More Or Less

Someone very clever once pointed out to me that the perfect number of children is “one less.” It’s true. With one, you still remember how easy it was to be childfree. When you have two, the days when you had only one seem like cake. Sigh.

Didn’t you ever notice that those nanny-to-the-rescue shows always feature families with four or five kids? No wonder the parents need help. I love those shows, by the way. There’s always some dreadful behavior the parents exhibit, some glaring weakness, like excessive screaming, or my favorite, the give-‘em-candy-all-day-mother, to make you feel like such a great mom.

And now there’s a woman on Project Runway, the Heidi Klum fashion show, who has five boys. No wonder she wants to run away and sew pretty things. She’d probably be willing to do the “Who Wants to Be a Garbageman in August?” show, just to get out of the house. Of course they show her in a pencil skirt, perfect white blouse and pumps, hair smoothed back, sitting on a stool watching her brood jump up and down like banshees as she talks about staying pulled together. She said something like, “I dress every day. Otherwise it’s a slippery slope down to sweatpants.” What I’d like to see is the camera panning around to show her three (there must be at least) nannies, hiding out of sight in the back hallway. No way that woman keeps those kids herself. Not remotely possible. Not without a lot of valium.

So, anyway, for two weeks this summer my daughter is at sleepaway camp and I actually get to try “one less” for a while. It’s nice to spend extra time with the boychild, and very reassuring to know he can actually speak in complete sentences. With his big sister around to ‘help’ him explain everything, we weren’t entirely sure he could. It’s also amazing how different it is to have just a boy vs. just a girl. When he went to grandma’s for two weeks sailing camp at the beginning of the summer, the girlchild and I chatted and puttered around her room. I even found an opportune time to have “the talk.” (I think it’s important to get my point of view across while she’s still young enough to think French kissing is ‘icky.’) It was a great galpal fest, at least for me, and maybe one of the last before tweenage sets in.

With just The Boo at home, I get to experience boy friendship in its purest form. See, boys don’t really have heart to hearts. Oh he’ll talk to me (or more rightly, at me) about all manner of things – how he is doing in the Pokemon game battle, what strategy he used to crush his opponent, the technical differences between a Star Wars ATAT and an ATST, anything in fact, that is pugilistic, thunderous, and above all fictional. Reality? Feelings? Factual events of the day? Not so much. But does this mean I’m free to go my merry way while he plays his games? Not at all. He seems to need my presence. Just my physical presence. No interaction, doesn’t want me to play the games with him, just wants me there. In case he needs to tell me something. If I wander off to straighten a closet or pay a bill he’ll come calling after me, “Mom? Mom? Can I tell you something?” And off he goes, even when I say, Hon I can’t really listen right now. Doesn’t matter to him. Ears never close.

One day they’ll both take off and it will be quiet and calm and I’ll have all the time in the world to myself. But I don’t wish for that day at all. Not at all. When it comes I know I’ll be wishing I had one more. Just one more.