I want to attach myself, like a pilot fish, to the side of Joan.
Maybe she needs a new best friend? Who knows?
“If you don’t mind unboxing these knitting kits…” she says.
“Unboxing? I’ll buy one!” I exclaim.
“They’re pretty great,” Joan says. “And the proceeds go to a good cause. It’s for the Literacy Project. They provide Caldecott Medal–winning books for poor children—”
I don’t know from literacy projects, and I’ve never knit in my life.
“I’ll buy two!”
At 6:30 P.M., a dozen mothers gather in the nursery on small child chairs with powder-blue seat cushions. On four walls around us is red-and-white-striped wallpaper covered with bears. There is one stay-at-home dad named Brad who hovers for a few minutes, sort of jogging, from heel to heel, while bouncing his crumple-faced baby in a plaid BabyBjörn carrier. But what with the powder blue and the bears and the women and the baby, I feel anxious for Brad, as if there, right in front of us, his manhood might actually fall off. Fortunately, his phone cheeps and off he jogs.
Joan opens the Spring Jamboree meeting, “Shall we get started?” My job is to take notes.
There are announcements of deadlines, calls for gift baskets, solicitations of items for the teddy bear raffle…
And then Joan gives the floor over to a mother named Elise. Clearly, it’s a huge symbolic moment.
“Elise worked very hard at the fund-raiser LAST year,” Joan says. “And she very much wanted to organize it this year? So we thought, this year, she should be ALLOWED to do it?” Joan’s tone is both questioning and firm, as though forestalling any…argument about the matter? “We think she has some great ideas? Elise?”
Elise stands. She has a tight brown ponytail, slick in front, then exploding into frizz down her back. She wears a sleeveless white blouse. She is bouncing what appears to be a miniature Dwight D. Eisenhower in a flowered pink baby sling.
“All right, people,” she says, shifting from foot to foot with an odd heightened excitement. “Listen up!”
She points to an easel.
“I’ve split up the planning of the Spring Jamboree evening into four categories,” which she reads aloud as she taps:
Food
Beverages
Theme
Decorations
As soon as I see the list, it strikes me that there is a problem with this order. I believe a better order would be:
Theme
Decorations
Food
Beverages
Or even:
Theme
Food
Decorations
Beverages
Really, any of these would do, as long as Theme GOES FIRST.
“Elise?” Joan asks. She is now stuffing envelopes for yet another mysterious ongoing project. “What IS the theme?”
“The theme is Cinco de Mayo,” Elise replies flatly.
“Cinco de Mayo!” exclaims another mom, whose name I’m pretty sure is Sharon. “We should get it catered from Puerto Vallarta!”
“What is Puerto Vallarta?” Elise asks.
“It’s this great Mexican restaurant near our house!”
“It’s a very tight budget,” Elise says. “I think like last year? Keep it simple. I’m thinking platters from Costco.”
“Costco platters!” Joan exclaims cheerfully. “Those were just fine!”
“Aw!” Sharon sighs, in sharp disappointment. “It’s just that Puerto Vallerta is really, really great and really, really cheap.”
“Well,” Joan says again, “maybe you can get us some numbers. Elise? Would you like her to get you some numbers?”
For Sharon, this is beside the point. She shakes her head with surprising energy, like a horse champing at the bit.
“OKAY! Maybe it’s a few more dollars, but the point is—”
“You know what?” Elise retorts, her vocal pitch titching up just a notch. “I just think, ‘Keep it simple.’ Keep the food simple. Because then we can bump up the decorations. Target has these cute little one-dollar cactus pots—”
“I just think if you HAVE a Mexican theme, you should HAVE good Mexican food!” persists Sharon. “Was there a theme LAST year? I don’t remember a theme. Why do we even HAVE a theme?”
I now notice what appears to be dried pink strawberry Danimal on Sharon’s white blouse, and it occurs to me that, mothers of small children, we are all just very, very tired. I myself feel as though I’m falling into a stupor, writing slower and slower and slower in my notepad…
In fact, looking down, it appears that instead of “beverage,” I have written “begerave”…and next to it something that looks like
Frsdrggb???
