CHAPTER TWO

Feeding Frenzy

 

On weekdays Marla and Alexander arise at the dawn’s early light, either rousing or being roused by their children, and instantly swing into their dress-them, feed-them, let’s-get-out-of-here-fast morning mode. When I emerge from my bedroom at 7:15 or 7:30 (Milton will follow fifteen or so minutes later), Olivia, fully dressed and sitting crossed-legged on the floor outside my door, announces in reverential tones more suitable to “Elvis is leaving the building” that “JuJu”—that’s my grandmother name—“is up.”

Down in the kitchen I open my arms to a soft warm bundle of Toby, who guzzles his bottle of formula solemnly, tightly gripping my pinky and gazing deeply into my eyes as if I alone hold the secret of his happiness. Isaac, puffing his cheeks out and then punching them with his fists to make a satisfying pop-pop-pop-pop sound, is greeting me with the trick I recently taught him. And although I wish he would think of me as his storybook-reading rather than cheek-punching JuJu, I am feeling warmly welcomed by my temporarily irresistible grandchildren.

The operative word, of course, is “temporarily.”

Marla and Alexander, on their feet and on the move, are swilling down bites of bagel and cups of coffee while also matching small shoes to small feet, ponytailing a tangle of long yellow hair, preparing Olivia’s lunch and Isaac’s snack and a couple of Toby’s backup bottles, stuffing the food and some changes of clothes and various other necessities into backpacks, and persuading two, sometimes three, of the kids simultaneously that they still love the breakfast they loved ten seconds ago. But Isaac is dumping his Cheerios on the floor. And Toby is letting us know, via screams, that happiness can no longer be found in a bottle. And Olivia is defending her right to eat a bowl of berries that consists of three measly berries and eight spoons of sugar.

“Hey, girlfriend,” Alexander says to Olivia. “The idea is berries with sugar, not sugar with berries.”

Olivia isn’t accepting these proportions. Nor is Isaac accepting a box of Frosted Flakes as an alternative to his rejected Cheerios. Nor is Toby accepting a pacifier as a replacement for his once-beloved, now apparently hated bottle. There is, at the moment, much crying in the kitchen.

Marla and Alexander, scolding, cajoling, comforting, chastising, pleading, insisting, and sometimes threatening dire punishment, focus on getting their family ready to leave. Miraculously they are able to make this happen. And they’re on their way to work, driving downtown in two separate cars with the children strapped into three different versions of car seats, Marla and Olivia going off in one direction, Alexander and the two boys in another. Milton, who has made coffee—his special coffee—for himself and me, brings our breakfast and newspapers out on the porch. And unless a grandchild is ill and we have volunteered to be the default nannies, the day—give or take a few toys and games and Cheerios and crayons and some sandals and Junior Suffragist shirts to pick up—is all ours.

Milton and I are exhausted just from watching our son and daughter-in-law negotiate these high-octane early mornings, sometimes with colds or stomach flu and always on impossibly little sleep. The spillage, both liquid and solid, is often torrential. The din and the demands go on nonstop. But Marla has said of the parent-career-marriage juggling act they engage in that she feels that they are much luckier than most. “Alex and I share the child care fifty-fifty,” she explains. “And my bosses couldn’t be more understanding. Plus our children are healthy, our day care is great, and you and Milton are living right here in town. I know plenty of working moms who have none of these.”

In addition, Marla’s parents—both of them younger, thinner, and stronger, not to mention more glamorous, than we are—can be called on from time to time to fly from their Michigan home to Washington, D.C., where they’ll free their daughter and son-in-law to go away for a weekend while they baby-sit.

And yet, with all this support, Marla adds, “I still would have to say that we’re always living on the brink of chaos. Even with all of the pieces in place, even with everybody being helpful, things can sometimes start falling apart because families and children can be so unpredictable.”

