A friend has a numerical theory about child-rearing -- call it a mother's law of diminishing returns: Any number less than the maximum is easy.
If you have 10 kids, nine is easy. If you have four kids, three is a breeze.
I can't prove this theory -- I stopped at two kids -- but I can say for certain that doing something with just one child is delightful.
It doesn't matter what it is. Grocery shopping or pizza and a movie. When you are alone with one of your children, he will slip his hand into yours. He will tell you the story of his day. If you are patient, he will reveal his darkest fears.
This is particularly true in a car.
There is more truth spoken in a rolling station wagon than in all the confessionals in all the churches of the world. Especially if your child is in the back seat.
Kids will say things to the back of your head that they could not find the courage to say to your face. When they sit next to you in the front seat, they not only play with the radio, they tell you what they think you want to hear. The possibility of eye contact drains their nerve.
You can be sure no such intimacies would be shared in the presence of a sibling. They would rather tease and pick, swat each other and whine. The best thing you can do for any child, we are told, is spend time alone with him.
My daughter was just days old when we had our first such outing. I packed her in a Snugli and took her to a quilt show. It was spring, and the warm wind blew my brain clear of the gloominess of caring for a 2-year-old and a newborn.
As I walked among the quilts and Jessie dozed, a rush of premonition made my stomach flutter. I had these pictures in my head of all the things my new best girlfriend and I would do. I whispered all sorts of promises into her sleepy ears.
Jessie is 8 years old now, and those promises are starting to come true -- though not exactly as I imagined them. Some days, I fear Jessie and I have as little in common as our closets -- Talbot's woman meets Vegas showgirl.
But we went to the ballet not long ago, and my often defeated mother's spirit will feed off the memories of that night for many nights to come.
We left the men watching "Ernest Scared Stupid." That pretty much summed it up, I thought. My husband and son did everything but belch as we left.
Jessie was not the fill-in for my husband that night. I made it clear that she was my first choice as a companion. I told her we would go out for dessert after the ballet and she could pick the restaurant. "Where do you and your girlfriends go?" Jessie asked. "Let's go there."
She wore a red velvet dress, white lace tights and black patent leather shoes. She has not let me choose her clothes for years, preferring to mix and match in imitation of a teen-ager's style. But on that night I felt like I was out with "Samantha," the American Girl doll.
Don't let me idealize this too much. Time with Jessie has its frustrations. You will wish you were deaf about 40 minutes into it.
She tells stories like my mother tells stories. She starts with Adam and Eve and moves through the millennium. If you can hang on long enough, you might get to the end, but you won't remember where you started. You will never know what the point was.
There was no chatter this night. Once the house lights dimmed and the overture began for the Annapolis Ballet Theater's fall production, Jessie was on the edge of her seat -- in every sense of the word. She wasn't blinking, and I didn't think she was breathing. She wrung every cent out of her $5 student ticket.
As she requested, I took her to the lively restaurant that my friends and I frequent. It felt weird being there with Jessie, for soda and ice cream instead of wine and Caesar salad. She marveled at all the grown-ups out so late. The next day, she would tell her friend, Sarah, "I was up way past midnight. It was so cool."
Over brownies a la mode, Jessie told me, "Mom, my friends really like you. They think you are, like, so nice."
Jessie was looking me in the eye when she said it. No car seat headrest separated us like a tiny confessional door. It might not have been the truth. She might have been telling me what she thought I would like to hear. But I felt like I was being rushed by the best sorority on campus.
Looking back, I'm not sure which of us got the most out of time alone with one child.