November 21, 2003, 8:39 a.m.
Daddy Does Not Look Like Stalin

Some years ago, when Molly was roughly the age Phoebe is now, and we were living in London, I took Molly to an exhibition of Fascist art. It consisted of officially sanctioned works from the Spanish, Soviet, Italian, and German tyrannies, and featured innumerable muscular, striving people bearing farm implements and sheaves of wheat.

Because Molly rode at that time in a stroller, we had to take an escalator to the Soviet level instead of taking the stairs like everyone else. And so it happened that we were delivered up a long ramp straight in front of a large portrait of an avuncular man with friendly crinkles in the corners of his eyes. Molly looked joyfully at the man's face and cried, "Daddy!"

"Uncle Joe doesn't look anything like your father," I corrected her
severely, "Daddy doesn't have a mustache."

"Well, you never know," came the soft voice on an American tourist who had been observing us, "I mean, reincarnation and everything."

"Do you think," I asked the woman, drawing myself up, "That I could be living with the reincarnation of Joseph Stalin and not know it?"

At least I hope that's what I said. It was a while ago, after all, and it may be that I said, "Pshaw!" or, "I wonder," or, "Maybe." For of course there are times in marriage when one does wonder.

The tourist moved on with a faint, superior smile, and I filed the incident away as evidence of how wrong children can be in their superficial assessments of the adults around them.

Now, however, I may need to reconsider.

Some days ago, we're motoring along on a familiar route when Phoebe cries out delightedly, "Mummy!"

"Yes?"

"Mummy!" she repeats in the same joyous voice. I glance back to see her pointing at a huge wall painting of — not Evita, not Madame Mao, but Marilyn Monroe.

"Ha, ha," I chuckle indulgently. What a charming child.

"Ugh," Molly says, "I'm glad you don't look like that."

"But Marilyn Monroe was regarded as a great beauty."

"Yuck. Didn't she have something to do with President John F. Kennedy?"

"Er, actually — "

"Didn't she — "

"Here we are!" I say gaily, stopping the car, jumping out, and releasing an unusually large number of children, not all of whom are mine.

"Thank you, Mrs. Gurdon," says Oliver politely.

"Wow! Balloons!" yells Paris.

"Where should I put my sleeping bag?" asks Benjamin.

Tabitha has stopped to rummage in her bag for her American Girl doll, a carefully coiffed Felicity. "I'll get mine, too!" Molly calls, dropping her things and running upstairs for Samantha, an American Girl doll on whom neglect has wrought dreadlocks. Tonight we are having Paris's birthday party sleepover, a knees-up that had been postponed due to illness.

The other children thunder upstairs after Molly, and I exhale bravely. There is, for me, a special terror in having a houseful of other people's children, which I assume originates in my own extremely quiet upbringing as an only child. What if they cry? What if they won't eat what they're given? What if they're insubordinate and I reprimand them and they tell their parents? Mingled with my apprehension is the understanding that now is the easy time, and far more terrifying days lie in my future when I will have herds of teenagers foraging in my kitchen. What if they're insubordinate? What if they cry?

From upstairs comes a lot of thumping, laughter, and the peculiar high-pitched yodeling that Paris produces when he's thrilled beyond measure. "Run!" someone yells.

I shouldn't worry. These are lovely, well-mannered children, hand-picked from a seething mass of potentially disastrous seven-year-old guests, and they seem to be comfortable —

"Help! Look out!"

With a great whoosh, six children tumble down the stairs towards me, feet thumping, hair flying, all chortling and shrieking and rushing to get away from the Birthday Boy, who is brandishing a lavatory plunger and whose spirits are so high they've gone falsetto and down they come, and around the corner, skidding on the marble floor of the front hall and romping in a hilarious roaring column into the utility room and up the back staircase, through the kitchen, and back up the main staircase towards the top of the house.

"Paris," I say quietly, to the emptiness, "Put that disgusting thing away."

The birthday party is a huge success. We play Freeze Dance — to the Go-Go's, a freshman-year favorite of mine — and Musical Chairs. Only three children cry from the chagrin of losing. The first is Violet, who fails to find a spare chair and retreats behind a sofa gnashing her teeth and rending her raiment. By the time we've lured her out we lose Benjamin, who falls hara-kiri-like on the floor and won't look up until he has mastered his disappointment. When Phoebe loses, she screams piercingly until someone picks her up. Tabitha wins the round of Pass-the-Parcel and spends the next half hour valiantly working on an enormous multicolored lollipop. Then there is the inevitable pizza, and chocolate milk, and roasted potatoes, and —

"Children," I say hopefully, "Why don't all of you have a bit of broccoli, and then you can surprise your parents when they ask, 'What did you eat?' by replying, 'We had broccoli!' Wouldn't that be fun? And surprising?"

"But I don't like broccoli," reply several young voices.

That night, after the children have gobbled cake and ice cream, changed into their pajamas, watched Finding Nemo, and trotted down for a snack of buttered toast, we chase them into sleeping bags on the floor of our bookroom. Ahh, will you look at them? Four seven-year-olds and one nine-year-old, happy and serene and safe. Molly and Tabitha snuggle with their dolls, Paris's head rests on the back of his giant stuffed tiger, Tigerowee; Benjamin is tucked in with a tiny white owl, and Oliver is bedded down with a pair of stuffed bananas in evening dress.

My husband and I pause at the door. None of the children has the slightest idea — except perhaps Molly, and she only vaguely — that in a year or two a coed sleepover of this sort will be impossible. Not just impossible, also improper, and, if it happened, highly embarrassing. I am fleetingly reminded of the way Paris hurtles unashamedly into my arms when I pick him up from school, and of the envious looks of the mothers whose boys are already distancing themselves, and, well, Reader, there's just a whole lot of preemptive nostalgia going on.

We are still standing there when Phoebe trundles past us dressed in her terrycloth bathrobe, over which she has pulled a mangy Indian Princess dress. She is pushing a little plastic trolley. She is supposed to be in
bed.

"Bye, fat pig," she remarks to her father as she passes.

"I beg your pardon?" says he, doing a slight double take.

"Jiggety jig," she says. Her trolley bumps into Oliver's sleeping bag.
Oliver waves a banana at her in a comradely way.

"Oh, buy a fat pig" my husband says, mollified.

"Right, everyone. Good night."

"Good night!" they chorus.

— Meghan Cox Gurdon is an NRO columnist. Gurdon lives in Washington, D.C. and writes as much as her young family will permit.

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