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Vegas bachelor party.) And then I forget I’d promised Joey that he’d be the one to stick the magnetic key fob into the sensor on the outside door, and
his
meltdown begins. It wouldn’t be out of the ordinary for the general angst of the moment to be escalated by one of the boys pooping in their pants or falling down and beginning to bleed. In these situations, I think about how I’ve made my life so much more difficult than it needs to be. I surmise that I’d be a happier, calmer, and better-groomed person if I lived in one of those suburban McMansions where the boys had space to run around and I had a kitchen with room for more than two days’ worth of food and the counter space and appliances required to prepare it.
    Add to that the publicness of it all. Can no moment of childhood ugliness happen in private? Why is it that some meticulously dressed gay man who lives in my building—one of the same guys I used to chat with about politics and restaurants while doing laundry or sorting recycling—seems to appear at the most shameful mommy moments, wincing past me, no doubt silently congratulating himself on the bullet he dodged by not having easy access to an ovary, and making me feel like a pox on our perfect neighborhood.
Don’t you remember? I’m one of you!
I want to yell. Or,
I almost didn’t have kids! I didn’t know it was going to be so hard!
    But there’s no “almost” about twin three-year-old boys, no blending in or quick and quiet entries. My only chance at getting them into the building smoothly is if one of Mrs. Tannenbaum’s white pugs—the friendly one, hopefully—is hanging around the first-floor hallway. If the boys made enough noise, Mrs. T. would appear with a small dog biscuit and break it in two for them to give to Mitzi. “Thank you,” I’d say to her as if she’d just fortified me for the long journey ahead. It’s one flight—eighteen steps with a landing halfway—and we’re home. It’s not unusual for it to take fifteen minutes.
    The apartment itself is lovely. The perfect place if you are childless, or maybe if you have anything other than twin boys who are between the ages of zero and three. It’s technically a one-bedroom with a study, which was our combination closet and office until we turned it into the boys’ room. The whole place is eight hundred square feet—about the size of the back porch in the house I grew up in.
    During my pregnancy, I nested like some kind of crazed Martha Stewart protégée, intent on delivering on the promises made in my hard-fought campaign to keep the apartment. Determined to be right about how easy and wonderful life in our little apartment would be, I transformed our abode into the ultimate small but cleverly designed family home. It was even featured on ApartmentTherapy.com as “Cassie & Leo’s Dreamy Oasis.” Our dovel gray walls and white Eames rocker, the chandelier and half-sized travel cribs we painted the same midnight blue, handsomely awaited the arrival of their tenants, who were markedly less impressed than thedozens of ApartmentTherapy readers, who commented on our brilliant storage solutions and sophisticated color palette.
    There are some upsides to living in our tiny apartment, including needing only twenty minutes and five or six baby wipes to clean it. But when I see my boys slithering off our supertall bed, running four steps to the sofa, jumping on that, then repeating the loop over and over, I can’t help but think of a pair of puppies forced to live in a small pen.
    Leo grew up with a bunch of brothers, but I only had my sister. My earliest memories of playing include coloring and dressing up dolls, and I guess I pictured the boys doing slightly more masculine versions of that. I did not foresee constant wrestling or the compulsion to run and jump and knock things over that is programmed into their DNA.
    When I was pregnant, the market was booming and we could have sold our place for a nice profit. Now we’d