Wake
(for Grace)

He ate five donuts in one night.  I swear my son will never grow up.  He's always on the Playstation or Starcraft and distracts his sister.  She needs to work, she's got some pretty strange ideas about life.  Always reading junky novels and when I say something she claims she's hormonal and just finished A Room With a View and Going After Cacciato, which she always leaves on the couch.
I can't get them to do any work except cleaning the bathroom and vacuuming.  The house will go up in flames when I leave for two weeks because my bossy grandmother just died.  The girl is "pulling her hair out," as she says because for once, she'll have to cook clean take care of the house because neither my husband nor son can see dirt or boil water.  I pack the kids lunch every day and they complain but they're even worse off now that they'll have to make their own.
My son quit the cello, piano, trumpet, and Chinese all in the space of two years because he's indolent and mostly listens to this awful heavy metal music that he plays loud enough to stun several pandas.  We always have to tell him to turn the bloody noise down.  The girl says that, anyway.  She's always using coarse provincial language and she says Mom you should hear what the other kids say and I don't want to be a lady anyway.  Her posture is awful and I think that's why she's too tired to practice her violin.  I never had the opportunity so I play the piano now, it's my baby.  That is, when my daughter isn't playing that British electronic music.  Some of it I've actually grown to like, but I don't think I'll miss it.
I left home half a world away twenty-seven years ago not to find freedom or love but to get my Master's degree.  I lived in New York but never visited Ellis Island, which my children think is really unusual (or screwy, they'd call it).  I'm descended from the Han but married an Ottoman.  The kids say I'm more married to the furniture type than their father.  They always berate him for forgetting his silver anniversary; he's a big teddy bear, absentminded, deaf-in-one-ear professor.  If I return and he's unscathed, I will have to look for tranquilizers because his son gets so angry he starts screaming his head off.
I used to get paid thirty dollars an hour.  Now I'm getting interviewed for a job that's one-third of the pay.  My daughter always asks me if I regret giving my work up for my children.  I waited long enough to have a successful career, so I don't think so.  My husband doesn't want me to work because 'someone has to be there for the kids.'  My son's almost fourteen but extremely immature.  His sister will apply to college next year.  She always looks at me as if I've got two heads if I mention MIT or Princeton, although she's extremely smart and forgetful (I believe she got that from her dad).  I hope she remembers to take her medication every morning.
Every day now, they hug me and say they love me because their unpaid servant is leaving.  The house will be a mess books all over the floor and couch, microwaved dinners will be their staple and a disaster area needs to be proclaimed.  Will I be sorry to return?  Of course not.  Don't be idiotic.

~ E. Koven