Because I Said So (16 page)

Look at them, united. The world makes sense to them now: They have a pee-pee and you have a ki-ki. Now it’s a game—boys
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versus girl. You’re the visiting team and you’re already Out. They charge back into the house. They both push the baby in the stroller, and the baby drops your nursing bra and its frayed elastic strap gets caught in the stroller wheels and you don’t even try to save it because it’s served you long enough and well enough through these three sons. The boys forge on, pushing the baby into the bedroom they all share, and the Hulk shuts the door. You stand there for a moment, noticing all the crayon marks and snot stains, and are about to get some Clorox to clean it all up when the Tae Kwon Do Master opens the door and puts up a sign that reads NO GRILS and NO MOMS and then slams the door shut. Sure, you feel a little hurt, but you get over it. You must. These boys, they will break your heart if you let them. These boys, your sons, they will love you one instant and hate you the next. Why?

Because you’re their
mom
, the love of their life and the bane of their existence. And if you’re going to stand there and wipe tears from your eyes because they’ve locked you out, well, then you’re missing out on some serious self-serving quiet time.

So you head to the kitchen,
where else? You make coffee.

You drink coffee. You think,
Hmm, this is actually quite pleasant
to be a girl, locked out.
You even read an article that has been sitting on the kitchen counter since before the baby was born. You read it backward, last sentence to first sentence, because you are certain you will be interrupted any second and you’d hate to miss the ending. This doesn’t seem odd to you. Your days flow backward. You wake wishing the day would end; you go to sleep wishing you could start the day over. When you finish reading the article, you think,
My God, I have accomplished more than I
could have ever hoped for on a Sunday, home alone, with the
boys.
You pour another cup of coffee.

But then, suddenly, you stop. It occurs to you that it is a bit too peaceful in the house. It occurs to you that if it’s peaceful, something is definitely up, meaning: something is definitely going down. You put the coffee down and ask yourself,
Do you dare
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interrupt? Do you dare peek in?
This is typical mother-of-three-sons behavior—you are constantly second-guessing decisions you have yet to even make. You reason,
Why bother them? No one’s
crying.
Surely if there was a problem, you would be the first to know, right? But then you remember, oh do you remember, that you are the responsible one here—remember?

You run to their room, kick the door open, and see the cost of your quiet time. The Tae Kwon Do Master is standing on a folding-chair, about to add his final touch—a ghoulish Halloween mask that leaks blood-colored goop—onto a pile of boy treasures stacked as high as your head: Battlebots, Power Rangers, Curious George, Hot Wheels, Hulk hands, Peter Pan and his sword, a battery-operated fire engine, a vibrating crane, a gyrating dump truck, an entire Mutant Ninja Training Academy attached to an entire Alien Space Lab, soccer trophies, T-ball trophies, Tae Kwon Do trophies, Mancala, a chipped ukulele, a rusty harmonica, an electric xylo-phone, several glow-in-the-dark dinosaur bones, a singular hand-painted ceramic tarantula, and a very buff and extremely naked G.I.

Joe seated in his Jeep. When the boys see that you see what they have done, The Tae Kwon Do Master smiles sheepishly and hands you the Halloween mask. The Hulk says, “Look, Mommy, is that cool?” And the baby leans his big head so thrillingly far out of the stroller that the stroller appears about to tip when the Hulk announces, “Mom, Mommy, Mom, I have to make a boom!” You tell the Hulk to go ahead, make a boom, and he says, “Please, please, please, Mom, Mommy, Mom, help me!” And before you can tell the Master to clean up his chromosomal-XY mess, he declares,

“Mommy, I have to make a boom, too!”

