I don’t have kids but this brought back memories.

My mom was the PTA president.

She never wanted to be the president, it just happened that she was the only one to show up to meetings with any semblance of regularity. She worked as an ultrasound tech. She still does. My parents are together but we moved a lot. And the other parents all had those own little friend groups already established every time we entered a new town. It turns out that stay at home mom’s are even more cliquey than middle school girls. They didn’t like the fact that my mom was president of the PTA rather than one of them- though any one of them could easily have taken over that position if she had wanted to actually show up to the meetings but that is crazy talk right there. She struggled to get any of them to lend a hand for the small things… but not the big things. She last served as PTA President in a small town with a huge Mexican immigrant population. Oh, the kids are having a cinco de mayo festival? Or a big grade school graduation? Or a winter dance/fair/what have you event? Sure. The nice working Mexican mothers volunteered to help out. No trouble. They would do anything for their kids. But the stay at home moms from down the street? Maybe they showed up with a container of store bought cookies.

The PTA frustrated her to no end, but good things came from it. She convinced the tiny new ice cream shop to donate ice cream for Cinco De Mayo the year that shop opened. Now the shop, La Michoacana, is the best known ice cream parlor in town with an established sister restaurant the La Michoacana Grill open nearby where you can get tacos and burritos and a Popsicle. And the owners come out to greet my mother when she stops in. They remember her even though my younger brother is nearly finished with his college degree. Mom hasn’t been the PTA president for a long time and we no longer live in that town. My friends who live in town (daughters and sons of the stay at home mom clique that my mother was never a part of) will go into the shop often -they do have the best ice cream in town- and the owners don’t know them. But my mother they know. And that is just one business.

Being the PTA president is hard. I don’t know how mom managed it. And there are definitely good ones out there and less good ones but I can’t quite fault one for being annoyed that she cannot get a mother to help. Not that you didn’t have very valid reasons to not be able to help- and hopefully the PTA lady does actually know this- but sometimes she gets so many excuses -not all of which are half as valid as yours- that she may snap at the wrong person or just get tired of trying to figure out who actually couldn’t make time and who just didn’t feel like it.

Or she could just be a bitch. People are people and some people are bitchy. That’s the way of things.