You Can Go Home Again

Ah, the family vacation - a rite of summer. Memories that become as much a part of us as our tissue, blood and bones.

Our summer vacations always entailed the family station wagon breaking down on the way to see our grandparents and our father trying to fix the car with whatever was at hand. When our windshield wiper inexplicably broke during a thunderstorm, my father stopped at a farm stand to buy a potato. He bit the potato in half and smeared the windshield with the potato on the theory that potatoes were somehow water-repellent.

When that didn't work, and with the windshield now completely obscured by rain and potato, he tied one of my brother's shoelaces to the end of the wiper, rolled down the window, and drove with his left hand outside, manually operating the wiper using the shoelace. Where was my mother in all of this? She was reaching around behind her, swatting her hairbrush in the general direction of the backseat to quiet the chorus of protests by my brothers and me.

Given this, you may wonder why I chose to visit these people this summer, and to subject my own children to them.

It was Henry's first trip to Cumberland, my hometown. We stayed at Rocky Gap, a lovely lakeside resort that I have been visiting for more than 30 years, the kind of place where kids under 10 still eat for free and the service is slower than an upside-down box turtle.

Several of my best friends from elementary and middle school still live in Cumberland and almost all of them have daughters. Sherri brought 5-year-old Elle and her toddler brother Ben Ben down from New York. Julie was visiting from Florida with Cameron. Kerry came with 7-year-old Ila. Samantha brought Grace. And Emma and the girls, who last saw each other a year ago at Rocky Gap, immediately reconnected and formed a girl gang. Shawn, who is an adoring auntie, and Heather, who had the sense to let her kids stay on their bedtime schedule, joined the rest of us for drinks lakeside while Scott and Samantha's husband watched the girls swim and my parents stayed with the boys in our room.

We got caught up on each other's lives over shots and homemade birthday cake. I love these women. They oxygenate my blood. Heather has her mother's hilarious sense of humor and could win a prize for sexiest preacher's wife. Julie, who still loves a good time, just like high school, was the prettiest homecoming queen in our history and is still clueless about how gorgeous she is. Kerry is one of the most passionate people I've ever met, especially after a few beers. Samantha is mother to everyone, loving our children as if they were her own and raising Grace to be a little lady worthy of her name. Shawn is a glamour girl on the outside, but on the inside, she's a country girl more loyal than a St. Bernard. And Sherri is the closest thing I have to a sister, and I'm not convinced an actual sister could be better.

We have been there for each other through the deaths of parents, the births of children, the ends of marriages, the beginnings of new relationships. I don't think I could live without them. And to see our daughters playing together, bonding, having an impromptu sleep-over in Sherri's room and sneaking potato chips in bed, almost blew my heart out of my chest.

It was worth the fifteen hours spent in the car with a crying six-month-old, Emma throwing up into a grocery bag and Quinny having to go potty during a traffic jam on I-95. It was even worth the fight Scott and I had over a headrest that was obscuring the back windshield, which ended in me giving him the finger in front of the children. (In my defense, I gave him the finger so that I wouldn't curse him out loud.)

Close on the heels of this trip to Cumberland was Scott's family reunion in Westchester. The Balber reunions were started 40 years ago by ten Balber cousins who grew up in the same building in Brooklyn. There is a dysfunctional structure to these reunions, with a regular family meeting presided over by Balber Board Chairman Cousin Michael. Cousin Petey, whose real name is Stuart, is the family CFO, who reported a zero balance in the family's coffers. (Not surprising, since the sole family asset is a forty-year-old hard salami.) Cousin Marty gave a stirring presentation on Balber family origins, discovered by him at a genealogy booth at a Renaissance Fair: "You thought we were Russian, but we're Swiss, you dummies," he said, unveiling a computer-generated Balber family crest. In the center was a large palm tree, possibly foretelling the ultimate migration of an important contingent of Balbers to Miami.

Along with being chairman, Cousin Michael is also the only Balber who can discern whether a new Balber has the Balber Thumb. Cheers erupted during the Friday night buffet when he declared that Henry does, indeed, have the Balber thumb. And with that, Henry was pressed, literally and figuratively, into the bosom of the Balber family, in the form of the ample cleavage of Cousin Irene.

