Momfriends (3 page)

“I really don’t see the rush for any of it,” I said. “I can barely keep up with the two of them walking.”

“Oh, me neither, no rush” she says. “I’m just saying.”

We sat for a while. She complimented Naomi’s eyelashes and her chubby cheeks. I kept looking at Naomi, not at Victoria, not complimenting Zachary. This was a bad idea though. I knew I was being sensitive. I was in a rotten mood and it wasn’t her fault. The neighborhood moms talked, they emailed, and they posted anonymous reviews on websites. I had to be more gracious. I couldn’t pull this sullen-girl act the way I used to when I was in high school, but so many times simply talking to other moms made me feel as uncool as I had in high school.

At last I turned to Zachary. I felt cheap, but I had mouths to feed. Throughout time mothers have had to do worse.

“What’s going on, pal?” I asked Zachary at last. “What nice curly hair you have.”

“Oh, it’s from his dad’s side,” Victoria said immediately, smiling.

“Adorable,” I said.

“Thank you,” Victoria said. I needed to get going. Julissa would freak if I wasn’t there to pick her up from school. I had no idea what she was going to do when she realized Sage was wearing her bathing suit. I called Sage over and handed him a T-shirt.

“We’ve got to go get your sister.” I stood up and secured Naomi in the sling. “It was nice to see you, Victoria.”

“Oh, you too. I was thinking of maybe getting some more pictures of Zach. You know for the grandparents. Those others came out so well.”

Score!

“Anytime, I would love to. You still have my contact info, right?”

“Of course.”

“Cool, let me know. Bye-bye, Zach,” I said, waving. I took Sage’s hand and we left the playground.

It seemed I was back in business.

Chapter 2

Claudia, the Ant

It was at the top of my to-do list.

I was going to get my kids into the perfect nursery school, no matter what. This was a project. And I was an excellent project manager.

In order to get into your top choice preschool, it was crucial to start eighteen months out. It would give me time to prep the children and make sure the staff at the day care knew to expunge Emily’s biting incident last fall if they were ever questioned.

In reality I wish I had started sooner. I wish I had started when they were in utero. The first order of business was to bring in an expert.

The consultant said she was going to call me back in five minutes, ten minutes ago. Not to mention it was 10:57 and every day at 10:59, I shut down my computer and walked downstairs to the café for an iced cappuccino. Now this consultant’s tardiness had the potential to put my whole day back.

Plus there was a typo in her email. She wrote “their” instead of “they’re.” As in, “I’m sure their going to have no hiccups getting into the school you want them to get into.” This was a woman to whom I was considering giving money so she could “ease the twins’ path into the right school.” One would think that Marcy, the consultant, would have typed that sentence countless times. Maybe she didn’t usually deal with twins. And maybe she was relying on her spell check to catch her typos as people so often did. If you ask me, people take far too many liberties on email. They just don’t respect the person to whom they are sending the email. Or maybe she wrote her email quickly because she was so busy with all her other clients.

I don’t know why I was trying to figure out Marcy’s motivation for her misspelling. I don’t know why I bothered. I was always doing that, trying to figure out what made everyone else so incompetent. Most of the time, it was because people didn’t care.

But I cared. And I was excited. I remember the charge I got when I opened each of my college acceptance letters. I had gotten into every school to which I applied. Except Harvard. I was wait-listed at Harvard. But I believe it was an extremely competitive year. If I had tried to transfer there in my junior year, I am more than sure I would have gotten in.

And I am more than sure I would have initially gotten in if I had the advantages that a lot of other kids had. I’m sure they had experts helping them along. A little money goes a long way. My mother was so certain I could get in on merit alone. That’s not the way the world works, I soon learned, but no matter. She was crushed when I was wait-listed. I think that maybe I didn’t transfer to spite her. And now when I still lay in bed at night wondering if I should have transferred, what really gnaws at me is that once again my mother was right. More doors open for Harvard grads.

My children would go to Harvard. The right preschool was the first step. If only Marcy would call back. It was 11:14. I was beginning to suspect that Marcy was not who I wanted taking such a pivotal role of my children’s future. I would find someone who was punctual and, more importantly, someone who could spell.