Oh no! There’s that cuneiform again!
“Maybe we should move on,” suggests Joan. “And we’ll keep Puerto Vallarta on the table. Thanks for that suggestion, Colleen,” she says, patting Sharon on the hand.
Why is she calling Sharon “Colleen”? Then suddenly I realize Sharon’s name may actually be Colleen. And I was so sure Colleen’s name was Sharon. Crap! Now I have to go back and relabel that whole passage of notes. I should just go back to my fail-safe practice of calling everybody “Honey.”
“I just want to decide on the stationery,” Elise shrills, verging on hysteria. “Tonight! I just…want…to decide…on the stationery!”
“Okay…” Joan says.
Although, in fact, what Elise means is not exactly STATIONERY but merely one of three possible BORDERS of stationery upon which we are going to print INVITATIONS…for the Spring Fund-Raising Jamboree raffle…which we will actually be stuffing INTO the labeled cubbies…of one another.
Which you’d think would be simple but somehow…The very teeny tininess of this task…I mean, look at this:
For the life of me, I can’t tell the difference. IS there a difference?
But no, now I and the twelve other sleep-deprived mothers seem to be going into a kind of decisionary paralysis. I can actually feel our brain chemicals slowing down. It’s like if certain types of birds or lemmings see themselves in a mirror and they get so confused they suddenly hopelessly lose their sense of direction and plunge into the sea.
“What was the theme again?” another mother stabs out suddenly, in panic.
“Do I have to feed my parking meter after six?” wails another.
“Is Jamboree really spelled with two e’s?” cries a third.
It’s not just a Snorl, it’s the literal…
VORTEX OF THE SNORL.
We are now interrupted—awakened—by singles, pairs, and trios of hysterical parents starting to crowd into the nursery. It is a parade of goatees, crocs, baby strollers, baby slings, the odd Ramones T-shirt, a little tie-dye, canvas Trader Joe’s bags…
Who keep coming. And coming.
If Guavatorina was my own circling crow…The anxieties of my fellow Los Angeles parents—they’re not just a few crows, they are a murder of crows…like The Birds! It’s like a Worry blizzard straight out of Hitchcock!
“Where is ‘Into Kindergarten’?” “Is this ‘Into Kindergarten’?” “What’s YOUR home school?” “What’s YOUR home school?” None of the news is good. These are Valley public schools, Van Nuys public schools, frightening unknown elementaries no one had ever heard of…their names a gutteral blend of contemporary Mexican and historical Dutch! The grotesque syllables came out like horn blats.
“Cramplin!”
“Guavatorina!”
“Meldonblag!”
“Oaxacateptl!”
“Van Triscuit!”
“Tijuanaville!”
“Cocopo!”
“Hufflepuff!”
“I don’t even KNOW what our school is,” weeps one mother, in a batik skirt. “All I know is we can’t go there! Eighty percent free and reduced lunch! The scores are frightening!”
It is soon clear that the nursery can’t hold all the incoming parents. Joan’s husband, Walt, a short, blond ’f
ro-haired, slightly perspiring man who looks a bit like a kindly ferret, shouts: “Joan! We need to move into the lunchroom!”
“All right!” she cries out.
New doors are opened. Folding chairs clatter apart. Tables are lifted, pushed—
It’s like a scene from Dr. Zhivago, of madding crowds at a breadline.
“Do you want me to continue taking notes, Joan?” I yell over to her. “I see you’re kind of overwhelmed here!”
“Fine!” she says, barely hearing me, madly gathering her materials, her Tupperwares, her clipboards, her paperwork. “Fine!”
Waving a clipboard like a semaphore above him, Walt urges us into the bigger room. We form a large ragged semicircle against a double-stacked crush of child-sized blue lunch tables, their metal legs poking every which way. Surrounded on every side, Walt seems to need to talk fast to keep from being stoned.
