Judith Warner, the End of the School Year, and Alpha Moms

Sometimes I think Judith Warner just needs to lighten up. I like Judith Warner. I think she’s smart and nuanced and makes a lot of important points. Unlike Caitlin Flanagan, she genuinely cares and thoughtfully writes about complexity, and she’s not afraid to be Not Quite Sure. However. I do think she is afflicted with an acute case of cultural myopia, and sometimes she takes things a bit too seriously.

Take this piece about the end of the year (yes, I know, it’s Times Select, but Dawn has labored long and hard on my behalf, with a little assistance from Phantom, and I now have the ability to go below the fold, so I have, in my continued efforts to subvert the NY Times powers that be, pasted the entire piece--you guessed it--below the fold). To summarize briefly: there’s too much going on at the end of the school year, the alpha moms over-achieve and make the beta moms feel bad, and Warner cries (Warner often cries, something else I admire about her, being someone who does a fair bit of crying myself).

Once again, I don’t quite get it. The end of the school year has always been crazy--I remember it from when I was a kid. And this year in East Coast Big City, it’s been even crazier because of the rain, which has meant postponements of picnics, and pile-ups of Little League games, and field day rescheduled three times, which means more emails and more volunteer sign-ups and more what have you. And I certainly feel the craziness--just the other day, E's friend's mom and I were wandering vaguely around E’s classroom, trying to corral our daughters’ wayward belongings, and agreeing that we were totally overwhelmed and could barely keep our heads on straight.

But. That’s just the way it is at the end of the school year. Then it ends, and we get summer. The best solution is to increase one’s intake of late-night vodka, which S and I have definitely done (though his late-night vodka is of the no-sous chef variety, not the overwhelmed-by-end-of-school-year variety, since he has managed to miss the vast majority of end-of-school-year craziness, though by a miracle of scheduling and rain date rescheduling, he actually attended both E’s end-of-school-year picnic and M’s end-of-school-year barbecue, though I made the potato salad).

Oh dear, this is becoming another why-can’t-I-get-to-my-point-already post. Because my point is not about the end of the year, it’s about alpha moms. More specifically, it’s about freaking out over alpha moms.

The thing is, I just have not encountered these people in my life with kids. I’ve certainly read about them in the NY Times, and I believe Lucy has encountered them, living as she does in a rich suburb and teaching in another (Lucy, are you there? can you validate?). But in my life? Not so much. I used to think it was because I lived in Red State Capital City Suburb, but now I’m in East Coast Big City, albeit the not-so-upscale end of an inner suburb that is getting increasingly upscale but nothing like Lucy’s, and still, the moms I encounter are just, well, kind of normal. And sympathetic. And incredibly helpful to each other. I mean, I don't want to drink margaritas with each and every one of them, but I don't want to drink margaritas with each and every one of anyone.

There are a bunch of moms who are at M’s school all the time, running things and helping with things and being generally alpha in that sort of way. But they are great--the school couldn’t function without them. I suppose I could be intimidated by them, but they are all perfectly nice. And they are not doing stuff like making picture frames for the teachers; they’re doing stuff like running the book club and organizing field day and setting up food for kindergarten orientation. And they don't make me feel bad for what I do or don't do; they're just grateful when I bake brownies for the teacher appreciation lunch.

So I return to cultural myopia. Warner lives in Washington, and I’m sure her kids either go to a private school or a fancy suburban public school, and I’ve never been a mom in either of those situations, so maybe that’s what it’s like. But an extremely small proportion of the population is involved in those situations, albeit an extremely high proportion of NY Times readers, and I guess maybe what I’m trying to say here is that I am so tired of those moms being the media representation of contemporary motherhood. Only I feel like I’ve said that before.

So the other thing I’ll say is that I just don’t see why an extremely intelligent and accomplished woman like Judith Warner can’t just say “the hell with this shit.” If she thinks it’s wrong (it being the compulsive parenting behavior she sees around her), why worry about it? If her kids are healthy and happy, which they appear to be, what’s the problem? If she’s worried the alpha moms will disrespect her food, I have super-easy potato salad and brownie recipes I can share with her. But really, ultimately, it’s better to resist the dominant paradigm--if it is indeed dominant--than to cry about it.

My Last Day of School
by Judith Warner

The tears were flowing fast and free at my daughter Emilie’s last-day-of-school party Wednesday morning. And it wasn’t just because the kindergartners were hyped-up and over-sugared.

One mom burst into tears when I went up to say hello. She’d had a little run-in with another mom, who’d scolded her for showing up late with the arts and crafts.

It didn’t matter that she’d been up until 3 a.m. gluing class photos onto little colored-paper frames. Nor that she’d made a special effort to provide both boy- and girl-friendly sponge cutouts for collage. It also didn’t matter that she’d provided plastic sheaths to protect and immortalize the crafts projects, nor that she’d discovered, one hour prior to party time, that the paper frames didn’t fit into the plastic sheaths, and she’d had to cut them down to size.

