C,
Still bent double from our early morning encounter with yoga yesterday, although having BS telling me to ‘open up, like a flower’ while he pressed down on my inner thighs during corpse pose made it all worthwhile. Nevertheless, as part of my new resolve to a better parent – or at least appear to be one – I managed to hobble down to the bus-stop in time for the pre-work cocktail hour. As a private school parent, you may not be familiar with this 15-30 minute time-slot during which working parents gather to discuss burning issues of the day, and otherwise postpone the moment when they must inevitably depart for work. (Stay-at-home parents, of course, are generally far too busy to hang around.)
Anyway, one of the topics under discussion today appeared to be what kind and how many after-school activities are considered appropriate for a child between the ages of say, 0 and 11 – peak formative years for Harvard, you understand. When I mentioned that I was hesitating about whether or not to sign my offspring up for soccer, on the grounds that their once weekly gym class would serve as more than enough fun for one week, one mother, in particular, turned to me in horror. ‘Fun, it seems, is absolutely not the point in life: not now, not ever. Our children are to be moulded into a race of super-humans, ready to take over the world at a moment’s notice, thanks to all the hours of extra-curricular tuition in ancient Sanskrit, Mandarin Chinese and Russian, not to mention figure-skating training for the 2010 Winter Olumpics, all of which are apparently critical for successful world domination.
Mother Superior made it quite clear that she regards my lax stay-at-home mothering and moronic offspring as objects of pity, to be left in the dust, no doubt, the minute her second child is admitted to Squidwell. Silly me, I thought the point of life was to be happy! It seems that Mother Superior has not only read every parenting book under the sun (indeed, she may have mentioned writing some of them), but she is able somehow to schedule all these activities for her children, and singlehandedly run the Department of Labor at the same time – or so she implied.
I was tempted to point out that while Mother Superior may indeed be smarter, better educated and WAY more successful than yours truly, she certainly doesn’t know s*** about fashion. The fetching silk shirt she had on looked like it had recently been ironed – by the wheels of a bus – while she appears to be allowing her hair – gasp! – to gray naturally. I would offer my considerable skills as a makeover artist, honed during many extracurricular hours’ careful study of Us Weekly, but I fear that would only serve to make her attractive, as well as insufferable.
Instead, I returned chastened to apply my weekly face-mask in my humble abode. I may not rule the world, but at least my pores won’t resemble the craters on the face of the moon.
Faithfully,
P.
