Laura Bennett - Didn’t I Feed You Yesterday?

I recently read about prosopagnosia, a brain malfunction that interferes with facial recognition. Peter has this. We can be at a party thrown in his honor, stocked with blood relatives and lifelong friends, and he will still tug my sleeve and whisper “Who is that?” in my ear as a colleague of twenty years walks up to us to say hello. I have to say “Hi, David , how are things at the Architectural Digest ? Peter just loved the spread on the Ford project . Didn’t you, dear?” We’ve got it down to a Mad Libs formula, where the sentence is pretty much the same, and I just fill in the personalizing blanks. If I go too far away from Peter, he pinches my arm. I like to think of it as a love bite.

Peter doesn’t rely only on his scary eyes and wacky hair to excuse him from being social; for many years, he used smoking. It worked brilliantly—he could step out of a conversation or a meeting, or exit between courses at a boring dinner party, and hide away for the eight minutes it took to drag one down. He had this funny little habit of putting out a cigarette by rolling the cherry off the end. He then put the butt in his pocket; by the end of the day his clothes would be full of stinking shriveled trash. One day he was in a meeting with clients when little twirls of smoke started coming out of his pocket. A smoldering butt had combusted and ignited the accumulated garbage. When Peter realized what was happening, he tried to get up and leave, but by then his jacket was on full-tilt-boogie fire and he was fast becoming a ball of tweed and flames. His clients started screaming in Italian, as Italians are prone to do, running at him and patting him down as someone else threw a glass of water at his chest. This was the man responsible for building their corporate headquarters. Talk about a career on fire.

PETER HAS GROWN ACCUSTOMED TO BEING MISTAKEN FOR THE boys’ grandfather when he’s out with them. He may be old enough, technically, but he does not sit on a hill smoking a pipe, watching me child-mind from afar. He is lithe and energetic, and a natural athlete. Peter has perfect posture and extremely elegant hands. He is so graceful that he can make bowling look like ballet. But for all his finesse, he is fiercely competitive. There is no such thing as a friendly game of croquet for Peter, and we have learned not to play board games with him because of this drive to be on top.

But unlike some younger fathers, who are still building their careers, Peter never hesitates to put us first. Yes, he does card tricks, he runs like a girl, he has an überannoying habit of overintellectualizing everything. But he never complains about the cost of my shoes; for that alone, he is a keeper. I love the fact that, as an older father, Peter has his work/family priorities firmly in place.

One day a few years ago I was in Union Square with Peik and Truman after school. They were with their skateboarding pack, executing jumps and spins and other death-and police-defying acts of wonder. Truman, being five, was drifting into the larger space of his big brother, and acting very much like an eight-year-old in every way, until Peik had had enough of sharing his friends and boxed Truman out. Not one to sulk, Truman looked around for new fun and noticed a troupe of break-dancers getting warmed up. He loves break-dancers, and we often go on adventures in the subways at night to watch them perform. Knowing what was about to happen, I got out my phone.

“Peter,” I said, “you have to get to Union Square with your video camera. Truman is about to dance.”

“I’m in a meeting with the lawyer.”

“Really, Peter. Believe me. You must get this on film.”

“I’ll be right there.”

By the time he arrived, Truman was being introduced to the crowd as part of the crew. The dancers lined up one by one to take their solos. Sure enough, they sent Truman out for his turn. Truman stepped forward in his preppie rugby shirt and carrot-orange hair and executed a series of spins and worms and even the Michael Jackson crotch grab. I laughed until I cried, watching that performance. Peter was thrilled to have preserved the moment. He looked up at me and mouthed, “Thank you.”

I pointed down at my new alligator Manolos and mouthed, “Oh no, thank you.”

SIX KIDS? AND YOU WORK? HOW DO YOU DO IT?

“Well, our oldest is away at college, so there are only five left at home” is how I usually deflect the astonishment from people I meet on the street. “And we have help.”

“Oh, you have help.”

This is where the problem lies. Perhaps people assume that if I have help, then I must be rich, and hating rich people has become the latest American pastime, so they must hate me. Or perhaps because my life was made very public for a short time, during which I was nicknamed “Bad Mommy,” they think that this gives them the right to judge my choices.

In any case, people love to beat me up over the fact that I have help. Being raised with nannies doesn’t seem to have adversely affected my kids at all. In fact, all their therapists say they are very well adjusted.

In an otherwise innocuous interview for Parents.com, during which I spoke about how I juggle work and family, I mentioned the girls who help me with my children. In the South, where I come from, “girl” is a term of endearment. I call all women “girl,” regardless of age, race, or sometimes gender. This tidbit was buried in a five-screen click-through about style and girdles and whatnot, but for some reason Jezebel.com, a women’s website that is part of the Gawker group, linked to the article with a squib about how disrespectful it was of me to refer to professional child-care workers as girls. I’d been targeted by this particular website before, so I wasn’t taken aback by the hostility. What did surprise me was how many of Jezebel’s readers are stay-at-home moms, who actually have the time to read, post, and then have lengthy conversations among themselves about how bad I suck as a mom. Who’s watching their kids? The hatred spewed from keyboards all across America.

SuperSally: If you can’t take care of your kids without almost round the clock help from multiple individuals then WTF? Either you had too many damn kids and didn’t bother to think about it as you were popping them out or you are incompetent.

Experiencing the pain of childbirth does not make me love my children more; that’s why God invented epidurals. Changing every diaper, cooking every meal, and doing every pickup and drop-off will not make me love them more, either. Choosing not to do so hardly makes me incompetent.

And then there was this type:

Pureblarney: I cry inside every time I wait for the subway next to a child and his nanny. I will be raising my kids, thankyouverymuch, even if I have to pull teeth to keep any semblance of a career in tow.

Awww. You’ve got to love an idealist willing to perform unlicensed dental procedures for the sake of being with her kids. But would she rather see a totally stressed-out mom pushed to the brink of frustration? A dicey thing if said mom is standing on the edge of a subway platform.

Other comments were virulent—one reader even went so far as to post a testimonial saying she had seen me calmly sit by as my children terrorized an airport terminal. She included in her story the details that my kids were tackling and baiting each other, that I occasionally slung a curse at them, and that Peter was detached and “had completely given up on his family and quite possibly life itself.” She did go on to mention in a later comment that the boys were well behaved on the plane, but she never considered that perhaps I was operating from a plan.