Didn’t I Feed You Yesterday?

by Laura Bennett

  “Here,” he says, handing me a bag. “I got you the Monistat three-day capsules with the external cream, and the one-day treatment from Vagisil that comes with the cool comfort wipes. I wasn’t sure which you’d want, and they both sounded like viable possibilities.”

  I’ve always been aware of how much smarter Peter is than pretty much everyone around him, including his wife and offspring. I used to chalk this up to the age difference (eighteen years, but who’s counting), but lately I’ve had to admit that he is simply always right. I have come to accept this truth, which makes it no less annoying. Because he is smart, he assumed his children would be as well. He was a bit disappointed when the test scores started rolling in.

  “Sorry,” I said, handing him a pre-k admissions score sheet. “I’m average. I diluted your gene pool.”

  This houseful of average doesn’t bother me at all. I have seen many a person with a genius IQ have difficulty navigating day-to-day life. Peter is one of these types, always misplacing things and being mildly disappointed in the world around him. It can’t be easy for him, and if he were a people person, I’m sure it would bother him more. He has wonderful social skills, but prefers not to use them. Peter’s carefully cultivated “crazy professor” demeanor is an attempt to ward off normal discourse, particularly with strangers. He also has this way of looking at you with crazy horse eyes, which is sort of off-putting at parties.

  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.”

  HELP WITH THE HEAVY LIFTING

  “All my kids’ therapists say they are very well-adjusted.”

  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.

  Best (or maybe worst) of all, she accused me of dressing the boys in various hues of Polo Ralph Lauren shirts. I ask you, why would I ever spend good money on something like that when L. L. Bean features just as many colors for half the price? Doesn’t that nice lady know what kind of shoes I could buy with the difference?

  Now I am certainly no stranger to angry comments. I take full responsibility for everything I say and the wrath that comes along with it; I just didn’t expect a website that once featured a blogger called Slut Machine to go so self-righteous and judgmental on a woman because she has help. I guess I should be thankful the folks at Jezebel aren’t calling me Sextomom.

  Trust me, I’m not at the spa while someone else is raising my brood. Kids in New York need planned activities; they don’t just run out to the backyard or meet up with the neighborhood gang for a game of kick the can. There are music lessons and organized sports, pediatrician and orthodontist appointments, birthday parties, and playdates. Inevitably these events take place at different ends of Manhattan at the same time. It’s a complex matrix of times and places, requiring a team effort to make it happen.

  If our household is a team, Alicia is the captain.

  “Don’t forget to pick up Truman after your meeting because Nicole will be with Pierson at reading. I spoke to Peik. He is coming home on his own. I’ll take Larson to speech and meet you back here at four-thirty.”

  Roger that. Dependable and organized, Alicia calls the plays by telling us all where we need to be on any given day. She expertly handles as many as ten speech and language sessions a week for Larson’s learning disability; she knows all the therapists’ names and has friended them on Facebook. I can count on one hand the days of work she has missed in the thirteen years she has been with our family. I think it’s wonderful that my children love this woman, who has cared for them since they were babies. And if she felt disrespected by being referred to as “girl,” would she still be here after so many years?

  Alicia is a single mother to two boys, Warren and Christian, who have grown up alongside my boys. My philosophy is that if Alicia is happy, I am happy, so I attempt to make her life as stress-free as possible. Having her boys around where she can keep an eye on them makes life easier for all of us. Of course, this puts the boy count in the house at seven on most afternoons. Scan the loft and you will see scattered about the apartment glassy-eyed boys of various sizes and colors planted and staring into screens of some version of mind-sucking technology. Until, of course, they all decide it’s time for a game of monkey in the middle. Then they pound about until the downstairs neighbor starts beating on the pipes.

  Alicia is petite, well spoken, and well dressed. She never hesitates to use her knowledge of style on me, saying things like “You’re not going to leave the house in that, are you? You look like Secretarial School Barbie.” Or “Explain to me why you are wearing a tuxedo at two o’clock in the afternoon.” Thanks to an addiction to exercise and fitness magazines, she is superfit. When she arrives at eight-thirty in the morning, she has already been to Boot Camp or kickboxing or on some other blood-rushing, muscle-building endeavor. She has a passion for designer handbags and can describe in detail the latest It bag. Once, when I was pitching a fashion game show to a network and needed a display of designer loot to demonstrate the game, I turned to Alicia to borrow what I needed.

  “That Chloé bag is gorgeous,” said a network executive.

  “I know, don’t you love it? I borrowed it from my nanny.”

  “Your nanny? I want to be your nanny.”

  “Oh, no you don’t.”

  DESPITE HER QUIET DEPENDABILITY, ONE LOOK AT HER FACEBOOK profile photo gives you a clue that Alicia has a wild side. Wearing a wig and a fitted hot-pink dress, photographed from behind showing off her well-toned rear: this is the Alicia I see only occasionally.

