A Little Understanding

Posted September 07, 2007

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"Every night, after Birdy and I are asleep, you and Daddy watch sex." Ben has looked up from his breakfast of oats and apples to make this claim, and I smile stallingly at him and blink. Blink. Blink. "What, honey?" "Sex. You and Daddy watch it. On TV. What is it even?" Blink. Blink. Unless Michael is plying me with porn in the dead of my sleep cycle, I am lost; to the best of my recollection, we have not watched anything even vaguely nasty since the early '90s when, five minutes into one particular film, I felt like we were studying a how-to video about plumbing or hydraulics and could not stop cracking jokes ("And then this fits in there like that -- that should just about do the trick!"). "I see the video box every morning," Ben concludes, and this wakes me finally from my surreal trance. "Sex and the City!" I announce, like a game-show winner. "Sex and the City!!! It's just a funny grown-up show," I say, then add, "and if for any reason you feel like telling your friends or teachers or anybody about it, which I don't know why you would, but if you do you should call it by its whole name. Sex and the City." "Okay," Ben says, and does not add, "weirdo," although I would understand if he did.

Living with children is like sitting in a meeting where half the room has been given one memo and half another: some of us are talking about energy conservation; some of us are talking about the best size for baked-bean cans. "What?" we say to each other a dozen times a day. "What? I don't know what you're talking about." And it starts up first thing, when, every single morning, the kids dash out of the house and into the driveway, and then turn to stone, standing there like baffled statues while the leaves swirl around their legs. "Into the car!" I cry, every morning, "Get in the car, guys!" and they spring back to life. "The car? Oh! Okay! The car!" By tomorrow morning, their memories will again be washed blessedly clean of this particular sequence of events.

Or this: Ben is singing in a local children's chorus, and they had their first concert on Sunday. He was thrilled: dressed up in his black pants, white shirt, and red tie, he could not stop admiring himself. "This is not how I usually like to dress?" he said, my boy of the turquoise yoga flare pants, "But I like how I look." Michael took a photograph and when Ben looked at it on the camera, he shook his head. "Erase that one," he says. "I just look like a little kid in that picture." We arrived at the auditorium and the director got the kids up on stage for one last rehearsal, then hustled them into the lounge for a snack before their performance. "How was that, bunny?" I said to Ben when I found him. "You were yawning a lot, I saw." "I know!" he said. "I was nervous! She said we were having another run-though but then suddenly it was just the performance happening." "Oh honey," I said, picturing the six people in the audience during their rehearsal, his father and Birdy not arrived yet, nobody even paying attention to the singing kids, the director cutting them off in the middle of every song. "That was the run-through." Ben nodded slowly, understanding dawning gold in his face like the sun. "Ah ha!" he said, like a Scooby-Doo mystery resolving itself. "I was actually just starting to wonder if that's what was going on."

"How much would it take?" Ben wants to know now. "If you were pouring lemonade into a pond? How much until the pond looked yellow?" "I don't know," I say. "I kind of think it would never look yellow." "Yes," Ben says agreeably. "But how much lemonade until it did?" I can't think of an answer to this, but Birdy walks right over to Ben and puts her face very close to his face, even though her chewing mouth is full of yogurt and oats. "I know Ben!" she says, spattering him a little bit with her enthusiasm and breakfast. "I know what you mean! A lot of lemonade, right? A lot, Ben." I hope that they feel about each other the way I felt about Michael last week in the supermarket when he said, "I just don't get tilapia. I mean everyone's so crazy about it, but to me it just tastes like fish and dirt." Michael and I -- we're getting the same memo. "I know!" I said. "I know exactly what you mean.

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A Little Understanding

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by Catherine Newman

Catherine Newman cooks for the family

Dalai Mama Dishes

Catherine Newman cooks for the family

A Little Understanding

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