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By Root 473 0

postnatal depression, our there-but-for-the-grace-of-God defense put me right off. I felt driven to distinguish myself from all those normal-normal mommies, if only as an exceptionally crummy one, and even at the potential price tag of $6.5 million (the plaintiffs had researched what W&P was worth). I had already lost everything, Franklin, everything but the company that is, the continuing possession of which, under the circumstances, struck me as crass. It is true that since then I have sometimes felt wistful about my corporate offspring, now fostered by strangers, but at the time I didn’t care. I didn’t care if I lost the case so long as in the process I was at least kept awake, I didn’t care if I lost all my money, and I was positively praying to be forced to sell our eyesore house. I didn’t care about anything. And there’s a freedom in apathy, a wild, dizzying liberation on which you can almost get drunk. You can do anything. Ask Kevin.

As usual, I’d conducted my own cross for opposing counsel (they loved me; they’d have liked to call me as a witness for their side), so I was asked to step down. I paused halfway off the stand. “I’m sorry, your honor, I just remembered something.”

“You wish to amend your testimony, for the record?”

“We did let Kevin have one gun.” (Harvey sighed.) “A squirt gun, when he was four. My husband loved squirt guns as a boy, so we made an exception.”

It was an exception to a rule I thought inane to begin with. Keep them away from replicas and kids will aim a stick at you, and I see no developmental distinction between wielding formed plastic that goes rat-a-tat-tat on battery power versus pointing a piece of wood and shouting “bangbang-bang!” At least Kevin liked his squirt gun, since he discovered that it was annoying.

All through the move from Tribeca, he’d soaked the flies of our movers and then accused them of having “peed their pants.” I thought the accusation pretty rich from a little boy still refusing to pick up on our coy hints about learning to “go potty like Mommer and Daddy” some two years after most kids were flushing to beat the band. He was wearing the wooden mask I’d brought him from Kenya, with scraggy, electrified-looking sisal hair, tiny eyeholes surrounded by huge blank whites, and fierce three-inch teeth made from bird bones. Enormous on his scrawny body, it gave him the appearance of a voodoo doll in diapers. I don’t know what I was thinking when I bought it. That boy hardly needed a mask when his naked face was already impenetrable, and the gift’s expression of raw retributive rage gave me the creeps.

Schlepping boxes with a wet, itchy crotch couldn’t have been a picnic. They were nice guys, too, uncomplaining and careful, so as soon as I noticed their faces begin to twitch I told Kevin to cut it out. At which point he swiveled his mask in my direction to confirm that I was watching, and water-cannoned the wiry black mover in the butt.

“Kevin, I told you to stop it. Don’t squirt these nice men who are only trying to help us one more time, and I mean it.” Naturally I only managed to imply that the first time I hadn’t meant it. An intelligent child takes the calculus of this-time-I’m-serious-so-last-time-I-wasn’t to its limit and concludes that all his mother’s warnings are horseshit.

So we walk through our paces. Squish-squish-squish. Kevin, stop that this instant. Squish-squish-squish. Kevin, I’m not going to tell you again. And then (squish-squish-squish) the inevitable: Kevin, if you squirt anybody one more time I’m taking the squirt gun away, which earned me, “NYEH-nyeh? Nyeh nyeh nyeh NYEE-nyeh-nyeh-nyeh nyeh nyeh nyeee, nyeh NYE-nye nye NYE-NYE nye-NYEEEEEEE.”

Franklin, what good were those parenting books of yours? Next thing I know you’re stooping beside our son and borrowing his dratted toy. I hear muffled giggling and something about Mommer and then you are squirting me.

“Franklin, that’s not cute. I told him to quit. You’re not helping.”

“NYEH-nyeh? Nye nyeeh nyeeh. Nyeh nyeh-nyeh nyeh nyeh. Nyeh nyeeh nyeeh-nyeh!” Incredibly, this nyeh-nyeh minced