As Henry exulted in being passed from Balber to Balber, falling asleep in Cousin Dara's arms, snuggling into Cousin Dossie's neck, it dawned on me that my boy is part of this tribe. He belongs to them every bit as much as he belongs to me, a fact made starkly clear when the family's matriarch, Great Aunt Joy, wept when she saw that Henry had the same birthmark as her beloved brother Genie, Henry's grandfather, now dead more than twenty years.

When we arrived home on Sunday, I picked up the Sunday Times and read an article in the Business section about happiness. The one thing the happiness experts agree upon is that stuff doesn't make you happy, strong relationships do.

And I thought about Scott and me, imperfect parents, sometimes struggling partners, who accidentally gave our children the one thing this summer that may truly make them happy: membership in a clan. And then I thought about how we knew to do this. For me, it began with a station wagon and a potato.

This entry is dedicated to Chaney Dakota Spring, who gave 16 years of faithful service as Zealand Family Dog. She is catching sticks for the angels now. Rest in peace. Good girl.

More Gaga, Less Goo Goo

It was 103 degrees in the shade and I was happily traipsing through the concrete canyons of Tribeca on my way to meet a friend for lunch. These were the stiletto sidewalks of my singlehood, and after spending the Fourth of July weekend with Scott and the children at the beach, I was overcome with nostalgia for my life as a unit of one.

My friend and I had agreed to meet at the Odeon and I arrived early. I reveled in opening the door with my hand instead of kicking it karate-style so that I could jam a stroller through it. I sat down, ordered a club soda, and just breathed.

My friend arrived, looking damp, but dapper. In the middle of a successful law career, he had taken a turn at home with his two children and I was hungry for some empathy.

"So," I began, reaching for the bread basket. "About staying home and raising children..."

"It's horrible," he said with a big smile.

That moment captured for me the dichotomy of parenting. We spent the rest of lunch discussing the boundless joy of watching your children grow and the paralyzing fear that something could somehow go terribly wrong.

I told him about the weekend we had just spent at our good friends' beautiful new beach house. On the one hand, I relished our big barbecued meals outside, our post-bedtime, adults-only wine talks and my delicious swim with Emma and Quinny while my friend held Henry in the shade and loved up on him. But where I once adored water in any form, now, with three children, it became another hazard and source of anxiety. Our friends' pool sparkled, but it also menaced. Jerry Bruckheimer has nothing on me in dreaming up disaster scenarios and this little flagstone oasis became the backdrop for my worst fears played out in the technicolor 3-D of my overactive imagination.

My friend told me about the day he took his daughter on the Cyclone roller coaster at Coney Island. As the car crept up the rickety tracks toward the first drop, he was at once both utterly proud of her bravery and completely convinced the tracks would collapse and their bodies would be thrown into Astroland.

"How can you bear the anxiety?" I asked.

"Because I want them to be brave and adventurous," he said. "I want them to be bold."

"Damn," I thought. "I do too."

Because I was, and can still be, bold. I just need to be reminded that inside this Upper East Side mother is a cocktail-swilling, purse-slinging daredevil who once grabbed Manhattan by the horns and rode it like a mechanical bull.

My mother always says that when you're paying attention, the universe will guide you.

As luck would have it, the next night, I had tickets to a Lady Gaga concert with my dear friends Kate and Anne and my new friend Cristina. They are three badass blonds who love a good time and somehow have refused to allow their family lives to swallow them whole.

I knew I could learn from them.

So I pureed carrots for Henry and pumped a bottle of milk, threw a roast chicken on the table for the big kids, stuffed my bra with breast pads, shook my hair out of its bun a la Linda Carter turning into Wonder Woman, bid Scott a fond farewell, grabbed his credit card and hailed a taxi.

After some pre-Gaga libations at a bar down the street from Madison Square Garden, we strode to the box seats that Kate had wrangled for us. We were sharing the box with the usual panoply of bankers and lawyers.

Lady Gaga made her entrance and I was captivated. She appeared on a giant screen in silhouette, several stories tall, in what looked like a set of bat wings, but turned out to be giant disco ball shoulder pads.

