• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

Instead, I am awash in a sea of camouflage. I step lightly through my apartment in four-inch heels, as careful as a bomb defuser in a minefield, trying to avoid the neck-breaking toys scattered everywhere. Some items I recognize—bikes, skateboards, Rollerblades: typical childhood fare. Others scare the bejesus out of me, like the thing that has three wheels and requires swaying hips to propel it, and the sneakers with the hidden wheels that seem to pop up only at busy intersections and always at the moment when the light turns yellow midway through the crossing. I’m quite fond of the full-size scooters that fold up into sleek bundles worthy of Inspector Gadget, but these objects are more usually found perilously leaning against a wall, ready to slip into my path and carve a gash 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 my chin.

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