“Let’s begin with just a quick data dump of some of the general kindergarten questions and concerns you have!” Walt yells, over the hubbub.
And now, instead of Aimee’s vague accusation of “bigness,” “Los Angeles Unified”—a noxious term I can’t hear now without feeling a tight choking sensation in my chest, followed by a slight burning acid reflux…The dragon that is our large urban school district, the giant dark hydra, is shown to me, with all its hideous heads, tongues, arms, claws, wings…
I scribble down the notes, and scribble and scribble. I’m writing as fast as I can and can still barely keep up…
URBAN PUBLIC SCHOOL WORRY LIST
Republicans have caused U.S. public education to become complete, unsolvable travesty
Fifty children packed into classrooms designed for twelve
Thanks to No Child Left Behind, giant lowering “Mao Tse-Tung”–like oil paintings of George W. Bush hanging everywhere
It’s all testing!
High-stakes testing!
Students are tested every single minute of every single hour of every single day
Even on bathroom breaks students retrace the letter A over and over again while drunk, angry teacher beats ruler until students crumple forward to their knees weeping
Thanks to teachers’ union, teachers insist on getting huge benefits, teaching short hours, and having lots of vacations
Teachers who smile, love children, and get excited about anything are barred by the union
McDonald’s transfats are required, sold everywhere in vending machines
Due to strange corporation arrangement with Wal-Mart (to make up for all the budget cuts), only music by Kenny G or Kenny Loggins—only the Kennys—is allowed
What about magnet schools? Dead grass, filthy, odds are one in 2,400 of getting in, funding iffy
Middle schools are continually in Oz-style lockdowns
Mountain lion virus outbreak
Thanks to hormone-filled milk, teen girls mature four years earlier than ever before and are like crazy Britney Spears animals now
Boys’ pants are all down around their ankles now—it’s all about the butt
Gold teeth seen in butt
Have you heard of this new thing called “pantsing”?
Because due to budget cuts there are no custodians, middle-school bathrooms are flooded ankle deep in water; Hurricane Katrina–like, girls can only get out of the bathroom if they submit to “pantsing”
And then for high school…“Cheney!” Everyone has to go to “Cheney High School!” which feeds straight into the military!
There is so much bureaucracy, not even one idea can make it through
GIANT benefits for teachers, and the kids don’t even have a pencil—typical teachers will waggle vacation photos from Cancun over the children and say: “Hah! You don’t even have a pencil!”
Teachers fill up their bank accounts by calling in sick
Bureaus upon bureaus upon bureaus, the LAUSD takes up forty city blocks, extensions that literally go nowhere, it’s exactly like Terry Gilliam’s movie Brazil, corpses found in stairwells dating back to the pre-1960s
There are some pockets of safety in Los Angeles, but those are few and far between.
A map of Los Angeles reveals very few “safe spots”…
Joan shushes the group.
She stands on a lunch table, trembling under the fluorescents. And she says:
“I grew up in Ohio…”
A hush falls over the group.
“I grew up in Ohio,” Joan repeats. “The public schools I went to had green grass, brownie-baking PTA’s, and families who looked like Ozzie and Harriet…”
There are vague murmurs of assent.
“But we don’t live in Ohio forty years ago. We live in Los Angeles today. Not only is it a desert, making even the growing of grass ecologically questionable, white children are now a minority in L.A. County—just one in five. So English speakers have a choice. We can turn and flee into our little Johannesburg-like enclaves, the supposed ‘good schools’…But the fact is, there simply aren’t enough of them.”
Her arms fly up, like Evita, and she exhorts us:
“How long will we flee our neighborhood schools? How long before we learn to work all together! How long before we stop living in fear!”
The room falls dead silent.
Look at her! I think.
She is so strong! So certain! The fluorescents reflect off her chestnut pageboy! Her fingers point, touch, make circles! And through the sheer dint of her trembling passion, her body almost takes flight.