We danced and shimmied while the bankers and lawyers emptied the chafing dishes of their fried chicken strips and hot dogs. The mix of free vodka and Gaga left us dizzy. "Jump!" shouted Gaga, and we jumped.

On my second trip to the private restroom - a close runner-up to the open bar for my favorite feature of the corporate box - a woman hissed in my ear: "Going to the restroom again? I'd like to be doing what you're doing."

I looked at her, confused. All of that jumping was a bit much for my post-baby bladder and I had slightly peed myself. Just a little, but enough to require a couple trips to the Ladies' to, um, mop the floor, so to speak. She wished she had wet herself....?

Then it dawned on me. She thought I was doing cocaine.

I went back to my Gaga gaggle and told them what happened. It is rather telling of our current station in life that everyone was outraged by the suggestion. "Can't we just be high on life?" Kate asked in a snit, until Anne reminded her that we were also high on a bottle of champagne, a round of pre-concert Gaga-tinis and the deadly Cape Cods Kate had been liberally mixing at the open bar.

We jumped higher and harder as flames shot out from Lady Gaga's leather bikini. I didn't even think about Quinny's bathroom nightlight setting the hand towels on fire and burning down our building, or whether I had left some carrot chunks in Henry's food.

"You can be whoever you want to be," exulted Lady Gaga, who had changed into a transparent nun's habit. We cheered wildly.

As the show ended, I got a carefully-worded email from Scott asking when I might be on my way home. I slipped into a cab and sped back to my life.

I opened the door and a battle-weary Scott was holding a non-sleeping Henry. The big kids were asleep, but Henry was just getting the party started.

"From Goo Goo to Gaga," said Scott.

"And back again," I thought scooping up Henry.

I put the baby to bed, then woke up two hours later to feed him. At 3 a.m., a wet Quinny crawled into our bed dragging his urine-soaked blanket with him. An hour later, Henry was hungry again. When the sun rose, so did Henry, and I saw that one of his eyes was swollen shut with mucus. It was about this time that Quinny used his Yoda underpants as his own personal toilet for a number two. I began collecting soiled bedding.

My hang-over, which had just been flirting with the corners of my eyes, smacked me upside the head. There would be hell to pay for the fun I'd had. And laundry - yes, there would be laundry. Lots of it.

But I had been to Gaga. I was a Gaga-loving mama. And if Lady Gaga was right and I could be whoever I wanted to be, I would choose exactly this: a woman facing three loads, one in Quinny's underpants, and a vodka death spiral that would take two days to overcome. I vowed then to keep that Gaga flame alive.

Before I left the Garden, I bought the concert t-shirt, the one with the oversized banana and two disco balls on it. And yes, I will be rocking it at the Citarella fish counter.

Black Is the New Black

The other mothers were obviously wondering why I was wearing black nail polish to the Fancy Nancy-themed birthday party.

"It's called 'Nocturnelle,'" I whispered to one woman who was staring in alarm at my hands. "By MAC."

She was immaculate in a white linen suit and wearing something eggshell-pinky on her perfectly-manicured fingers.

"It's not really black," I tried again. "It's deep grey."

Truth was, it was the black nail polish I had bought for Emma and me for Halloween when we dressed as vampires. And the reason I was wearing it in mid-summer at a party where little girls were parading in matching pastel tutus and twirling chiffon parasols goes back to my desire to impress Quinny.

Quinny is a tough customer. While Emma seems to have just accepted me as this woman who landed in her life like a friendly alien one day, Quinny has always been a little skeptical.

I am a third wheel to Quinny. He has a mama whom he adores. If you ask him his favorite ice cream flavor, he'll say "Mama." He loves to go to "Mama's Bank," which he apparently believes Mama owns and keeps stocked with lollipops just for him. And of course, he has Papa, too, who carries him around on his head and tickles him just right. So with lollipops, tickles and all that love, who needs this other lady with her incessant hand washing and rules against lightsabers in the living room?

Quinny understands that I carried his beloved brother Henry in my belly and that I am therefore Henry's Mama. So he begrudgingly accepts that I have to be in the house, sort of like the late party guest who brings a case of beer after the liquor store is closed. No matter how you feel about him, you have to let him in.