  “Is that Alicia?” a father asked me at a school Halloween party.

  “Catwoman? Yeah, that’s her.” I smiled.

  “That’s my sexy nanny!” Pierson added, proud to be there with the masked girl in the tight leather pants carrying a whip. Costume parties always bring out Alicia’s wild side. She tends to look like one of the girls on the Leg Avenue packages at Ricky’s. The sexy cigarette girl. The glamour gladiator. The dark angel. Every costume features Alicia’s hard-earned abs.

  She doesn’t get mad often, but when she does she is capable of a crippling silent treatment, which renders me defenseless. The silent treatment is the worst for me. Yell at me, hit me, just get it over with. I have tried to convince her that keeping her anger in is unhealthy, and it would better and more cleansing for her to express why she is angry, but I think she knows I am just saying that because I can’t bear her torture.

  Alicia has been a part of our family as long as Peik has. And when I say “a part” I don’t mean some organ we could live without if necessary, like the spleen. Not one of my sons knows a world without her. She knows everyone’s favorite snacks and makes sure they are stocked in the pantry. She is the softy in the house: the boys go to her when they feel unloved or in need of some extra attention. To be democratic, she refers to them all as “Boyfriend.” When Peik was a baby, he pronounced Alicia “Sheesha,” which has stuck so completely that even my friends and neighbors think that is her name.

  “I called the house and spoke to Sheesha yesterday,” Larson’s class mother told me, “She is so lovely. She said it would be no problem to make her banana bread for the bake sale.” They know better than to ask me.

  Larson has improved upon this moniker by adding “Mom,” as in “Sheesha Mom,” and sometimes just plain “Mom.”

  “You are Lawa,” he tells me, “and Sheesha is Mom.” When he calls out “Mom!” from somewhere in the house, if I respond he will sometimes say, “Not you, Mom, my other mom.”

  That my children have no problem letting me know exactly on which side their mommy bread is buttered doesn’t bother me at all. I’ve known women who have fired nannies for less-obvious attachment, but my feeling is that if I’m going to entrust my children to another woman, I’m glad they love her. And she, unquestionably, after all these years, loves them right back.

  WHEN I MARRIED PETER, ZOILA WAS IN THE PRE-NUP. OR AT LEAST, she would have been if there had been a pre-nup. The first time I came up to Peter’s apartment, I couldn’t help but notice that he already had a wife: there she was, putting away the laundry.

  “Laura, this is Zoila,” he told me as she was pulling on her coat and I was taking mine off. “She knows where the bodies are buried.”

  Nice job description, I thought.

  “Nice to meet you, Miss Laura,” she said. I liked her instantly. She wears ankle socks, and a cardigan, and she changes her sneakers for Dearfoams slippers when she is in the house. The woman is standard-issue sitcom—Alice from The Brady Bunch, with a Guatemalan accent.

  “Mr. Peter, I picked up your shirts and bought some new vacuum cleaner bags—and here.” She handed him a little pile of business cards, receipts, and what looked like pennies wrapped in lint. “From the laundry.”

  After Zoila left, Peter explained to me that he’d been seeing her for nearly twenty years. She had outlasted every girlf
riend, casual date, and broken betrothal. Some women had objected to his deep connection with Zoila, claiming that they, too, could starch a collar or take a complete message, with area code, should he not be at home to receive a call. Those women are history; Zoila remains.

  “So you see,” he told me, “she’s part of the deal. If you have a problem with another woman going through my pants and maybe even keeping secrets from you, then you might as well tell me now.”

  “Can she cook?” I asked. “Because I don’t.”

  “No, she’s not a cook,” he said. “But I don’t really eat.”

  “She can stay.”

  This was a smart move on my part, as in all my years of marriage I have never had to remember a thing that involves my husband. People tell me it must be nice to have a housekeeper, but I prefer to think of her as a Peterkeeper. She doesn’t run my household, just his Elba-like piece of it.

  But Zoila’s value to me is also immeasurable: she never forgets a child’s birthday (and has even had to remind me a few times), but, most important, she has never, ever told me anything about Peter that I might not want to know. I’m not saying that there’s anything to tell, but I gain peace of mind from the confidence that I wouldn’t have to bother with it if there were.

  WHEN I CRAWLED HOME, PREGNANT AND EXHAUSTED, FROM THE challenge part of Project Runway, I was faced with the seemingly insurmountable task of creating a twelve-piece collection in two months all by myself. No pattern makers, no cutters, no beaders, just me. This was going to be a full-time task, and I knew that the boys would be too much for Alicia without me, so she brought in Nicole. Now I can’t imagine our house without her.

  The only thing Alicia and Nicole have in common is that they are both from the Caribbean. While Alicia is petite, Nicole is six feet tall and weighs two hundred pounds, most of it pure muscle. I like to introduce her as my bodyguard.