Maybe Marcy was a grasshopper.

“The Grasshopper and the Ant” was a story in my favorite childhood fairy tale collection. In every aspect of my life I felt I was the hardworking ant to everyone else’s lazy grasshopper.

I hoped this story would resonate with one of my children, but Emily was only interested in The Backyardigans and one of the few words Jacob said clearly was truck. I worried this might signify their future personality defects. And if it did, I was more than sure it could be corrected by the right preschool.

Or maybe they would be somehow stigmatized if they started one of these designer preschools with so many issues. Perhaps their reputations would carry through to high school and somehow word would get back to the Harvard admissions committee. Perhaps they needed a chance to excel that they weren’t getting at their day care. Perhaps they needed a preschool prep school.

I had been doing research on preschools. I stayed up late at night trolling urbanbaby.com, reading different reviews and finding out everything I could online about the best schools.

I recently read about the Brooklyn Center for Early Childhood Education (BROCECE pronounced Brookese, for people in the know). It was relatively new on the preschool scene, but even though it was in Brooklyn, not Manhattan, it was recently highly rated in an article in
New York
magazine. It was an up-and-coming feeder school, meaning it could lead the twins to a good elementary school and that would make all the difference. It certainly wasn’t a top preschool, it was in Brooklyn after all, but maybe if we did a year there, the kids would be ready. I imagined them on a preschool interview in Manhattan. At this point, it would be a disaster. They needed time. Perhaps they could start at Brookese and then transfer somewhere even better the way I should have done with Harvard.

Very well, then. Who needed Marcy, the incompetent consultant? Often it caused delays when one delegated. I would be the master of their fate. It was preferable. Getting the twins into Brookese was going to be my new focus. I could pour all my energy into Brookese instead of spreading the twins too thin with several schools. They would be big fish in a little pond. It was perfect.

The phone rang. I looked down expecting it to be Marcy. I was prepared to dismiss the tardy grasshopper. For the fee she had intended to charge me, I might relish it a little. She was unprofessional, and I don’t give people second chances. But it wasn’t Marcy. I recognized my mother’s number on the caller id. I knew why she was calling, but I didn’t want to talk to her. I was more than sure she would find a way to make me feel as though I was doing something wrong.

I let the call go to voice mail. But at the moment I was about to head down to the cafe, my computer calendar reminder dinged. I was supposed to be in a budget meeting. I was going to have to forgo my daily dose of caffeine. I was more exhausted than usual. Today of all days.

It was my birthday.

This morning I opened my eyes as usual a few precious seconds after I heard Jacob start screaming and right before Emily started kicking her crib, I realized that I was thirty-nine; technically I would be thirty-nine at 2 PM, but still.

Peter’s face was still buried in the pillow. It might have been nice if he leaped out of bed as a special birthday treat or maybe brought me breakfast in bed or something. But no, nothing.

I lay there for a minute, glaring at his bald spot.

I took a deep breath, knowing that as soon as my feet touched the ground it would begin. But somewhere I still hoped things would be different today of all days. I had a strict schedule. And it would have been nice if for once, someone else adhered to it.

But the twins refused to follow the rules. They were both up and all the stuffed animals from their cribs were on the floor. I didn’t know who to grab first. Jacob was crying real tears and Emily was screaming with her mouth wide open.

And then it turned into a morning like any other morning. Nothing could be different because it was my birthday. Each moment was a crisis, but it all flew by. I was a hamster on a wheel. No time to drink the coffee I had set up to be made in the morning. We needed to maintain this schedule to get us out of the door on time. Peter would tag team in occasionally like when Jacob threw his spoon of cereal against the wall. The stain would be cleaned up later, probably tonight at 1 am. Emily bumped her head on the coffee table, and Peter grabbed her so I could shower with the curtain open, and Jacob on the floor gnawed on puzzle pieces instead of trying to fit them together. I thought about wearing something nice, my red silk shirt that I always got complimented on, but Jacob had puked on that one morning right before work and I still hadn’t picked it up from the dry cleaner.

