Having It All

This evening, I spent 1.5 hours at a school meeting--a *volunteer* meeting. We spent 20 minutes--20 minutes!--discussing the merits of allowing older school children to trace cut-out shapes. I will spare you the details.

This started innoncently enough. The school was looking for volunteers to help with their Art Zone program. An hour for each training session (to learn what the project entails) and an hour assisting in your child's classroom.

Hmph. Assisting my ass. Ella's school is notoriously bad at the whole communication thing. If there is an event scheduled, three different sheets of paper will come home--each with a different start time. It's like those Choose Your Own Adventure books.

So anyhow, knowing there were going to be parents volunteering in Ella's classroom and knowing Ella's penchant for exploiting my working mother guilt ("all the other kids have their moms pick them up from school"; "I was the only kid at story time with a NANNY"; "How come Christina doesn't have to work?"), I figured that if I did not volunteer, my lovely little darling would come home and say, "Lily's mommy helped at school today. How come YOU didn't help at school today?" Plus, I figured it might be kind of fun--assisting the teacher and her aide as they led the kids in an art project.

Right. ACTUALLY, the teacher and her aide will not be present during this art project. Basically, it's me and one other mom leading eleven 3-year-olds in an art project. Come again? You're kidding me, right?

It gets better. The art project? It's all about perspective and foreground and background and how things appear bigger when they are up close and smaller when they are far away. It involves different colors of paper and cut-out shapes that need to be glued down and PASTELS. Yes. That's right. Eleven 3-year-olds armed with pastels. And scissors too. Did I mention the scissors? And glue sticks.

Lily's mommy and I were the "bad moms" during this entire meeting. We couldn't stop whispering to each other. This was not what we had bargained for. And we just couldn't get over this project. Fifth graders? Sure. Fourth graders? Sure. But a room full of three-year-olds? I can't even get ONE three-year-old to put her shoes in the specially designated shoe receptacle.

As Lily's mom put it, "I'm PAYING tuition here so that other people can do these sorts of things with my child."

But that's not even the half of it. The moms that are on the Art Zone committee have spent countless hours making schedules and printing phone lists and making zerox copies and cutting out little shapes and cutting colored paper into precisely measured pieces.

These women can't possibly have jobs, right? I mean, if they do have jobs, then I fall even shorter in the motherhood arena than I previously thought.

All I know is that I work two jobs. I just spent my one free evening this week at a meeting that took four times longer than it should have (and which was billed as an HOUR of my time). I left the house to a screaming, crying three-year-old because I wasn't going to be here to put her to bed. I'm up to my eyeballs in work everywhere I turn. If it's not actual work work, it's laundry. Or Halloween costumes. Or Halloween parties. Or bills. Or insurance BS.

Forget this women's lib crap. Let's go back to the '50s when all the mommies stayed home and were on valium.