Of course, for my part, I am wild about Quinny. I haven't known this kind of unrequited love since my freshman year of high school when the basketball player I had a mad crush on wanted nothing to do with me. He worked in the mall and I spent hours teasing my bangs into an irresistible hedgerow before gracing his counter with my presence, only to be ignored. My only solace is that he still works at the Chick-Fil-A.

But back to Quinny. I decided that we would make Star Wars cookies. Taking my cue from McDonalds, I thought I could endear myself to Quinny by aligning myself with his favorite franchise.

We bought Star Wars cookie cutters and new baking sheets so they wouldn't burn. Quinny and I made the dough together and pressed it into Darth Vader and Yoda shapes. Giddy with success and Quinny's smile, I announced that we would now make Darth Vader icing.

Having slept maybe three hours, I took the container of black food coloring, popped off the lid and then shook it vigorously. Quinny watch wide-eyed as I sprayed the kitchen with what looked like squid ink. The floor, counter tops and appliances all had leopard spots. Somehow, Quinny was spared, but I looked like a chimney sweep.

"Papa! We had an accident!" Quinny shouted. I put my hand over his mouth, instantly covering his face with black fingerprints.

"Ha ha ha!" I said. "Isn't this fun? This is how you're supposed to make Darth Vader icing."

"Papa!" screamed Quinny.

It took a roll of paper towels and an entire container of wet Swiffers to clean the kitchen. By the time I was finished, Quinny had lost interest in decorating the cookies. And I had about 5 minutes to get ready for the birthday party. So I loofaed myself until my face, neck and chest were covered in pale green rather than black blotches, but my fingernails still looked like I had been making mud pies. So I quickly coated them with black nail polish.

Emma eyed me critically.

"Black nail polish really isn't in style anymore," she informed me.

"I know," I said.

"Grey is in," she offered.

"I know."

"Mama wears grey," Emma continued. "It looks really pretty. It's called 'Chinchilla.'"

DEGAGNE

I've always been a late bloomer. I drove myself to the mall to buy my first training bra. I didn't start law school until age 26. The only thing I did before most of my friends was to marry and divorce.

When I was a little girl, I assumed I'd start having children around the same time my mom did, well-timed to coincide with the legal drinking age. But my twenties came and went, then I found myself separated from my husband at age 32. Although I had high anxiety about whether or not I would ever have children, I was able to distract myself with my law career and a string of relationships, some good, some not so good, while time marched on and my ovaries began their steady decline.

Then I met Scott. And he came with two of the best little bundles in the world, Emma and Quinny. And so it was that in my late 30s, I was introduced to the wonders and perils of true love, love for a man and his children, the kind that suddenly leaves you vulnerable to the vagaries of the universe in a way you never thought possible. One minute I was blithely jay-walking in high heels through Tribeca traffic, the next I was clutching two beloved little hands in an Upper East Side crosswalk, saying a little prayer that we'd make it to the other side.

The watershed moment when it really hit me that the footloose, champagne-fueled single girl I had been was gone for good came when I was about five months pregnant and Quinny had the stomach flu. Scott and I took turns carrying him into the bathroom, watching him cry and wretch into the toilet while we sat on the ledge of the bath tub and surreptitiously wiped our own tears. Exhausted, Quinny finally begged not to go into the bathroom again. So I held him over my shoulder and I just let him throw up all over me, again and again.

The sun came up and an exuberant Emma woke. She was nonplussed by her brother's stomach troubles - she'd recently had her own vomit-a-thon after getting over-excited about a trip to Disneyland - and insisted that I help her with a Halloween word search.

"Emma," I chided, with Quinny slung limp over my shoulder and both of us stinking and covered in vomit, "I'm a little busy. Can't you see that your brother is sick?"

"But I can't find 'DRACULA' anywhere," she pleaded.

I looked down and studied the puzzle. "Some of the words are written backwards," I told her. "Which really isn't fair. That's too hard."

So while Quinny rested his big, vomity head on my soiled neck and Scott changed our bed linens for the fifth time since midnight, Emma and I finished the puzzle. And I realized that I had completely capitulated to this family.