It didn’t matter that it was her son’s third birthday and that she hadn’t been able to shop for his party because she’d had to go to her first grader’s “author’s tea” — a catered school affair that she’d left scandalously early, because she just couldn’t take it anymore.

“I hate this [expletive] time of year,” she said, in between gasps of one of those efficient little cries with which I am so familiar.

“Everybody does,” I said.

There are five class mothers in kindergarten. For the end-of-year party, one of them organized all our teacher gifts into baskets. Another made a commemorative plaque. A third made an incredible CD of photos of the kids set to music. The fourth was my slacker friend who’d messed up the crafts. And the fifth organized the party, found the room, cleaned it, organized the buffet, baked something sugar-dusted with a name like Harvey Nichols cake (or something like that), and did it all with a huge smile and a genuinely delighted look in her big blue eyes.

I arrived at the party feeling quite proud. I had managed that morning to 1) take a shower 2) work for the better part of an hour 3) remember to bring the cookies I’d promised and 4) arrive a few minutes early, which gave me the satisfaction of seeing Emilie’s face change from anxious anticipation to pure joy as she entered the room and saw me.

In the previous 10 days, I’d been through three violin recitals, many half-days of school, a “biome presentation,” camp forms, doctor visits and an overnight trip to the mountains with Emilie (sheer bliss, a thunderbolt of stress before and after ) — all during work hours. Not to mention children at sixes and sevens with each other because, well, nobody likes transitions, and a bout of screaming at Max, who’d asked me, disrespectfully, I felt, to get off the phone.

(It was 7 p.m. on Sunday. The garden hose was blasting, mud was streaming, baths were running, the barbecue was cold, and I was on a work call.

He said: “If you’re going to yell at me, then I am going out to dinner.”

I said: “Couldn’t you just get the barbecue going first?”)

“I hate this [expletive] time of year.” I stared up from my pizza at yet another mom, skinny and wired, whose tears glazed her dilated eyes like stale contact lenses. She’d spent all morning at the pediatrician’s office, she said. She was supposed to be at work, and after two weeks of bucolic mountain overnights, soccer and ballet year-end parties, the biome thing and the choral concert (did I mention the choral concert?), she was in serious trouble with her boss.

“I gotta get out of here,” she said. She vibrated before me for a couple more seconds, and then she was gone.

“Don’t you just love this time of year?” It was Emilie’s best friend’s mother now, picking a popsicle out of her skirt. “She makes me show up for these things. I leave work, and then she ignores me.”

There came a scream: “It’s time to cut the Edwardian boudoir cake!”

The class baskets for the teachers looked fabulous, each with its own perfect tissue-paper flower. The class mom who’d made the slide show had copied program guides and CDs for every last one of us. I’d had to write at least half a dozen reminders on my hand to remember to go and print out two 8 1⁄2-by-11-inch photos of Julia for the memory books that the third grade class was forcing upon — I mean giving — the teachers as end-of-the-year gifts. (Julia’s quote: “I had so much fun in math!”)

My store-bought cookies were sitting in their plastic containers. I’d been told not to arrange them on paper plates. Did the class moms fear I’d drop them? Eat them? Get distracted mid-task and walk away? (How did they know?)

The kids inhaled the cookies in seconds. The plaque was presented to a lovely teacher whose retirement party I’d forgotten to attend at the exact moment when I was throwing a barbecue scrub brush at Max.

It takes only a few bad apples to spoil life for the rest of us, I was thinking.

The slide show began. And there were our children — all 28 of them — timid and little at the start of the year, bold and proud at the end, holding hands, making faces, climbing, painting, dancing, reading and grinning at us, and all of this set to songs like “All You Need is Love” and “Child of Mine.”

I was mortified to find myself crying. Not just tearing up, but really and, truth be told, uncontrollably crying. I hid behind Emilie’s head and soaked the back of it. I was about to wipe my nose on the hem of her dress, when another mother handed me a Kleenex. At which point I looked up and saw the red eyes, heard the sniffles and realized that we were all drowning together.

After the slide show, the other moms kept their heads down. They grabbed their kids away from the few remaining cookies, made for the door and snapped at their kids to say good-bye and thank you, and stop it.

“Mommy, why are you crying?” Emilie asked, as we left the party and the waterworks continued.

“Grownups cry sometimes when they’re happy,” I lied.

I don’t want to feel again what I felt while watching that slide show: that childhood is finite, that our days together are numbered, and that those hours in the mountains and at the biome museum are gone forever.

Better to be in a snit over cookies or phone calls or crafts. Better to keep on running, between work, home, school and the dry cleaners, between one day’s obsession and the next day’s fight.

Better to stay in a dissociated state of stressed-out busyness. Better to fight the Mommy Wars than admit how easily I can be destroyed by the wrong kind of glance from the wrong kind of person whose very eyes seem to contain in them all that I am not and fear I will never be.

Anything is better — at the end of the school year — than truly stopping to think.