Laura Bennett - Didn’t I Feed You Yesterday?

Of all my children, Truman shows me the most affection, and has valiantly lived up to his honest and stalwart name. Perhaps because he breastfed until he was four years old, he has developed a disturbing fondness for skin-to-skin contact. At nine years old, he still throws himself at me for a hug and kiss when he gets home from school—did he just cop a feel? I would take his mother love as a compliment if he didn’t show most people the same level of affection. When he was five, we took him to see Momix at the Joyce Theater, an establishment known for its dedication to modern dance and the avantgarde. It was a beautiful performance, at the end of which the dancers left the stage and exited through the audience, waving to the crowd jubilantly on both sides. Truman, his small freckled face streaked with joyful tears, leaped to his feet and stopped one dancer in mid stride by embracing her tightly around the waist. I was simultaneously proud and jealous. But then I worried that someday this polymorphous perversity might be misconstrued as sexual predation, his face was so firmly pressed against her breasts. I have also noticed that he simply cannot pass the baby without unsnapping Finn’s one-sie (if he’s wearing one, which he typically isn’t), stroking that soft belly, and saying “Good baby, nice baby.” It’s sweet. But kind of creepy.

Truman is also our natural athlete; he can play catch with small children endlessly, delighting in their every move. And he is our greatest hope for higher education, because he fences. This sport is so obscure that it is actually possible to become nationally ranked, something that would never happen in basketball or baseball. Being nationally ranked in anything looks impressive on an application, and it’s surprising how many colleges have fencing teams. Of course, what I pay for lessons will never equal what he might receive in scholarship money, but if he is going to have an extracurricular activity it may as well be one that is going to give us a glimmer of breaking even. He works hard at school and always has a new and interesting dance routine. His best attribute though, is his red hair. He gets that from his dad, who is now famous for his Einstein shock of white hair but once was russet-locked. My red hair comes from a box at the drugstore, because I’m worth it. But because I have a ginger boy, only “Hi, My Name Is Rhonda” knows for sure.

When Baby White Male turned three, another boy was born, as if I needed another boy. Until I had Pierson, it seemed as though I was merely a genetically recessive host womb, designed to produce a child in your image. Naming this one took less time than naming Truman, but it was still a dithering affair. I suggested, as I had twice before, Peter, thinking it the quickest way to please my husband and get us out of paperwork jail. He was having none of that, but did agree to a derivation, and so we came up with Pierson: “Peter’s son,” in some decrepit foreign language. It was enough to buy our release from the hospital, and seemed like an entirely appropriate moniker, but eventually we realized he looks exactly like me.

Pierson prides himself on being “sexy.” He is six and it is his favorite word. He uses it to describe himself, but also cars, skateboards, dances, food, girls, and shoes—anything at all. Our family has grown accustomed to his constant use of the word, but it tends to throw off strangers.

“Did he just say sexy?”

Pierson works his sexy image: he always makes sure he has his gorgeous curly brown hair styled with product, and he’s been choosing his own clothes since he was born: screaming when I would hazard to diaper him with Barney instead of Elmo. He did have a point. Lately, his carefully cultivated look requires an abundance of flames and skulls: his signature motifs.

“Mom, today I am Emo.”

“I thought you were Goth.”

“That was this morning.”

“What happened to yesterday’s Sk8r boy? I was kinda getting the hang of him.”

“Oh, he’ll be back, don’t worry. Would you like to see my show?”

After painstakingly creating a new look, he will pull two Nelson benches together to form a catwalk, and give us his best runway strut. When he receives a compliment on his leather motorcycle jacket, he responds with a wink of his mischievous light green eyes. If Truman is voted most likely to be a sexual predator, Pierson would be voted most likely to be gay—and that is fine with me, because God knows I could use another feminine force in this house.

Pierson loves to shop and hates to bathe, eat, or sleep. When I hear new parents talk about how the baby doesn’t sleep through the night, I have to strangle the bitter laugh that would reveal the doom I’ve faced with this child. I am such a light sleeper that I practically lie awake waiting to be awakened by him, eager to show me which outfit he plans to wear to school.

One of Pierson’s proud distinguishing factors is that the second and third toes on both his feet are connected, sort of webbed halfway up. I guess when you are one of so many siblings anything that sets you apart is something to embrace, even if it is a mild genetic mutation. Normally, I would find an attribute like this disturbing, like the human version of a six-toed cat, but I have to admit that on this handsome child, it is kind of sexy.

In a “What were you thinking?” move, a year and a half after Pierson, Larson was born. Exhausted from caring for the four previous children, and clean out of ideas, we took the easy way out and went with “Laura’s son.” Naturally, he looks exactly like Peter. Now I have three of him.

“Hey, Lawa, can you get me some owpol jus?”

“Sure, and you can call me Mom.”

Larson is an outrageously outgoing little four-year-old, whose relentless friendliness drives him to strike up conversations with everybody. However, because of developmental speech problems, his conversations tend to be a garbled stream of excited rhetoric, generally responded to with “What?” or a confused smile. When he was less than two, Larson’s adenoids were enlarged and infected, and his ears filled with a viscous fluid as a result of a series of undetected ear infections. He clearly has a very high pain threshold: he rarely peeped about anything hurting him. Apparently, if you can’t hear very well, speaking can be tricky. Once he had surgery to remove the residual junk from the infections and started speech therapy he quickly made great progress, though the exact extent of his disabilities has never been clear.

This doesn’t seem to bother him in any way. Larson spends his cheerful days surfing YouTube with the alacrity of a teenage boy and obsessively changing from superhero costume to superhero costume while begging for NRFB MIB Blue’s Clues items he finds on eBay.

Because Larson has been designated a child with “special needs,” he has an entourage—an ear, nose, and throat specialist, a pediatric prosthodontist, occupational therapists, speech therapists, and play therapists. It is a supporting cast with Larson as the shining star. We have also learned that when you can’t breathe through your nose because your adenoids are enlarged, you breathe through your mouth, and your tooth enamel pays the price. We had Larson’s decaying little front teeth capped, and ten minutes later he knocked one out by accident. With his ear-to-ear smile and one large center tooth he is very much the perfect, living comic strip character. The Larsonator.

For a while we weren’t sure what was “wrong” with Larson—as in, why he didn’t seem to progress the way the other children had. Yes, there was the physical problem, but there was also a time when we didn’t know if that was all there was to it. He had a too-happy, goofy quality about him. Autism was ultimately ruled out because of his intense desire to communicate. He went through quite a few tests, including one for intelligence quotient. The administrator asked Larson to point to the butterfly picture in a book. He responded by getting up and performing an entire dance. He started by squirming on the floor like a caterpillar, and then rolled up in a blanket, unrolling from the blanket, opening his wings, and then flying off, fluttering around the room with a large grin on his face. The tester looked at me—I swear she had tears in her eyes—and gently told me that because he did not point to the two-dimensional drawing he had failed the question. I blinked. She blinked. Larson fluttered some more. I looked at him and held my tongue. We all knew in that moment that he was going to be fine, whether the test results indicated intelligence or not. At first, I felt angry that the test had to be so rigid, but I couldn’t blame the administrator. She saw what I saw. In the next moment I felt incredibly grateful, knowing all the difficulties that mothers go through to help their children survive far worse than a delay in speech. If this is all I get, I thought, then I’ll take it and run for the hills.