Nothing about my romance with Scott has followed the typical boy-meets-girl trajectory. It's more like one of Emma's word search puzzles than a narrative. Here's "LOVE," here's "CHILDREN," here's "FAITH." And just recently, over Memorial Day weekend, Scott and I, after "CHILDBIRTH," became "ENGAGED." Almost simultaneously, to Scott's delight, we also added a "CAR." And I suppose, once we get Henry sleep-trained and Quinny settled in nursery school and we find an apartment big enough to accommodate this growing menagerie, we will have a "WEDDING."

But for now, I am going to enjoy being a fiance. Because even though we've cared for children together, had a baby together, even bought an SUV together, Scott was still romantic enough to buy me a ring that, to this country girl, looks big enough to fry an egg on. There are moments in the midst of the chaos of our household when the light catches the diamond just right so that a little fire burns on my ring finger. And I remember that what came first was a girl who loved a boy and a boy who loved her back.

It Sells Itself

Scott and I tried to buy a car last weekend, the Acura MDX, which got the highest safety rating in Consumer Reports and has room for three car seats, bless it. We wanted this car bad. And we were well prepared to go head-to-head with the dealer. We looked up the inventory price. I trolled car fanatic chat rooms to get a sense of the going rate for a base model and researched car dealer lingo so I could translate what the salesman was saying when he "talked to his manager." Scott and I practiced our good cop/bad cop routine, with me in the role of bad cop.

As we walked into the show room, I got an excited little flutter in my stomach. When I was a kid, my parents would take us to a used car lot on Memorial Day and tell us it was an amusement park. We totally bought it because there really was a carnival atmosphere: There were giant blow-up clowns waving their empty windsock arms on the roof of the dealership, free popcorn and balloons for the kids, plastic flags in red, white and blue, and men sweating through their polyester three-piece suits as they demonstrated the incredible features of the 1979 Datsun 510 station wagon, replete with wood panels and a carpeted trunk with fresh vacuum lines running across it.

I still love the smell of fresh paint on a tire. And there I was, in a show room on Memorial Day, ready to make a deal and drive that car home today, ladies and gentlemen.

But something was off. There was a noticeable absence of confetti. There weren't even any giant SALE signs painted in fluorescent bubble letters on the dealership windows. And inside, it was as quiet as a museum. We had to ask to see a salesman and when one finally approached us, he did so reticently, as if he thought maybe we were armed.

"Hi," he said. "I'm Don*." (*Not his real name. His real name was Darnell.)

"Hello," Scott said brightly, already playing good cop. "I'm Scott and this is Elise."

"Ffft." I said, dropping a pretend cigarette on the floor and putting it out with my toe.

"Can I help you?" Don asked.

"We'd like to buy an SUV," Scott said.

"Well, we'd like to look at an SUV," I interjected, elbowing Scott in the ribs. "Let's not make this too easy," I muttered under my breath.

"Did you want a new car? Or a used car? We have several 2007s." Don made a lackluster sweep of the showroom with one arm, then dropped his hand to his leg as if he were suddenly very tired.

"Let's look at the 2010s," Scott said. Don pointed to a gleaming black SUV several yards away. "There you go," he said. "Over there."

"Did you want us to know anything about the car?" Scott asked. "Could we look inside?"

Don opened the back door and stood silently next to us.

"How's the trunk space?" I asked.

Don opened the back door.

"Do the seats fold down?" I asked. Don folded down one seat.

"Not a lot of room back here," I frowned.

Don shook his head. "You're right," he said. "You could fit a few suitcases, but you might struggle to fit a stroller too."

"Ummm," said Scott. Clearly, he was having trouble remembering his lines.

"Maybe we should take another look at the Infinity," I prodded. This was part of the act we'd rehearsed just that morning over bagels.

Don's face brightened. "I used to sell Infinities," he said, and whistled. "They're beautiful cars. If you were going to travel any kind of distance, you might be more comfortable in an Infinity."

"Well, maybe we can test drive the Acura?" Scott asked helpfully.

"Is it a problem that we had a few drinks at lunch?" I asked Don, hoping to snap him out of his malaise. Scott struggled to keep a straight face.