With a gift for contingency planning that puts FEMA and Homeland Security to shame, Alexander and Marla are unlikely ever to let things fall apart. Their just-in-case scenarios, their months-in-advance advance planning, their lists of people to call when the people they’re counting on to show up fail to show up, appear to cover every possibility. But by the time they’ve finished doing their best by their three children and their careers, there isn’t too much left over for personal pleasures. Having it all, says Marla, is not an option.

“Someday I’ll play the piano again and work out every day, plant a vegetable garden, do regular volunteer work, spend more time with my husband, and entertain like Martha Stewart instead of serving salsa, chips, and beer. But right now?” she unapologetically tells me. “Right now there’s no Martha Stewart in my life.”

Nor, right now, is there much Martha Stewart in mine.

Indeed, when our friends come by for a drink before we go out to a restaurant together, we drink—if it’s not too blazing hot—on our porch. For although the Alexander Five have colonized that porch with a jogger, a buggy, a couple of strollers, some balls, a helmet and bike, and four extremely large and ugly bright green plastic boxes from Peapod’s home-delivered groceries service, it still looks better out there than it does inside. Inside isn’t looking too good not only because of the kids’ stuff scattered all over the floors and not only because the tops of our front-hall radiator covers now display two different sizes of diapers (some unused, some used) and two different strengths of sunscreen (for infants, for children) and pacifiers in two distinctive styles. It also isn’t looking too good because all our household grace notes—the vases of flowers, the painted Russian boxes, the coffee-table art books, the charming knickknacks, the glass bowls filled with candy or potpourri—have been removed, to save them from being damaged or lost forever, from every (at least I hope every) child-reachable surface. And since child-reachable surfaces include what Isaac is able to reach when he enterprisingly pushes a chair to the object of his affections and then climbs up on it, our first floor is a sorry and most un-Martha combination of stark, strewn, and stinky.

Our dining habits have also taken a dive since the arrival of the Alexander Five.

For when there were just the two of us, Milton and I habitually sat down to a quiet dinner at 6:45, the perfect compromise between his wish to have dinner at 8 and my preference for dinner at 5:30. Though we constantly watch our weight, and though we often eat our dinner in the kitchen, we still like dining graciously and well, which involved—in the good old days—the use of cloth napkins and our beautiful flowered plates, and a glass or maybe two of a quite decent wine, and a main course that might be a veal piccata, a poppy-seed-crusted tuna, or chicken breasts in a mustard-ginger sauce.

Often, while we were eating, there would be mellow music playing in the background—the Modern Jazz Quartet or Simon and Garfunkel. We’d discuss everything from the state of the world to the veal. Dinner was, in our postchildren years, a highly civilized meal. And someday it will be that way again.

Someday, when there are just two instead of seven of us, it will be that way again.

At the moment, however, we’re still in search of the answers to several questions. Like: When and where will who be eating what? And, can’t the children use napkins instead of sleeves? And, shouldn’t someone sometimes try a vegetable? And, couldn’t Olivia learn, when she sees a grown-up eating something that she believes to be utterly revolting, to stop saying “yuck” and making vomit noises? Actually, I’ve invented a little rhyme to recite to Olivia whenever she begins her “yuck” routine. It goes:

Don’t be rude

About other people’s food.

And since she now recites the poem (after she does the “yuck” and the vomiting noises), I think that we’re beginning to make some progress.

We hope to make some progress on other fronts. For instance, Milton and I and Alexander and Marla agree that we won’t aspire to togetherness at mealtimes. We agree that Milton and I will plan to eat at more or less our usual time and the rest of the gang will do dinner catch-as-catch-can. Here, on a typical Wednesday, is how this plays out:

I’ve set the kitchen table for two, with four other help-yourself settings stacked on the counter, and I’m making food enough for us all to eat—Milton and I in ten minutes, the others whenever. Marla has arrived, having picked up Olivia on her way home from her office. Alexander has arrived, having picked up Isaac and Toby on his way home. Marla is heating a baby bottle, and Milton is cooking the older children pasta, and Alexander is trying to comfort a famished and wailing Toby, and Isaac is playing peek-a-boo under the table, and Olivia is drawing on her special Olivia pad on top of the table, and I’ve just spilled gravy on the kitchen floor, and Olivia now has slipped on the gravied floor, and we’re mopping her off and serving her her pasta, and Isaac is saying “no, no, no” to his pasta, and our background music is Isaac’s “no”s and Toby’s diminishing sobs and Olivia merrily singing to the somewhat frazzled adults, “If you’re happy and you know it, clap your hands.”