So now they are in a hair-pulling, foot-tripping, butt-kicking race to the toilet, and there seems to be blood involved. Is it yours? You pull down your pants. You check. No, it’s theirs or, actually, it’s the Master’s, you discern after you pry them apart, and Hulk falls and hits his head on the side of the porcelain tub, and the baby spits up a shred of your bra, and the Master is now sobbing, blood drooling out of his mouth, “Mommy, Mama, Mom, he knocked my tooth out!” The Hulk stops and immedi-100

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ately enters into a litany of apologies. “Saw-ree, saw-ree, saw-ree,” the Hulk says, and he allows his big brother to sit on the potty before him, and you think,
Well, there is some brotherly
love here after all.
A bit of compassion, you think, as you watch the pooping Master gargle bloody spit into the palm of your hand. And the Hulk patiently waits his turn, sitting on the Winnie the Poo step stool and pointing at the baby, who has that red-faced WHAT IS HAPPENING TO ME, MOM? look that signals his poop is also on its way.

It’s a pooping party, and you’re the star. You are the star who is needed right now because this is a crucial moment in these boys’ daily psycho-emotional lives. After boys poop, they hate to flush it down. They want to study their accomplishment. They need Mom to do so, too. They need Mom to approve of it, Mom to admire it, Mom to wave it good-bye,
bye-bye boom
, as it swirls down the whirlpool pot. And after it is all gone, they are terrified to wash it off their hands. They want to keep it with them all day long—just like men who will keep the after-sex musk on them all day as a kind of secret they share with their bodies, themselves.

With boys, you have to bribe them into washing their hands after using the potty. You offer them bubble gum, candy, even cash prizes. And when you start doling out the treats, it starts another fight. Who got purple? Who got red? Who got a nickel, a penny, a dime? And as you watch the baby watching the escalation of yet another fight, surely thinking that this behavior is something to aspire to one day, you cannot help but ask yourself,
My God,
does any of this really surprise you?

Because admit it. You had three big football-playing brothers and a Super Bowl coach for a father, didn’t you? You even named your three boys after football players your father once coached—

Master Roman, after NFL MVP quarterback Roman Gabriel; Hulk Deacon after head-slapping defensive end Deacon Jones; baby Anton Lamar after six-foot-seven, 260-pound defensive end Lamar Lundy. You grew up in a cauldron of testosterone and even thought that someday
you
would make a fine NFL quarterback, if only given the chance. And if anyone ever even mentioned
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the notion of you giving birth to kids, you said, “Boys! Give me boys!” Come on, you
wanted
three boys. You said it yourself: “I think three boys would be fun.” You said, “Better boys than girls.

Boys are
easy
.” You thought you had this boy thing down. You thought you’d seen it all—on the field and off. Shin bones broken in half; limp arms dangling from separated shoulders; skulls cracked on sprinkler heads; collarbones snapped; barfing head concussions; bodies hurled through sliding-glass doors, off of tall stucco walls, and, once, down a cliff. Hadn’t you seen every cata-strophic boy scenario ever played out on the face of the planet?

Apparently not, because now you get to see it all over again in a more intimate version with your very own sons. See the “na-na na-na-na” fights, the “you can’t catch me” fights, and the never-ending

“it’s mine” fights. See them fight over rocks, shells, and straws.

Fights over who can pee fastest, longest, sloppiest. Fights over who can burp, fart, and yell the loudest. Fights over washrags, snot rags, and dust rags. And then there are the fights over Mom: who can kiss Mom the most, who can pick Mom more flowers, who can hug Mom the hardest, who can draw Mom the greatest crayon drawing.

Who can tell Mom the most, “You’re the best mommy in the whole world.” Those fights no one wins, except maybe you, drenched in hand-torn flowers, crayon colorings and purple Popsicle-lipped kisses. Still, so many, too many fights, and you wonder,
My God,
how did this gender ever become world leaders
? So many fights, you think,
My God, I must be doing something wrong.
So many fights you find yourself—in parks, grocery stores, and school parking lots—frantically searching out and stopping other haggard, lean mothers of three sons to ask them, “Please tell, do yours fight?” And you are actually happy to hear painful stories about bones breaking, noses bleeding, teeth falling out. So, as you regard this hormonal freak show that has become your daily life, you remind yourself,
This is normal; this is natural
. Because, for a girl, anything normal or natural is good, Mother Nature-y and organic, and thus somehow not in need of immediate repair. And for that, you thank God.

You thank God a lot. Thank God you have healthy sons.