"I won't tell if you don't," Don said, shrugging his shoulders. Then he pressed a button on his walkie talkie and asked that the car to be brought to the curb.

He led us to the test drive vehicle, a reddish-brown model. "What do you think of the color?" Don asked.

"I think it looks like someone had a perforated bowel and..." Scott put his hand over my mouth.

"I don't like it either," said Don.

While Scott and I took turns driving and arguing over the radio station, Don sat silently in the back seat. "Handles great!" Scott enthused. "Bad blind spot," I replied. Don said nothing.

When we returned to the show room, Scott bounded out of the car, took Don's hand and said: "Let's make a deal!"

Don led us to a table in the window. He named a price and I showed him an add from an Acura dealer in Brooklyn. "I'm sure we'll match that," said Don.

Don then looked over his shoulder and pushed a document toward me, pointing to the inventory price on a schedule. "You can probably get the car for this," he said.

"We checked the inventory price," I said triumphantly. "I was $800 less than this."

"Well, we recently had an increase in the transfer fees," Don explained. He pulled out a memo stamped "Confidential" to dealers from Acura, advising of an $800 increase in transfer fees.

"Let me leave you two alone to think about it," Don said.

"Let's try to get $1,000 off the inventory price," Scott said.

"I truly think he is already offering us the car at almost no profit to the dealership," I responded. "This guy isn't playing hardball. In fact, I think he wants us to leave."

When Don returned, Scott smiled and seemed to search around his mouth for his tongue. I leaned forward, removed my sunglasses and said dramatically, "We'll take the car today if you can take another thousand off the price."

"Hell, no," Don said. "They won't do that."

"Why don't you ask your manager?" Scott said affably.

Don left and came back a few minutes later. "We can take another $200 off. But that's it."

"We'll have to think about it," Scott said.

Don stood and offered his hand.

"Wait!" I said. "It's May 31st. Aren't you worried about losing your spiff if you don't hit your mark?" I didn't want to leave without showing off the fruits of my research. A spiff is an end-of-month bonus if a car salesman hits his mark or quota.

Don looked at me sadly and shook his head. He didn't even see us out the door.

"Way to go," I said to Scott through gritted teeth. "You had to try to get below invoice. Now Don thinks we're grinders."

"Shut your clam," Scott said. "I know how this works. Don will call us tomorrow and we'll get our car at our price."

I called Scott at his office the next afternoon. "Did Don call? I asked.

"No," said Scott. "But he probably starts his shift at 4."

"I can't believe it," I said. "We are such losers. We were practically begging Don to sell us a car. And now we've blown it. I really wanted that car!" I felt a big whine coming on.

"If he doesn't call tomorrow, we'll go back and offer him another $500," Scott soothed.

"Okay," I said.

"But I'm going to demand that they detail the car first and bring the paperwork to my office by messenger."

"Okay, tough guy," I answered. "And if they won't messenger over the paperwork?"

"If I have to go in there, I'm going to make sure I get a free cup of coffee."

Laundry Fairy, C'est Moi

Scott has been talking about his socks.

First it was: "I'm low on socks."

Then: "Every pair of socks I pull on has a hole in the toe."

And, in a more frantic pitch: "I am running out of socks!"

I have a color-coded rating system modeled after the Homeland Security Threat Level color scheme to help me determine my response level to Scott. This helps me maintain my busy inner life calculating how many pilates classes it takes to counteract the impact of a large serving of Sedutto's Birthday Cake Ice Cream while still maintaining critical communications. Blue means no response is necessary, for things like "what's this thing on the bottom of my foot?" or "we really need to put together a household budget." Yellow requires an elevated response, for things like "does this match?" or "where should we order dinner from?" Orange requires my immediate but brief attention -- things such as "what do you want for your birthday?" or "is the baby too young for Ambesol?" Red should be only used in the extreme case when I absolutely can't miss a word, questions like "will you marry me?" or "is that cab driver texting with the kids in the car?"

Socks are always blue, or so I had thought. Because, truly, why is he bothering me with this? And yet, he persisted, finally bellowing: "I need socks!" with the same urgency as another man might say "He's got a gun!"

