked like an invitation to say more.
“Yes. It was as close to tragic as I ever hope to come.”
“I can imagine,” I said, leaning forward. At this point I really needed some specifics to find the right empathetic chord to strike—this is what people do: we share our own challenges to let another person know that we understand their pain. I was already flipping through my memory picture book, past the time that Cleo shoved pearls up her nose, straight to the time that Peik had emergency surgery for a septic knee. I found nothing quite as wrenching as spending Christmas in intensive care. “How did she get there?” I queried, very gently. Sometimes people don’t like to talk about accidents or diseases, especially at fancy cocktail parties.
“Well, she was sitting right there.” The woman pointed at an imaginary object. “On the counter at Bergdorf’s, patiently waiting for Mommy to make a special purchase.” I recalibrated my mental picture of Lily to reflect perhaps a pre-walking infant, something that sits up on a department store counter. “When just like that, some thoughtless person offered her a treat, can you imagine?”
“Um, no,” I said, thinking: Well, it’s not unheard-of to give a kid candy at Christmas.
“And then it happened!” she exclaimed in a hushed voice, nearly dropping her Sauvignon Blanc as she swept her other hand in front of her. “Lily jumped down off the counter to get the treat and broke her back!”
Now I did feel some real sympathy. A small child with a broken back is serious.
“Yes,” she moaned. “Thank God she had on her Chanel booties, or God only knows what would have happened to her paws. Four days in the hospital. Can you imagine?”
“Oh,” I said. “Her paws.”
“Yes, poor little Tiger Lily may never be able to have another pedicure, what with the damage to her nails.”
“Tiger Lily? You’re talking about a dog?” I said, unable to politely hide my disgust. A swirl of thoughts raced through my head: I’ve got to get back downtown; I want my ten minutes back; why does Karl Lagerfeld design dog shoes? This woman was a walking example of exactly why I won’t have a dog in the city, especially not one that will fit in a purse—that kind of dog will make you a crazy person before you are ready to be one. Once all my circuits are snapped and I’m wandering around with my latest gay boyfriend, wearing feather boas and too much jewelry, then and only then will I have a dog. If any of my children want a dog, they can move out and get one. I need to remain a safe distance from this particular banana peel.
ALL THAT SAID, FOR EVERY WOMAN IN NEW YORK WHO TREATS HER shih tzu like a child, there is a woman who treats her child like a shih tzu—prized, groomed, pampered, and coddled to within an inch of its life.
I was at a parents’ meeting at school one morning, talking to one of the new moms—an attractive, petite, divorced woman around my age. She was telling me about her difficult relationship with her ex-husband. There was a distinct sound of bitterness in her voice, which didn’t surprise me once I understood he had left her for a twenty-four-year-old.
“He really crossed a line last week,” she said. “I’m going to have my lawyer work on getting his custody rights revoked. My case is ironclad—you cannot believe what he did.”
“What did he do?” I had to ask. After all, I often have divorce fantasies that result in Peter getting sole custody of all the children, even Cleo, who has been out of the house for a good seven years already. Just for some peace and quiet. That’s what my grounds for divorce would be: irreconcilable noises. I often tell Peter, “If I ever leave, you get the boys.” It’s all in good fun, but I imagined that this mom’s problems must have something to do with Ecstasy pills rolling out of the girlfriend’s slack mouth, or her pole-dancing friends coming over for a weekend performance. Something juicy, or half naked at the very least.
“Well”—she sniffed, half angry, half distraught—“he packed their lunches with Cheetos, Go-Gurts, and bologna sandwiches on white bread.” She sat back, satisfied. My mouth fell open, so she continued. “Do you have any idea how dangerous high-fructose corn syrup is? It is in every single one of those products! And the cheese single must have been made out of milk from cows who have been given hormones and antibiotics. When the children are in my care, I poach Amish-raised, grass-fed, free-range chicken breasts and stuff them into whole-grain pitas with hydroponic tomatoes and micro-greens that we grow in our own kitchen. How could he possibly endanger them in this way? And undermine my attempts to keep them from being poisoned by the agribusinesses that are the cornerstones of the nation’s obesity and diabetes epidemics?”
“It’s a good question, I’m sure,” I said. She probably took the look of shock on my face as kindred-spiritedness. I’m all for a nutritious diet, and I personally despise Go-Gurts, which are single-serving tubes of yogurt waiting to be set on a table and exploded by the force of a small boy’s fist applied to one end. They are capable of nailing a victim at thirty feet and making in a mess that only CSI: Miami could begin to unravel. But as I sat there hearing about other dietary transgressions, I couldn’t help thinking that perhaps it was this woman’s husband who should be pursuing a custody change. Her reaction was maniacally disproportionate. Junk food is not child abuse. Not in anybody’s book. I quickly made a mental note of this mom’s name so that when she called for a play date I could demur. It’s bad enough that my kids would starve at her house and never, ever forgive me for subjecting them to tofu. But even worse, here’s what would happen if her kids came to my house:
They would have no sense of moderation when faced with the forbidden fruit roll-up. Like winter-starved animals, they would dedicate themselves to consuming the lifetime allotment of sugar they had so far been denied. They would rapidly learn to lie about what they had eaten, because they would twig to the reality that their mother was keeping them from the things they loved and craved. This craving would become so all-consuming that they would question your authority in all other areas. Soon they would be boosting Twinkies from the corner bodega, a behavior that can only lead to smoking pot and much higher crimes.
I’ve had children like this enter my apartment, walk directly to the cupboard, remove a family-size tub of Swiss Miss Cocoa, and stand there eating it with a spoon, then move on to conquer a jumbo box of frosted strawberry Pop-Tarts. Faced with three different brands of snack chips, these children run from the kitchen clutching Cool Ranch Doritos in one hand and French Onion Sun Chips in the other, only to be found an hour later in the corner of the boys’ bedroom, curled in the fetal position amid the empty packages, unable to state their own names.
Sheltering children from every evil in the word as if they were precious pets does them a disservice; decision making is a skill, learned with practice from the time they are small. Put a cute little bow on young Fido’s head if you must, and feed him his whole-wheat whole-meal whole-grain puppy diet. But then do me a favor and keep your lapdog out of my house; I don’t need a Milk-Bone overdose on my conscience. At some point my boys will go out into the world and have to decide for themselves what is right and wrong. One would hope that they will have ascertained by then that Krispy Kreme doughnuts are not really for breakfast and that there are serious repercussions if you leave the mother of your children for a twenty-four-year-old.