Wine helps. Filling Toby’s belly with formula helps. Using the plain, unflowered dishes helps, because then I’m not compelled to say, “You’ve got to stop banging that flowered dish with your sippy cup.” Accepting less than elegant manners helps. Getting accustomed to kids bobbing up and down from the table between bites of pasta helps. And so does the absence of jazz and “hello, darkness, my old friend,” for we can’t handle any more music while Olivia is singing her never-ending verses of “If you’re happy…”

Milton and I are no longer clapping our hands.

Throughout this meal, let me note, Alexander and Marla are responsibly telling their children to remember their pleases and thank yous, and use their napkins and try not to slurp, and that pasta is for eating not for wearing. They also are scolding Olivia for giving Isaac a poke when he tries to steal her zigzag straw from her glass. They also are offering Isaac some alluring replacements for that zigzag straw but his position, unarticulated but totally, screamingly clear is, “Accept no substitutes.” They also are holding, walking, bouncing, feeding, talking to Toby, who, although normally cheerful, is now inconsolable. And they also are, at dessert time, sternly limiting their children’s supply of sweets, though Olivia—whose middle name surely should have been Let’s Make a Deal—is a tough negotiator.

“One mini Dove Bar for you, little O,” says her mother.

“Four,” Olivia brazenly replies.

“Four—are you crazy? One,” her mother tells her.

“JuJu always lets me have three,” she lies.

“Never,” I say indignantly, though I sometimes let her have three, but not when her mother or father is anyplace near.

Olivia silently raises her hand, smiles her killer smile, and waggles two slender fingers in the air, soon after which she is eating TWO mini Dove Bars.

And Isaac, outraged, starts yelling, “Mine! Mine! Mine!”

Soon after which he is eating two mini Dove Bars.

I’ve always said that, when raising kids, you must establish and stand by certain principles. I never said you should stand by them all the time. And so, as far as I’m concerned, let them each have three mini Dove Bars, so long as they stay in the kitchen, where nothing is velvet.

I feel a need to explain my concerns about velvet.

During the years that Milton and I were raising three boisterous boys, we decorated our house appropriately, choosing fabrics and furniture better known for their endurance than for their charm. We wanted our sons and their friends to feel welcome and comfortable in our home, which meant that fragile furnishings would not do, and which especially meant that the sofas and chairs I was longing to upholster in elegant velvets would be covered in sturdier fabrics, like corduroy.

I really loved velvet. I didn’t much love corduroy.

But I bided my time and eventually my children grew up and got places of their own, freeing me for a less defensive décor. And over the next several years the stain-resistant corduroys gave way to rooms full of velvet, delicate velvets, glorious velvets, more velvet (some have suggested) than anyone needs. I had bided my time and my sons were grown and now it was safe to have sofas and chairs of velvet. Except I had failed to factor in the grandchildren.

Who, by the time I had fully finished velveting the house, began to arrive.

Now I don’t think I have to say that I love my grandchildren more, far more, than I love velvet. But why must I choose?

And so, whenever they visit, I attend lovingly to their needs while standing between drooling babies and golden velvet, between runny-nosed toddlers and deep rich burgundy velvet, between pre-scholars clutching melting M&M’s in both their hands and a subtly striped (mostly fawn and celery) velvet, between kids oozing catsup and mustard and peanut butter and cherry pie and a lushly patterned brown-bronze-mocha velvet.

I have waged, until the moving in of the Alexander Five, tough but successful battles against the forces that would violate my velvets. But now that I’m facing attacks that are both daily and sustained from my three enchanting but often smeary grandchildren, I am, for the first time, fearful for their survival…. The survival, that is, of my velvets—not of my grandchildren.