"Then get some," I answered calmly. Scott looked at me as if I had just suggested he gather moon rocks. That's when it dawned on me. Scott doesn't know where socks come from.

He had never procured a pair of socks on his own. His mother, Roberta, still brought him socks for special occasions, socks with tiny dreidels on them for Hanukkah or bedecked with little candy canes in a nod to my insistence we celebrate Christmas. Scott still has socks from college with the days of the week on them in faded marker written by his mother.

Then he had his ex-wife, who spun casseroles into socks, or performed whatever alchemy it was that filled the sock drawer.

And now here he was, looking to me to fill the void and go sock-picking.

I looked at him with new eyes. This law firm partner who runs a global litigation department soon won't be able to put on his shoes in the morning absent my intervention. And despite the fact that I had just given up my own fairly lucrative career in the law to stay at home and raise Henry, I had to wonder: How does it feel to be that vulnerable?

You may be asking yourself why Scott doesn't just google "socks" and buy some over the Internet like his three-year-old son would. It's because Scott has never performed a single transaction on the web. He once tried to order movie tickets on line and couldn't follow the prompts unassisted. He can convert zlotys to dollars in his head, but he can't fill out an address screen. He will sprout wings before he has an Amazon password.

Scott is the opposite of an idiot savant. He is brilliant in all ways, except when it comes to the pedestrian things in life, like loading the dishwasher, purchasing socks or googling driving directions. But I have come to realize that these deficits are critical to our relationship, especially as I recreate myself from General Counsel to Domestic Diva. It helps keep us in balance, the yin/yang of our relationship depends upon it. We need each other. I need him to support us financially and rub my feet and he needs me for everything else.

This extends to the children. At eight, Emma is so precocious that if we didn't have a Wii, I think she might seek emancipation and lease herself a studio apartment. I am here to remind her that because she's not allowed to touch the stove or cross the street without holding an adult's hand, she probably wouldn't fare all that well on her own. Quinny is ridiculously handsome. Unlike his father, he knows his way around a computer and I once caught him googling "agent." But as I told him, until he's 100 percent potty-trained, Gap Kids is not going to want him modeling their pants, no matter how cute he looks in them.

And in this way, like Sisyphus, I find meaning in my loading and unloading the dishwasher, meal after meal, day after day, night after night.

Last week, we were going away for the weekend. After I had held the baby football style and rushed like a wide receiver across the length of our apartment gathering snacks and googling driving directions, I found Scott and the children sitting on our bed in their underwear.

"What are you doing?" I asked. "Why aren't you packing?"

"We're waiting for the laundry fairy," Emma said sweetly.

And you know what? They really were.

Rough Justice

Henry has a brother and sister - the progeny of Scott's first marriage - whom he loves with all of his strawberry-sized infant heart. When Scott told Henry that his beloved Emma and Quinny had strep throat, Henry worked his lower lip a few times, then burst into a wail.

"This is incredible!" said Scott, gazing at Henry as if he were a lab specimen. (And truth be told, he kinda was at the beginning. But that's a story for another day.)

"Of course he's upset!" I cried, running to Henry's aid. "There was this article in the Times Magazine about babies - they have real empathy. Quick, you have to make him feel better. Tickle him. Tell him they are going to be fine. He's so sad! Tickee, tickee, tickee!!" I shouted, making Henry cry harder.

"Emma and Quinny are going to be just fine," Scott said calmly, chucking Henry under the chin. Soon, Henry was reassured and back to his happy cooing while Scott did a nose dive into the article, telling me what I had just read for myself: Not only are children less than a year old empathetic, but they have a rudimentary sense of right and wrong. So much so, in fact, that one little baby in an experiment not only punished a mean puppet by taking away his ball, but also whacked him upside the head.

None of this was news to me. Three out of the four of children in my family have a stubborn streak of justice that persists despite all evidence that life just isn't fair. The fourth child is what scientists call an "outlier" for reasons I explain below.

As the eldest of the four, things went fairly smoothly for me until my first brother Christopher arrived on the scene eighteen months after my birth. I never felt particularly competitive with him for my parents' affection, probably because they were in their early twenties and too preoccupied with grad school and playing coed volleyball to pay either one of us much attention.

