Is There Still Sex in the City?

For a moment, I was flattered she thought I was young enough to be the boy’s mother, but then I remembered that a real mother would know her son’s sizes. If I admit that I don’t know them, she’s going to think I’m one of those bad mommies who doesn’t know anything about her own kid.

I was going to have to drop the ruse. I pulled her aside. “Actually, I’m not his mother. In fact, I’ve only met him once before. And his father only sees him once a year. And he doesn’t really speak English.”

She got it, of course. Thank god, because shopping, as I would later discover, is one of the many, many things that children cannot do on their own.

The Mother Hens

Of course, I never for one moment thought I could handle the boy and his father by myself. After all, even people who actually have kids have help, right? And sometimes, when they travel with them, these people with the kids bring their own nannies.

Someone at a rich-person party pointed this out to me. I pointed out back that while it was a wonderful concept, Max and I couldn’t afford a nanny. And even if we could, there wasn’t anyplace to put her. We couldn’t ask a nanny to sleep in a pup tent.

Luckily, for help I had all my friends. Like Tilda Tia, they, too, were convinced that the visit was going to be a disaster and I was going to need saving.

I’ve been known for not being “motherly” ever since I was a kid. When I was a little girl and someone’s mother in the neighborhood had a baby, all the little girls would have to troop over with their mothers to see the newborn. The mother would pick it up and hold it out and pass it to one of the little girls and everyone would coo and they’d keep passing the baby around until they got to me and I’d refuse to take it. Besides the fact that I found holding someone else’s baby terrifying—what if I dropped it?—it felt like an indoctrination.

In those days, when girls were good at holding babies, they ended up always holding babies. If you were “good with babies” they’d want you to become a babysitter.

I don’t think so.

Which was why all my friends had volunteered to help me play Mommy. Queenie and Kitty, both of whom had pools, had offered their houses for the afternoons and even to babysit. Sassy promised to do “sports” with the boy, like badminton and bridge.

Bad Mommy

It’s one thing to be a bad mommy theoretically, but it’s another to be a bad mommy in real life. Even if you are not technically the mommy.

Indeed, it seems that most women, whether they be biological mothers or not, know what to do in case there is an unmothered child in the vicinity.

Like when a kid arrives at someone’s house, you immediately give the kid something to drink. You take him to the bathroom. Give him a cookie. Treat him like a movie executive on a Hollywood set.

Which is exactly what happened when we arrived at Queenie’s for a swim. Queenie was what’s known as a Yummy Mummy and the boy was immediately taken by her. While she showed the boy to the bathroom, I got a tongue-lashing from my friends.

“Why didn’t you say he was so cute!” Sassy said.

“How can you not remember his name? He’s a person,” Kitty scolded.

“Hey. I don’t want to push it. I want to respect his boundaries. If he remembers my name, I’ll remember his name.” I tried to tell them my camp counselor theory but no one bought it.

“Even camp counselors remember the campers’ names. It’s part of the job, love,” Marilyn said, as if I was a dotty old bird.

Seconds later, Queenie came waltzing out to the deck holding the boy’s hand. Queenie looked glamorous and chic and put together, and now so, too, did the boy.

He looked happy. And relaxed. And for the first time all day, I relaxed.

But not for long. The other thing about kids is that you can’t just entertain them for a few minutes and then they go off and do something on their own.

Nor can you entertain them for a few minutes and then go off and do something on your own. It doesn’t work like that. It’s not a cocktail party.

You have to keep entertaining them.

Queenie knew this, being a mother herself. She asked the boy if he could swim and then swam with him in the pool.

Everyone took pictures of Queenie and the boy. Queenie told the boy how handsome he was and what a good boy he was, and we all agreed that Queenie was the best mommy out of all of us. She had the magic touch.

But then, Queenie got called inside by her actual daughter, and Marilyn took over.

Marilyn had grown up on the ocean in Australia and she got the boy to come out of his shell, getting him to talk in his halting English about how he’d lived near the sea in Iceland and it really was dark for two months in the winter and bitterly cold. But then Marilyn, who was sitting out in the broiling sun so the boy could be in the shade under the umbrella, got too hot and had to jump in the pool. Then he cuddled with Kitty, who was also a mom, having been a single mother when she was in her twenties, while Sassy told him stories.

And where was Max during all this mothering? He was in Queenie’s air-conditioned house, snoozing on the sofa.