I Can't Complain Read Online Free PDF Page B

asked Ben how that was going, boys and girls together. It was fine, he said, his tone implying,
Why wouldn’t it be?
I asked how his friend Nathaniel was coping with this mature subject matter, because I knew from Nathaniel’s mother that he still believed in the tooth fairy and Santa Claus. Ben answered as if venting a classwide scorn over Nathaniel’s reproductive IQ. “Nathaniel! He didn’t even know what PMS was!”
    Seventh grade brought a new school and, midyear, a new unit called simply Health. Ben announced it at breakfast, sighing and saying, “We start Health today.” A pause and a wry smile—I was his best audience and he knew it. “Third year in a row I learn about fallopian tubes.”
    He was an old hand. The teacher later told me that when Ben presented his special project on conjoined twins, featuring Chang and Eng, Barnum’s famous act, he informed the class that both men had married. Pause . . . shake of the head, then: “Don’t even
ask
about the honeymoon.”
    He’s a grown-up now with his own place, a fruitful social life, excellent hygiene, and good sense. I’d like to thank Bob and Mr. Weiner, the playground, his bunkmates at camp, the locker room, the Internet, and especially the Talking Transparent Woman at Boston’s Museum of Science. It’s an important job, and I couldn’t have done it alone.

The Rosy Glow of the Backward Glance
2004
    R ECENTLY MY PUBLISHER asked me to update my “about the author” paragraph for some promotional purpose. Instead of ending with the usual, “She and her husband live in Massachusetts and have one child,” I added, “a son, Benjamin, who turned out great.” I sat back and smiled. It seemed the right tribute at the right time, as Ben grinned at me from a newly framed college graduation photo.
    That’s where I sit now, on this side of my child’s first twenty-two years, all of which replay in the most delightfully nostalgic fashion. Things that once seemed huge, worrisome, tiresome, burdensome, are now only footnotes in The Legend of the Reasonable Child.
    The biggest travail that we’ve reduced to a fond memory is the fact that he didn’t sleep through the night until he was six years old. It could have been worse; he might have carried on and cried inconsolably, when all he needed was the sight of me, a pat, a blanket retrieved—but how did we know he’d ever reform? Add to our interrupted sleep the public relations factor: the question on everyone’s lips, beginning soon after his birth, was, “Does your baby sleep through the night yet?”
    “Not quite,” I answered—for the next seventy-two months.
    As he approached one year, every passerby, every bum on the street, was a child development expert. “Walking yet?” they’d ask, as if my toddler had HAPPY FIRST BIRTHDAY, BEN! embroidered on his bib.
    “Our pediatrician says they either walk or talk,” I’d murmur, turning to my big, happy stroller passenger to prompt a sentence containing both a subject and a verb.
    A partial list of early parental concerns and their outcomes includes: Then: Bad sleeper. Now: Age twenty-two years and ten months, sleeps through anything, naps anytime, any place, on any surface. Then: Crawled late, stood late, cruised late, walked at seventeen and a half months. Now: Walks, runs, skis black diamonds, drives. Then: Watched too much TV, played too much Nintendo. 2004: Graduates from an Ivy League university. Then: Suffered acute anxiety when left with anyone but mother, father, grandparents. 2004: Moves three thousand miles across the country, whistling all the way. Then: Shy. Now: Exceeds his five-hundred-minutes-per-month cell phone plan. Then: Addicted to breast milk, followed by cow’s milk, chocolate milk, and juice not from concentrate, which is to say:
teeth at risk;
blamed myself for not promoting water as most delicious beverage. To this day: No cavities. Then: Not interested in toilet training. (“I not fwee yet,” he would protest when