Mommy and mean

I'm having a serious dilemma. Jack started school and U10 soccer last week, add to that karate, homework and the occasional playdate and I'm now in crisis mode, crisscrossing town, being his chauffeur/social planner and going through two tanks of gas a week. Add Makena to the daily chaos, and the exercise du jour has been getting her to sleep a full night (so that I can) and getting Jack to school on time so that we can make a good impression on the new teacher.

We didn't know her before this year and she is new to our public school district but she's really cool and happens to be a mother to a class clown, like myself. She has a very nice class set-up that seems geared toward teaching kids more than it does toward impressing their parents. By that I mean that it's essentially clutter free, very well organized, and with things clearly marked on the boards and walls for kids to read. Other classes are extremely colorful (I like that too) but they are so crammed with "educational" tools and paper mache monstrosities that it seems hard for me to think that these kids will have a peaceful setting to let it all sink in...Whatever, not my problem this year.

Jack loves her and the environment she has set up, so ultimately, that's all that matters. He is in third grade, in a three/four split and the day before classes started, I showed up at school to see who he had been assigned to. As I approached the bulletin board, I overheard this anorexically thin mother, who I used to have playdates with when Jack was a baby but then stopped because she drove me mad, complaining to her equally thin friend that her fourth grade son had been put in a class with third graders. So I quickly put the breaks on giving her my superficially smiley "hello" and clammed up, aghast, when I saw that I was going to be seeing a lot more of her than I wished to! AGH! I stepped away and paid great interest to what classrooms Jack's friends had been assigned to and, feigning disinterest, overheard her list off the names of the kids in Jack's class, moaning. Then she perked up and counted six kids in fourth grade, including her own, of course, who were smart and bright kids -- so maybe this wasn't going to be so horrible and she would wait to pass further judgment. This is exactly why we kicked her out of our mommy and me group!

I just wanted to lecture her and tell her that all the kids were smart and maybe the third graders had been put in her class because they were especially bright (which they are, of course), but I didn't. I decided that I would blog about it instead!

So this morning I made it to Makena's first "Mommy and Me" class, the same one Jack went to when he was a baby, and where I met my three friends who threw me her shower. I'm sitting there with my ten-month old Chinese daughter and she's crawling all over the place with her runny nose and drooling mouth (she's not sick) and freaking all the other moms out and I study them wondering what we have in common (other than babies) and then the next thing I know, I'm seriously panicking because I don't know how many more friends I can add to my mix. It sounds so horribly calculated but I can barely see the friends I have now, add to that my new China friends, and the time I also need to spend with my husband and not to mention, my horse (not to be confused with my husband, the work-horse) and it's way, way too overwhelming. And did I mention my professional obligations?

And then I think about that uber-thin mother, and that it all originated in "Mommy and Me" eight years ago, and I freak out. Internally of course, outwardly, I appear super-relaxed cool.

So now that I've had seventeen cups of green tea and a bowl of congee to think about it, I've decided that I'm not going to force the issue. I'm just going to be not overly desperate to set up playdates for Makena and be sucked into someone else's neurotic soap opera when I have my own whack issues to work through. Then again, maybe that is something we have in common and I have a whole new mine full of new friends to relate to...hmmm...

I think I'm A.D.D. In fact, I'm sure of it.

I need help, because with friends like me, who needs enemies?

Is -- a mommy and mean.

PS I was finally able to capture Makena's smile in a photograph. She is always very studious. It was taken at her first visit with her pediatrician (the one that took my calls from China). She babbled the whole time he was examining her and didn't cry when she was given a meningitis shot! (FYI she was current on all her vaccines according to her book.) She weighed in at 17 pounds and 27.5 inches and he told us that she is developmentally right on track. Yeah!!!