Family
Kid Stuff
Why did I write a book about my two boys? I didn’t have a choice.
(Page 2 of 2)
But what about the boys? What would they think? Aside from a couple of my National Public Radio essays that came on the air when they were trapped in the car, they had never read or heard a thing I’d written. Which was fine with me. Telling was dedicated to Hayes and Vince with a caveat—“Please wait until you are at least fourteen to read this book.” But The Lunch-Box Chronicles was not just rated PG, it was all about them. They had to know.
The first chapter was no sweat. It opens at 2:45 p.m., when I’m picking the boys up from school—the chaotic scene at the schoolyard, the anguished cries of starvation: “Please, just one Slim Jim! Please!” The second chapter took us into deeper waters, as I described how I ended up becoming a single mom in the first place. When I read aloud the part about how much I hate leaving blank the line for “Father” on school forms and applications, Vincie buried his head in his pillow, and soon I saw his shoulders begin to shake.
The chapter moved to a cheerier note, talking about how much less alone we are than I thought we would be, but Vincie never lifted his head. I felt terrible about making him sad. After I snapped off the light, I lay down next to him. “It’s okay, Vincie,” I said, “it’s okay,” even though in many ways it just wasn’t.
Things went from bad to worse. The next night’s selection mentioned the disappearance of Vince’s beloved guinea pig, Sparky, and before I knew it, Vincie was crying again. I stopped reading. Maybe this wasn’t such a good idea after all.
“Vince,” said Hayes anxiously. “Listen. I’ll buy you a new guinea pig with my own money. I promise I will.”
Vince lifted his tear-stained face, amazed by this show of big-brotherly concern. “Will you really?”
“I swear, Vincie. A black one just like Sparky.”
“Mom!” Vincie cried excitedly, sitting up. “Take us to the pet store tomorrow!”
“We’ll see,” I said, touched and relieved by Hayes’ saving the day, but unwilling to reconsign myself to endless cage-cleaning and living room furniture fragrant with rodent urine. “You might have to wait until you go off to college.”
“That’s no fair, Mom!”
The next few nights we sailed smoothly through chapters about dinnertime and birthdays, but the chapter “Our Bodies, Their Selves” raised several red flags. This chapter deals with the issue of parental nudity and kids’ awakening sexuality, and one of the first sentences describes their adorable newborn bodies—including their “fingertip-sized penises.”
“Oh, my God, Mom!” Hayes spluttered.
“It’s when we were babies, Hayes,” Vincie explained. “Just like that part about us getting in her bed and peeing all over her and choking her. It’s not, like, now.”
“That’s right, Vince.” I chimed in, pleased to be defended, but several of the anecdotes that followed—the three of us sliding around the bathtub together when they were little, Hayes’s first inquiries about the female anatomy, and finally an incident on an airplane in which six-year-old Hayes seemed to be flirting with a little five-year-old blonde—did not find favor either. The airplane incident was deemed apocryphal.
“That did not happen, Mom.”
“It did, honey, I swear. You just don’t remember.”
“No, it did not. So far this chapter is sick. It’s too mushy, and it’s very, very sick.”
“Should I just skip ahead?”
“No,” said Hayes. “Don’t skip anything.”
In a matter of weeks, they knew it all—well, almost all. I have to admit I omitted the chapter in which I figure out what I’m going to tell them about my checkered past, and I also drastically abridged the section about Sylvia Plath and the idea of a mother’s committing suicide. But sometimes I got in too deep before I realized what was coming. At one point, for example, I was reading about gender differences, about how in the seventies we thought it was all socialization and environment, and that if little girls played with trucks and little boys were given Barbies, in no time our race would be practically androgynous.
FAMILY/ headline: Kid Stuff subhead: Why did I write a book about my two boys? I didn’t have a choice. Summary: My literary mentor warned me not to write about my children. So why did I? Because I had to. by Marion Winik
As the chapter explains, I don’t feel that way anymore. Hayes and Vince listened with perplexed looks on their faces as I gave my new view.
“Girls are interested in people, feelings, and relationships,” I read. “Boys are interested in noise, motion, and action. Girls will actually ask a question like ‘Are Mike and Ellen married?’ or ‘Is that guy with John’s dad his friend or his boyfriend?’ whereas boys will not even look up when Mike, Ellen, John’s dad, and his friend come into the room—”
“Who are all those people?” Vince interrupted in a bewildered tone.
“Nobody, Vince. It’s just an example. Now shut up,” explained Hayes, the literary critic.
I sighed and continued. “Put a group of girls together unsupervised and they will talk about everyone they know and tear them to shreds. Put a group of boys together and they will make an ungodly amount of noise and break things. Put it this way: Girls are bitches, boys are assholes.”
Uh-oh. I clapped my hand over my mouth.
“Mom!” Hayes was shocked.
“Which is worse? A bitch or an asshole?” Vince wanted to know.
“Girls are bitches, boys are assholes. Heh, heh, heh.” Now they were getting into it.
“Listen, you don’t need to go blabbing this part all over the playground tomorrow.”
“Oh, we won’t. Don’t worry.”
Yeah, right, I thought. Might as well print the T-shirt now.
After it was all over, while we were playing Scrabble one afternoon, Hayes broached the delicate subject again. “Mom, you’re not going to write about that ‘Inside Hayes’s Underpants’ thing, are you?” he asked, not looking up from his tray of letters.
“Well—I won’t actually give a guided tour, if that’s what you’re thinking, but I can’t swear I’ll never mention it.”
“Mom, promise me you won’t.”
“I can’t promise. It’s my job, Hayes.”
“Can’t you get a different job?”
“Even if I did, I bet I couldn’t stop writing about you. Do you just hate it?”
He said, “No—well, yes—well, I, I—kind of like the book, Mom.”
“Why?”
And then he made the same leap his father had. “Because it’s our book.”
That’s all I wanted to hear.T
Pages: 1 2
My Library