At last, I made it out of the house. First phase complete. There was no last-minute puke incident. That was a gift I for which I was grateful. But other than that there was nothing out of the ordinary. It was if today were any other day. Except it was Tuesday and Peter was doing drop off because he had a late meeting on Tuesdays. I waited when he kissed me good-bye, the quick chaste kiss we gave each other now. We kiss with the kiss that you might give a stinky grandmother.

On the subway I read through my emails as usual. Today couldn’t be any different. When the train went above-ground over the Manhattan Bridge, I had the signal to check my PDF and cell phone to see if there were any updates. Then I glanced for a minute at the view of the river.

It was in these moments every morning that I wondered if all of this was worth it. I thought of our exorbitant mortgage, working way too hard, and I fretted so much about the dangers that lay ahead for our kids in a city.

Sometimes the park seemed less like a small world and more like a minefield where pedophiles lurked, and kids fell off bikes or thugs mugged moms with strollers. I hadn’t heard of anything like that happening, of course, but it lay in the back of my head constantly.

I had no time to wonder or worry when I got to my desk and confronted another mountain of emails. I half expected to find a bouquet of flowers from Peter waiting for me, but it wasn’t there.

I hadn’t really had time to call the preschool consultant. It was personal business and I tried to never do personal business in the office. There was enough actual business that needed to be completed.

I am the vice president of production accounting. I love my title. I am pleased to say that earned it. I work for a production company that produces numerous soap operas. Lately one of the biggest ones is
Dragon Circle
about a street where a bunch of teenage vampires live. It’s all the rage with teens, especially the Goth ones. We have plenty of traditional soaps, too. They are still making money. But I have nothing to do with the on-camera stuff or anything creative. I run the team that balances the needs of the creative staff—who constantly want helicopter shoots on deserted Indian islands—with the bottom line of the parent company. There is a lot of numbers crunching and teleconferencing. But I don’t really do that stuff anymore. At my level I basically attend a lot of meetings, make a lot of decisions and delegate a lot of responsibility. I don’t love the delegating, but sometimes you have to let the underlings feel important.

All that and a corner office. I didn’t need Harvard for that.

It is only the business office in New York. All the shows are shot in LA, and our parent company is in London. Why that matters is because at any given time someone is awake to send me email or expect something from me. I have to leave the office at 5:15 every day to get the twins at day care. Once they were settled into bed, I was back online and working.

I was working harder now than ever before. I didn’t want anyone to ever accuse me of slacking because of my kids. I knew how people talked about women when they had kids, how they changed their expectations of them. I had to prove them wrong. Even if it meant I got three hours of sleep a night, nothing could slip through the cracks. It was important to me. The bar was higher.

I have always made sure to cross everything off my to-do lists. And I have many, many lists for goals set daily, weekly, monthly and yearly. No matter what, I have to get everything accomplished.

Except, lately, most of the time, I felt as if I was lying. I may have been getting them done, but I wasn’t necessarily doing them the way the pre-mom me would have.

I knew, even though I doubted anyone else did, that I wasn’t really always there. I used to be so on, so focused on my work, that nothing slipped by. If my work was my life, it was going to be perfect. And it was. That’s why I got the title vice president. To the victor go the spoils. But recently I had caught myself being distracted. Where I used to give 110 percent, I knew it had dropped to somewhere around 80. And this might be how most of the world operated, sleepily going through the motions at work, but it didn’t sit right with me. It didn’t feel genuine. I found myself talking in meetings, just so that I could be heard. I used to hate people who did that. Luckily, half the time the grasshoppers weren’t even paying attention.

And as hard as it was to keep up with my job, the times I was with my kids, I didn’t know which end was up. They were so unpredictable. I thrived on routine, and kids were supposed to require routines and schedules too. That’s what all the books said. But the twins never conformed to anything I tried to get them to do. Even though they didn’t necessarily get along, it was as though they somehow were working together to throw me off. And I knew that was impossible. They were only 22 months old.