Thank God you can swear like a lineman, yell like a lineman, and
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have the pain threshold of a lineman too. Because this last baby boy—whom you have now strolled out onto the back patio along with his brothers to watch the swimming pool–noodle fight in the driveway—he weighed ten pounds, eight ounces at birth. No C-section, no drugs, not a single stitch. The hitch? For forty days and forty nights, you could not take a single step without your hands gripped as tightly as possible on a squeaky old-folks walker. That’s right. A walker. You walked with a walker and listened to the crunching of your own cartilage with every single step because the big boy baby had actually refigured the shape of your entire pelvic skeletal structure, so that the hip bones were not really connected to the butt bones anymore. And your sons, what did they do? They looked at you with mouths open, eyebrows arched—complete compassion—before asking you, as you slow-motioned yourself from one chair to the next, “Mom, Mommy, Mom, do you want to wrestle now?” And so, several months later, you sure as all thank God that you can now walk and sneeze and laugh and run without having to reach down between your legs nearly every second to wonder,
Holy Jesus, did
my ki-ki just fall out?

So you need to “put it all in perspective,” as your mom tells you when you give her a 911 dinnertime call. Mom is so wise.

She’s eighty-one, fit, and clinically deaf. She’s always said she went deaf from doing too many high-dives as a kid. But now you know the truth. You know she went deaf as a survival mechanism while raising three sons. When you call her, you can barely hear her because the boys are having a high-pitched shrieking contest in the driveway and the baby is practicing his laugh track. When you tell her that you feel like you are running barefoot on a treadmill set on HIGH-SPEED PANIC, she says, “Are you having your period? They’re boys. What do you expect?” Then she says,

“Wooden spoons. Why do you think I gave you those three wooden spoons for Christmas? How do you think I raised your brothers? They survived, didn’t they?”

Back to your brothers, fine grown men with children of their own. Sure, they used to call your mom “a dog,” “the maid,” and
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a “stupid, selfish mother,” but they all grew up, grew out of it, and love her today, don’t they? And when she now tells them, “I love you,” they reply, “It’s your job.” And don’t you know that somewhere in the subtext of “it’s your job” is a whole lot of love?

So, when you break up another one of your boys’ fights—this one over a bucket of wet mud—and have to hose them down like dogs, and they are shaking and cold and cowering in your arms as you dry them off, try to recall your mother’s advice: “Look, try to enjoy this. Don’t be in such a rush. Look at me, I have plenty of time, plenty of time alone now to think by myself—and believe me, it’s not very much fun.”

So, please, please, try to have a little fun, will you? It’s a strapped-in, hang-on, long haul of a rollercoaster ride, and there’s no need to shout or panic or cry. When it’s all over, you’ll be shaking, weak-kneed, and winded, and you’ll say, “Hey, that wasn’t so bad. Let’s do that again!” But by then it will be too late.

GAME OVER. TILT. Time to go to bed. And you’ll be oh, so very, very sad.

You can feel it coming on every night. After the bathroom-flooding baths, the pillow fights, and the jumping on beds. After the reading of the
Little Engine That Could
and the singing of the

“Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Fart” song. After the sun has gone down and the mill you have been frantically treading on seems finally to slow down. After they have said their prayers and thanked God for everybody and everything. When the day is nearly done, and the house smells like a kennel, and there is spit-up in your hair, you cannot help but feel, not relieved nor necessarily accomplished, but sort of sad.

Tucked in their space-ship sheets, in the glow of their lava lamp–lit room, they still need you. The Hulk clutches his Peter Pan sword; the Master, his stuffed basset hound; and the baby, you. The Hulk twirls a strand of your hair and asks, “Mom, Mommy, Mom, even when we’re mad at each other we love each other, right?” The Master puts his tooth under his pillow and asks, “Mama, can I kiss you?” The baby buries his head into your neck. You peek under the bed for monsters. You check the guardrails. You turn on every light
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in the room. You try to remove all the fears these little boys feel as the night grows darker. You give them their last “don’t leave me, don’t let me go, Mommy” hug. You pet their heads, tell them, “I love you, see you in the morning.”