Jodi Picoult - House Rules

Mostly, though, I was aware of being the odd guy out. Because the minute Jacob had any kind of crisis-and that happened constantly-my mom would drop everything and run to him. And usually the thing she dropped was me.

Once, when I was about seven, my mother had promised me she’d take us to see Spy Kids 3-D on a Saturday afternoon. I had been excited all week, because we didn’t often see movies, much less 3-D ones. We didn’t have the extra money for it, but I had gotten a free pair of glasses in our cereal box and begged and begged until my mother said yes. However-big surprise-it turned out to be a nonissue. Jacob had read all of his dinosaur books and started flapping and rocking at the thought of not having something new to read for bedtime, and my mother made an executive decision to take us to the library instead of the theater.

Maybe I would have been okay with this, but at the library, there was a big honking display case taking advantage of the movie tie-in with reading in general. BE A SPY KID! it said, and it was full of books like Harriet the Spy and stories about the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew. I watched my mother take Jacob to the nonfiction section-567 in the world of Dewey decimals, which even I knew meant dinosaurs. They sat down right in the aisle, as if dragging me to the library and ruining my day didn’t matter at all. They started to read a book about ornithopods.

Suddenly, I realized what I had to do.

If my mother only noticed Jacob, then that’s what I would become.

It was probably seven years of frustration that boiled over just then, because I can’t really explain why else I did what I did. I mean, I knew better.

Libraries are places where you are supposed to be quiet.

Library books are sacred, and don’t belong to you.

One minute I had been sitting in the children’s room, in the comfy green chair that looked like a giant’s fist, and the next, I was screaming my head off and yanking books off the shelves and ripping out the pages, and when the librarian said Whose child is this? I kicked her in the shins.

I was gifted at throwing a fit. I’d been watching a master, after all, my whole life.

A crowd gathered. Other librarians ran in to see what was going on. I only hesitated once during my tantrum, and that was when I saw my mother’s face hovering at the edge of the group that was staring at me. She had gone white, like a statue.

Obviously, she had to get me out of there. And obviously, that meant Jacob couldn’t check out the books he wanted to bring home. She grabbed him by the wrist as he started to have his own meltdown, and lifted me with her free arm. My brother and I both kicked and screamed the whole way into the parking lot.

When we reached the car, she set me down. I did what I’d seen Jacob do a thousand times; I went boneless as spaghetti and collapsed on the pavement.

All of a sudden, I heard something I’d never heard before. It was louder than both my yelling and Jacob’s combined, and it was coming out of my mother’s mouth.

She screamed. She stamped her feet. Aaaaaauuuurrrrrgggh, she cried. She flopped her arms and kicked and tossed her head back and forth. People stared at her from all the way across the parking lot.

I stopped right away. The only thing worse than having the whole world looking at me going crazy was having the whole world look at my mother going crazy. I closed my eyes, feverishly wishing that the ground would open up and just swallow me.

Jacob, on the other hand, kept shrieking and throwing his fit.

“Do you think I don’t want to lose it every now and then?” my mother shouted, and then she pulled herself together and buckled a squirming Jacob into his seat in the car. She dragged me up from the asphalt and did the same with me.

But none of that is the reason I’m telling you this story. It’s because that day was the first day my mother cried in front of me, instead of bravely trying to hold it all inside.

From Auntie Em’s column:

When did they stop putting toys in cereal boxes?

When I was little, I remember wandering the cereal aisle (which surely is as American a phenomenon as fireworks on the Fourth of July) and picking my breakfast food based on what the reward was: a Frisbee with the Trix rabbit’s face emblazoned on the front. Holographic stickers with the Lucky Charms leprechaun. A mystery decoder wheel. I could suffer through raisin bran for a month if it meant I got a magic ring at the end.

I cannot admit this out loud. In the first place, we are expected to be supermoms these days, instead of admitting that we have flaws. It is tempting to believe that all mothers wake up feeling fresh every morning, never raise their voices, only cook with organic food, and are equally at ease with the CEO and the PTA.

Here’s a secret: Those mothers don’t exist. Most of us-even if we’d never confess-are suffering through the raisin bran in the hopes of a glimpse of that magic ring.

I look very good on paper. I have a family, and I write a newspaper column. In real life, I have to pick superglue out of the carpet, rarely remember to defrost for dinner, and plan to have BECAUSE I SAID SO engraved on my tombstone.

Real mothers wonder why experts who write for Parents and Good Housekeeping -and, dare I say it, the Burlington Free Press -seem to have their acts together all the time when they themselves can barely keep their heads above the stormy seas of parenthood.

Real mothers don’t just listen with humble embarrassment to the elderly lady who offers unsolicited advice in the checkout line when a child is throwing a tantrum. We take the child, dump him in the lady’s cart, and say, “Great. Maybe you can do a better job.”

Real mothers know that it’s okay to eat cold pizza for breakfast.

Real mothers admit it is easier to fail at this job than to succeed.

If parenting is the box of raisin bran, then real mothers know the ratio of flakes to fun is severely imbalanced. For every moment that your child confides in you, or tells you he loves you, or does something unprompted to protect his brother that you happen to witness, there are many more moments of chaos, error, and self-doubt.

Real mothers may not speak the heresy, but they sometimes secretly wish they’d chosen something for breakfast other than this endless cereal.

Real mothers worry that other mothers will find that magic ring, whereas they’ll be looking and looking for ages.

Rest easy, real mothers. The very fact that you worry about being a good mom means that you already are one.

During a short fit of writer’s block, I make myself a tuna sandwich and listen to the midday news. The local station is so awful that I like to watch it for the entertainment value. If I were still in college, I’d play a drinking game and take a swig of beer every time the anchors mispronounced a word or dropped their notes. My favorite recent mistake was when the anchor reported on a Vermont senator’s proposed overhaul of Medicaid. Instead of cutting to the video of his speech, they showed a clip of a polar bear plunge by a bunch of local octogenarians.

Today’s top story, however, is not funny at all.

“Early Monday morning,” the anchor reads, “the body of Jessica Ogilvy was found in the woods behind her residence. The twenty-three-year-old UVM student had gone missing last Tuesday.”

The plate on my lap falls to the floor as I stand up, tears in my eyes. Although I’d known this was a possibility-a probability, really, as days went by and she wasn’t found-that doesn’t make her death any easier.

I had often wondered what the world would have looked like if there were more people like Jess around, young men and women who could see someone like Jacob and not laugh at his quirks and flaws but instead celebrate the ways they made him interesting and worthy. I imagined the boys who would one day be in a class Jess taught and who would not have to struggle with the self-esteem and bullying issues that Jacob had struggled with in grade school. And now, none of that would happen.