Diary of a Gen X Mom: That mom
A Tale of Two Lives — one with a village and one without
By the time we had 4 children and 5 years in London, I was used to a village. Expats are one of the subsets of society that still forms them. Away from family and cultural oddities, necessity builds villages.
I had a lovely one. We had drop off playdates in the garden, after school tea (kids’ dinner) that were almost pot lucks, and standing ability to pick up each others’ kids from school in a pinch. I did not know how lucky I was.
When we returned to the US, home to Texas no less, a place known for its open friendliness, I thought I would plug right in. I quickly realized that I had been mistaken. Sometime between my upbringing in the 70’s and my motherhood days in the augts, American Motherhood became competitive busywork.
In London, I was above average for mother involvement at school, often picking up multiple kids who did not belong to me, chaperoning the occasional field trip, and serving one year on the nursery school PTA, which was a five member committee, including the headmistress, that ran one thing: the Christmas Carnival.
In our London primary school, I raised suspicion as an American with a clipboard. The school did not provide parent contact info, you see. We got the class list for only our child’s class, and it only listed the children’s names. The girls were underlined. The boys were not. That was it. Our school believed that you dropped your child at the door and if they needed you, they called you. If you needed them, you would call them. The school had no PTA, no Casino Nights, no Homeroom Moms. When we moms (and a few dads and nannies) wanted to socialize and network, we found ways. Some experienced mom would step up to gather parent details and the village-ing would begin.
Our second year at the school, I was that experienced mom, hence the clipboard. I figured I’d just show up the first week and pass it around. I got about 5 Italians and one German father, who I later learned was my Turkish friend’s husband dropping their youngest off, that is, I already had her details and had met her for numerous coffees, playdates, and movie nights. It took weeks of skeptical looks, but I finally got a list of critical mass. (The man from Colorado with the Tube Chat buttons — that was me at the school house door, except the mostly expat parents laughed about it.)
Once I had the list, the connecting began. We had coffee mornings, casual ones at a coffee shop, not the PTA meeting-like ones. We did dinners and movie nights. We picked up and watched each other’s kids, and not just after school. When new babies came along, we took elder siblings in. And so on.
When we moved home, I did not change my level of kid involvement, but within 6 weeks I realized that I was just a notch above complete slacker. There was so much to do — but without the connecting and the resultant village-ing.
Things British mothers would have protested never occurred to American mothers to mind.
Our first year back I had four children in two different schools. For that set up, I had the before-school-starts coffee for each school, the school start coffee, the grade level coffees for the older children, and class coffee for the twins. That was seven coffees in half as many weeks.
Soon came the Fall Festival at the nursery school, to which parents have to accompany their children. My twins’ slot was 10:30 to 11:30. After the 9am drop off, I had a little over an hour, which any experienced mom will tell you is not enough time to be getting on with anything, certainly not in Houston where one must factor in a 10–15 minute drive to where ever. It’s not like there is a grocery store or anything remotely errand-able near most churches. So I brought my laptop and did a little editing to fill the time.
The festival was in the soccer field across the small — in American scale — school’s parking lot. The twins’ class had eight children and two teachers. That is, the 4:1 ratio class had to walk perhaps 25 yards across a dormant parking lot to an enclosed football pitch. Yet, the mothers must attend. Someone might get hurt, lost, need to go to the loo, I guess. The 4:1 ratio was deemed insufficient to deal with those little hiccups.
A mere six weeks into school that was the second mother participation event. The twins missed a trip to a farm two weeks prior. Mothers didn’t have to attend but did have to drive. The farm was a little over an hour out of town. I didn’t think I could make it back in time for the school bus for the older children. Plus, even if I didn’t need to go into the farm, productive activity for a city housewife is limited in the country from 9:30–1:30. I could have planned a mothers’ meet, but most mothers would have gone, and many did, into the farm because it is important to share these experiences with our children, or something like that. That the children should build peer relations and other authority relations or that they start to have life experiences not involving a parent isn’t in the modern American mother’s parenting play book, at least not until sometime in the distant double-digit future. But there’s the rub. If mom waits until her kiddo is 10 for these independent experiences to begin, then her kiddo is far more likely either to resist independent experiences or rebel and force them in ways no one is ready for.