It is a rousing, epic Lord of the Rings–type moment.
What Joan is basically saying is, “Oh ye Gentle Hobbits of Kinder-wood! Arise! Stand yer ground! In numbers ye are mighty! Take your kindergartens back!”
Now that I see her at work, I see that Joan Archer is a galvanizer! An Alpha Mom, or simply an Alpha…
For instance, in our family, it is Kaitlin, the oldest daughter, who is the Alpha. So when our quavering eighty-six-year-old elderly dad has a mysterious fall, is rushed to emergency, then is mysteriously discharged…and the two streams of conflicting information start coming in, our dad insisting irritably: “I’m fine! I’m fine! I just fell! Oops, dropped my pills. Let me count them. One, two, five, three, TWELVE, THIRTY-SEVEN—” And on the other line you have: “Paging you? Dr. Sanders. The cardiologist. It’s urgent. Dr. Sanders.” And you call back Dr. Sanders and…he’s gone for the weekend?
I’ve found, even though it is I who live in town, since our family is lucky enough to have a family Alpha, all I have to do is to vaguely SUGGEST medical confusion, give a sigh, admit I’m at a loss, and within twenty-four hours, Alpha Sister has packed her bags, flown down (via her free airline miles—she knows all the codes, they’re all at her fingertips), and set up camp in our father’s living room. She is practically conducting medical tests herself, with her own equipment. All I have to do is murmur, “Wow—you’re amazing,” and respond to the continuing medical e-mail updates by occasionally typing things like: “Oh—so it’s the bladder, then?” And the problem is handled.
As for my family, I have a Kaitlin now: For public school I have a Joan.
“When I and a group of just two other regular working mothers founded this very preschool we’re standing in, Valley Co-Op…” Joan continues passionately.
Oh my gosh, that’s right. Hazy memory now recalls that Joan actually founded this place. Which I’d gotten used to thinking of as a piece of random luck we just fell into, an unexpected lifeboat in Los Angeles, unbelievably cheap, convenient, and flexible, you can leave your kid in aftercare for like two dollars an hour—
“So, as parents today, in a large urban school district, unless we choose to move OUT of the city, we have to have a proactive attitude. As many times as you ask, ‘What can this elementary do for me?’ you have to ask, ‘What can I do to help IT?’ ‘Where is a good public school?’” Joan pounds her fist to her chest. “‘A good school is where I am. A good school starts with me.’ The number one factor determining your child’s academi
c success is not the particular school she goes to but her parents. Or his! That’s you! You, the parents, are POWERFUL!”
It’s all so clear! I turn excitedly to the crowd, and realize…
No…Oh no…No…
Joan Archer is like one of the shiny elfin people, and we are like the raggedy hobbits. God, look at us: We are an unattractively lit roomful of wild-eyed, sweaty people. Bouncing babies. Faces hysterical. We can’t do this. We can’t. We are tired. We are panicked. We are already at our wit’s end.
The reject parents—the clubfooted little hobbits—we are indeed in flight!
I glance down at the map of L.A. again. Look at this. No. It’s too daunting.
This great, dark, overwhelming dragon threatening to crush us, this faceless thing called L.A. Unified, is a thing so much more vast and powerful than we are. It’s a Brazil-like bureaucracy whose grim tentacles reach everywhere, poisoning the very kindergartens our children would attend.
I look back at Joan and now…
I watch in slow motion as she makes a fatal mistake.
Which is to say, after she stuns us with this rather shocking notion of “standing our ground,” she fatally…turns. She turns away from a teeming mass of seventy-five people to fumble for a chart she has drawn up. The chart is in a scroll, she has to roll it out, but it keeps rolling itself back up—
“Oh my goodness,” she says. “This thing keeps—”
Joan was clearly all prepped in the nursery, but now, since at the last minute we had to hastily move to the lunchroom, she doesn’t have any of her traditional organizational weaponry around her.
Mother on Fire: A True Motherf%#$@ Story About Parenting! Page 5