I Missed the Supermom Orientation
Why couldn’t my daughter’s preschool name the classes based on the kids’ ages instead of the freaking life cycles of a butterfly?
My sister called to tell me that our yoga studio needed babysitters.
“It’s the easiest job ever,” she said. “You can bring Em, she can play with the other kids for a couple of hours, and in exchange you get unlimited free yoga! How can you beat that?”
I jumped at the chance, and immediately went to see Susan, the studio manager. She was the one who’d managed to convince me not to give up in the middle of my first class, and she’d helped me understand that yoga wasn’t about how sexy you looked in your Lululemons while doing a perfect straddle split. Since I’d been practicing, yoga had taught me to make a commitment to my own well-being, and it had given me the set of tools I’d needed to start healing. I was grateful for this gift, and wanted to give back.
Spending so much time at the studio brought me into a new fold. I felt like I was now part of the local yoga community, and since I was around lots of new people, I decided to give making mom friends another shot. Babysitting had been a great way to meet other mothers, and although I’d prescreened them to make sure none of them were concerned about their children getting poisoned by conventional produce, I still kept them safely at arm’s length. I just didn’t have time for moms who were smug and serious. I needed friends who were as fucked up as I was and could have a sense of humor about it. One day after class, when another mom casually mentioned she was on her way to a twelve-step meeting, I invited her over for dinner, thinking a recovering drug addict-alcoholic would be cool with my mom wearing an ankle monitor and my stepdad being incarcerated. Not that I told her, but I figured that if it came up somehow, she wouldn’t freak and hurry her little girl out the front door.
The moms at Emmeline’s preschool were a different story though. They scared the shit out of me. You see, I was comfortable at yoga by then and had come to realize that most people go to yoga to heal and/or openly discuss their pain. The four thirty hot vinyasa flow was like a suffering convention. Your dad’s in jail? Oh yeah? Big fucking deal, man. That girl has bulimia, this one over here was a foster child, that whole side of the room is filled with pill addicts: six people in here have survived cancer. Go into any yoga class, and you’ll find that a good 75 percent of the people there are profoundly broken, but step into a Fort Lauderdale pre-school, and you’ll find that all the other parents are, in fact, perfect.
The moms at Em’s new school wore expensive gym clothes and drove minivans, venti Starbucks cup in one hand, iPhone in the other. I’d see them in the drop-off and pickup lines, looking impossibly perky with fresh mani-pedis and recently highlighted ponytails, and I’d wonder when in the hell they found time to consistently keep up with their eyebrow waxing. I couldn’t compete. My eyebrows looked like woolly bear caterpillars before a long hard winter, and I hid my Hobbit feet in scuffed Payless ballet flats. And it wasn’t only that the other moms were so polished, but that they were chipper and happy and well rested. They were clearly in on some secret of motherhood I’d somehow missed. It was like they’d held a supermom orientation over the summer, where they’d all learned things like how to have flawless skin, glowing smiles, and spotless Range Rovers. The e-mail invite must have accidentally gone into my spam folder.
On the first day of school I rolled up in style in my now eight-year-old Saturn. It was dented in several places because I had run it into a concrete pole at the bank drive-through twice, and after that it had been repeatedly attacked by a flock of peacocks that roamed our old neighborhood, seeking revenge on their reflections. I wore faded Old Navy yoga pants because I wore them everywhere (except, incidentally, to actual yoga), and when I opened up the back door to let Em out of her car seat, an avalanche of empty fruit snack wrappers, Goldfish crumbs, and the sippy cup that had been missing for the past six months tumbled out onto the blacktop. I was a hot-assed mess. Turned out, I wasn’t even in the right drop-off line. I was in the imago line when I was supposed to be in the larva line (I think), but I got confused because the larva line was next to the chrysalis class’s drop-off but only for the day (and they were probably going to change it again), and oh my God, why couldn’t they just name the classes based on the kids’ ages instead of the freaking life cycles of a butterfly for fuck’s sake? Everyone seemed to have their shit together and knew exactly where to go, except me.
Part of the reason I was freaking out was because this was the first time I’d ever been away from Emmeline for more than a couple of hours, and being separated from her scared me. I was afraid she’d cry for me or that she’d think I had abandoned her, but when we got to her new classroom, she trotted right in and made a beeline for a big plastic box randomly filled with dry rice, which I would eventually learn was called a sensory table. Amazing, I thought. Sometimes it was like she was not even my child. I hadn’t gone to preschool, but on my first day of kindergarten I was the kid who sat all by herself and cried until she puked because I didn’t want to be away from home.
I lingered outside the door, you know, just in case, but Em waved me away.
“Bye, Mommy!” she yelled, and I had to take that as my cue.
Excerpted from This Is Not My Beautiful Life by Victoria Fedden. To be published by Picador June 2016. Copyright © 2016 Victoria Fedden. All rights reserved
Read more of Victoria’s writing at her website, and learn more about This Is Not My Beautiful Life here.
