Cheerful Abundance

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Watching the Hysteria

Posted in Suburban Field Notes by KT
Mar 21 2013

First up, if you are a mother, and you are on Facebook, you really need to be following Sanctimommy. Not only are her posts hilarious, and oddly familiar, but the comments on each are priceless, because her followers play along, each one-upping the other with their ’126 month old’ children and obsession with breast milk. Every time someone uses the phrase, ‘I don’t judge’ on that page, I snort a little. It’s pretty genius.

Today, I am watching the hysteria on a big parenting message board set up primarily for our old home town. The magnet, gifted and classical, and selective enrollment schools are starting to send out their acceptance and wait list letters, and the threads are full of sanctimommy snarking, along with ‘suggestions’ why one’s own children may have made the cut, while others did not. Remember all that hype a decade or so ago, about Indigo Children, and how they later got one-upped by the even more special Crystal Children, who have recently been usurped by Rainbow Children? Poor, poor indigos – they were special, and then their specialness got trampled by an influx of other fancy-coloured children. Watching parents post about their selective schools admissions is a lot like watching parents fight over whose kid is more special. So much humble-bragging is going on around here today.

All this one-upmanship, all these metrics that mothers hold themselves, and their children, too, it all seems so unnecessary to me. I suspect this is what happens when you take well-educated, ambitious women out of the workforce – they start applying workplace tactics to their homelife.I can’t imagine the pressure some of these women are under, to produce gifted and advanced children …. oh, wait. yes I can. Because I am watching a message board full of them today, and snorting. All those Archers and Millers and Chandlers and Ackermans and Haywards and Coopers and Wheelers and Tanners and Thatchers! All gifted and talented children are named after medieval professions: it is a fact.

Last night, at a school sporting event, I was sitting with a few other mothers, some I know pretty well, and others, not at all, when the subject of birthday parties came up, and who to invite. And damned if one of them didn’t say, point blank, that it was tough, because they didn’t want to invite the whole PreK class, and only wanted to invite families that would be staying at the school for kindergarten. While we don’t advertise that we are leaving, it is pretty clear that we are – when people ask, we hem and haw a bit, and we haven’t turned in our intention forms or deposits. Parents who have done those things are starting to group together at school events, I noticed last night.

I also noticed something else – a parent, casually mentioning to me that one of my daughters is having discipline issues in the classroom. Where she got that information, I don’t know, and it was pretty rich hearing it from her, given that her kid is a known biter, but it gave me pause, and when we came home, we had a careful conversation, after the kids were in bed, about how to talk about them in public. Obviously, we aren’t braggers, but also, about not being too self-deprecating about our family, because clearly, for some people, that is a form of currency, too. Maybe saying something negative about our kid makes her feel better about her own? I don’t know. It was such a weird moment – I don’t even know this woman’s first name, so it was awkward to hear her assessment of my child come out of her mouth like that, with the slightest tinge of … glee?

I hope our own school efforts are success. And I hope when we get there, we can find a little tribe of parents that care a lot about their kids, but not at the expense of everyone else’s kids, and who understand that playing the subtle game of parent politics hurts everyone and benefits no one. I hope for this, but I don’t expect it. After all, we applied to selective schools, so no doubt all the other parents will be grown up Crystal children, parenting Rainbows.

 

Tagged as: child naming, education, hoopla, humble-bragging, kindergarten, rambling
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