In addition to breakfasts and dinners each day, and lunches on the weekends, there’s a great deal of in-between eating known as the “snack,” which is why my glass-windowed kitchen cabinets (once so neatly arranged that sometimes I would actually stand there admiring them) are now a jammed-in-all-together helter-skelter mess of animal crackers, fishy crackers, mini-muffins, tiny cartons of applesauce, miniature boxes of Gatorade, miniature boxes of cereal, and (take your choice) either Scooby-Doo or Dora the Explorer fruit-flavored snacks.

Isaac, who has the plump rounded beauty of a Renaissance cherub, can also be found admiring my cabinets, his beseeching brown eyes and his piteous cries as he gazes at the goodies behind the glass conveying a state of criminal starvation. Trying to carry his oh-too-solid flesh past the cabinets and onto a kitchen chair poses a challenge to the lower back. And trying to sell him on carrots when he’s yearning for Scooby-Doos poses a challenge similar to selling George W. Bush on tax increases.

Snacks are much preferred to meals and are eaten far more frequently and copiously—before and after breakfast, lunch, and dinner. And, unlike meals, which in theory are eaten only in the kitchen, snacks are carried to every room of the house. My supermarket sojourns, which, despite those boxes of home-delivered groceries, take place about four out of seven days a week, can barely keep pace with this voracious consumption. Nor can my DustBuster suck up the smushed and spilled and stomped and crumbled food debris as fast as Isaac and his big sister create it. The tidiest of the three children is Toby, whose repertoire is limited to the bottle, though Milton and I tend to call it the “fucking bottle,” because it is merely a shell into which—each time and for us with great difficulty—you insert a disposable condom-like plastic sheath. And should you forget to insert the sheath (as both Milton and I will sometimes forget to do) and pour the warmed formula into this shell of a bottle, you’ll soon be mopping formula off the floor.

Our ineptitude with the bottle extends to our failure to master the locks of Toby’s bouncy seat, safety locks designed, we’ve been assured, to protect a baby from falling out of his seat and not for the specific purpose of torturing his hopelessly klutzy grandparents. So Toby is locked in his bouncy seat, screaming for his bottle. And Milton and I have finally prepared his bottle. And now we need to unlock the locks and lift Toby into our arms and feed him his bottle. The unlocking part of this plan isn’t going too well.

“Press down here, and pull there,” I say to Milton.

“I’m pressing. I’m pulling. It isn’t working,” he says.

“I think we need to release that center part first,” I say to Milton.

“I already tried. It won’t release,” he says.

“Or maybe we could just slide his little arms out from under the harness,” I say to Milton.

“Get out of my light and stop talking,” Milton says.

Eventually, thanks to a not-very-gracious team effort, Milton and I spring Toby from his bouncy seat. He no longer has any interest in his bottle.

Cleaning up the kitchen at the end of a three-meal, five-or-six-snack day, Milton, munching his grandchildren’s leftovers as he does the dishes, seems to have discovered his inner child. “This mac ’n’ cheese is pretty good,” he tells me. Or, popping some soggy frozen pizza into the toaster oven and then devouring it, he pronounces it to be “not bad at all.” He turns rather haughty, however, when I offer him some fruit-flavored Scooby-Doos. “Certainly not,” he says. “I have my standards.”

But our standards, as I have made clear, are not what they used to be. With the velvet imperiled, the flowered dishes unused, the state of our house not something you’d want friends to see, the kitchen shelves in tumult, the shelves of our freezer and fridge beyond description, the sound of silence replaced by the sound of crying, and gracious dining no more than a distant memory, the phrase I keep holding on to is, “This too shall pass.”

Then Isaac flings himself at me and gives my knees a fiercely passionate hug. And Toby sleeps in my arms with sighs of contentment. And Olivia puts her small hand in mine and says, “Let’s take a shower and dress up stylish.” And Alexander and Marla share a quiet drink with us at the end of an evening. And maybe I really don’t want this to pass too soon.