Didn't I Feed You Yesterday__ A Mother's Guide to Sanity in Stilettos - Laura Bennett [56]
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 Oprah. I meekly gave two knocks on the door, and an even longer two minutes later Peik opened it a crack, peering out with one wild eye.
“What?” he snapped. I deserved that.
“You need any snacks in there?