The busywork kept coming. Our second year back I got a PTA volunteer list for the elementary school that was two pages of double columns of job opportunities. Scanning, I realized that they were creating positions so the mothers would feel involved. And many of those positions had to do with fundrasiers to fund the festivals. It was a busywork circle: the bigger the fundraiser, the bigger the festival, and the longer the necessary volunteer lists. Repeat next year. (Or next month. You think these schools only have one festival-ish event a year? Ha!)
I soon learned that the whole scheme fostered competition more than cooperation — and that’s before adding on the “fun” of little kid sports teams.
And it wasn’t just the PTA. A year or so back, a lovely working mother confided to me that she worried about assuming too much by sending her daughter to play at our house on a regular basis, but the girls liked each other and I didn’t keep score sos she would try not to feel guilty. That was my first introduction to the phantom network of unmentionable co-ops for playdates. Somebody was always keeping score.
I’d already found out about diet and discipline rules. Helicopter moms don’t let their kids play at free range houses (as apt a description of our household as I’ll get in a short essay) and kids with tons of dietary restrictions aren’t allowed at houses that occasionally stock Oreos. (And, yes, when those kids come over they would sneak into the pantry and binge on forbidden treats.)
My favorite story, however, is the call from concerned texting mom year three or four back. While in the stop-and-go car line in front of the school, one of my twins leaned out of the back door window to wave to a friend. It was obvious she was kneeling in her seat. By the time we got past the school zone, she was bottom on seat with the belt in the proper positon. A little bit of, “Get in your seat belt, young lady!” had sufficed. I thought nothing of the incident until a few hours later when a mom, who had been in the line a few cars back, called to warn me that my nanny was not being attentive enough and described the incident of the twin leaning out the window. She got very flustered when I informed her I, the mom, was the driver at the time of the wave. She couldn’t believe that my daughter had knelt in the seat for maybe 50 feet while we creeped along at 10 miles an hour.
I tried to take it as a helpful gesture until she mentioned that she noticed my child waving out the window when she, the mother, looked up from her phone. I was being called out for safety by a mother who was texting in the car line in front of the school. This realization was not conducive to villaging. How can we build neighborhoods out of only Mrs. Cravitzes? (Remember the nosy neighbor lady in one of the 70’s sitcoms. Bewitched, as I recall.)
That might have been when I became that mom, as far as the gossip goes.
A few years after the texting mom incident, I was at one of the school fairs. I had picked a home base spot by a big tree so the kids would know where to find me. I had my kids and three others I was responsble for that day because a working mom (a different one) and another mom with elderly parents under her care couldn’t make the fair. I was alone — most of the moms who would associate with me were working — so this mom didn’t see me behind the tree. Her daughter, 4th grade, wanted to come over to our house. She liked playing there. I let them outside to play. I let them talk to neighbors. Her mother told her in no uncertain terms that she was not allowed to play at “that house” because it wasn’t safe. I, the mom, did not provide enough supervision. “Everyone” knew this.
By then, I had known I was That Mom, but it was probably the first time I was called it — that I heard, of course.
I rested in the knowledge that I was not always That Mom. Our third summer after our return to the states, we visited London. I showed up at the end of the day at our old London school (they are in session until mid-July) to pick up a few of the kids’ friends. Three years later and I felt like Norm walking into Cheers, where everyone knew my name and was happy to see me. The children had a blast, playing football in front of the Stacchi Gallery at Duke of York Square followed by dinner at our flat and a World War II pillow fight reenactment, while I had a cup of tea, or two, with my mother and nanny friends. A light fixture lost a crystal (chandeliers were part of the lucite and velvet design trend), but otherwise fun and fellowship was had by all. No injuries.
I eventually built another village, mostly out of our church in Houston. Expats and Anglicans village up pretty quickly. But for the general set that is modern American motherhood, I am still an odd mom out. That mom.