But then my brother was diagnosed with a rare, stupid disease and had to be in the hospital all the time. That was our first clue that life might not share our fundamental notion of justice.

Our second clue came after Justin was born. Justin was so skinny as a toddler that my mother had to feed him milkshakes for breakfast. While Justin was enjoying a thick, creamy milkshake every morning, Christopher and I were trying to survive on powdered milk and government cheese. When we protested, my mother just said, "Life's not fair. The sooner you learn it, the better."

But our sense of justice persisted, even in the face of our parents' totally unfair treatment. For example, until age 11, I was fine with the fact that all my clothes came from one of two places, the hospital consignment shop where my grandmother volunteered or Sears. After all, my BFF Shawn also wore Toughskins and the occasional plaid leisure suit to school. But then Shawn's father got a gig working construction in Saudi Arabia and suddenly there was money for Calvin Klein jeans. Shawn became an instant celebrity and my first frenemy.

I pleaded with my mother for designer jeans. "Designer jeans are an oxymoron," she said. And, more crushingly: "I am not going to spend $36 on a pair of jeans."

"It's not fair!" I cried. "I am the only girl in the whole sixth grade with knee patches sewn inside her jeans!" My father's response was to write "Jordache" on a piece of duct tape and slap it over my back pocket.

Despite the fact that I had to earn my first pair of Jordache with 36 hours of babysitting, I still clung to the idea that life should be fair. I even became a lawyer. And despite the fact that he spent his childhood outwitting a rare disease and getting blasted with mega doses of chemotherapy and steroids, Christopher also became a lawyer, convinced that justice is out there somewhere.

Then there's Justin, whose very name means "righteous" or "just one." Things slid sharply downhill for Justin after he gained the appropriate amount of milkshake weight. Matthew, the baby, was born, and Justin fell from star-baby to lower-middle-child status.

I called Justin "Justin Martyr" after his forebear (a second century moralist who was ultimately beheaded by the Romans) because Justin never stopped his campaign for "Justice for Justin." Justin always had to sit in the very back of the station wagon over the spare tire, he never got second helpings, and he was the only one of us who had to wear glasses in elementary school. Yet he never succumbed to the idea that life wasn't fair. When things got to be too much for him, he would just pack a jelly and cheese sandwich and a spare pair of underpants in a brown sack and run away to the public library. Once there, he would beg the pretty librarian to adopt him. She would return him to our family and the cycle would continue.

Justin's sense of righteousness persists to this day. Like 99% of the world, he works in an office and like 98% of those people, he would rather be at home. But unlike everyone else, Justin actually did something about it. He complained. So now he gets to work from home when he feels like it. And when he didn't like an overbearing manager sitting next to him, he kvetched until the company relocated the manager to another cubicle farm. Now he won't work weekends because his super-hot girlfriend just moved in with him. With these accommodations, work now seems more fair to Justin.

The rest of us just shake our heads and say, "He must be one hell of a programmer."

Now Matthew, the outlier: Whether Matthew was born with an innate sense of fairness has never been tested because Matthew literally has never had a bad day. Despite the fact - or maybe because - he was the only one of us not breast-fed, Matthew has never been sick. From the time he was born, he was not permitted to cry. One little hiccup from his Cupid's bow lips and the three of us were running to his crib, elbowing one another out of the way to be the first to pick him up.

Today, Matthew is six feet tall, a natural athlete with bright green eyes and blond hair. Taking a break from graduate work in linguistics, he works nine months of the year as a teacher in a cushy private school and spends his summers in Europe. Matthew will send around emails that say things like: "Geez, guys, instead of working this quarter, they want me to go to surf camp in Malibu with a few of the seniors." Matthew is engaged to Anna, a ridiculously beautiful Spanish woman who has a Ph.D. and a family vineyard in the south of Spain. "If we ever get tired of academia," Matthew has said, "maybe we'll just make wine."

I hope that little Henry was born under the same lucky star as his Uncle Matt. Certainly, his brother and sister spoil him with affection, almost knocking each other out to get closest to him. And in his wide-eyed, innocent way, he just seems to expect it.