Didn't I Feed You Yesterday__ A Mother's Guide to Sanity in Stilettos - Laura Bennett [28]
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