The class is always filled with other McKinley Moms, the kind who wear coordinating lululemon outfits and seem to never break a sweat. I tend to wear whatever I can pick up off the floor without turning on a light, which today is a shirt of Mike’s that reads “Fill to here with margaritas.” Squaring myself to the wall of mirrors, I noticed that the “fill line” cuts right across my boobs, adding a touch of class to my ensemble.
Class lasts forty minutes, which gives all of us enough time to get home and get our kids ready for school. Our instructor starts with some Sanskrit words, which seems slightly wrong coming from a white woman named Kelsey. Then, before she presses play on her Work, Bitch! playlist, she asks us to silently dedicate our practice to someone. “Send them your sacred energy,” she whispers, handing each of us a small, blue inflatable ball, which we dutifully tuck between our legs. For forty minutes, we listen to Nicki Minaj and Ariana Grande and scoop our butts, carve our thighs, and pulse along to the instructions shouted at us from our instructor, who narrates and participates in the entire class. She has four children and absolutely no body fat, possibly because she spends three hours a day pulsing and scooping and carving, and possibly because I have never seen her eat a bite of food, even at the all-school picnic.
This is “my time,” so I spend most of the class mentally going over my agenda during the day, and a fair amount pondering the fact that at least 60 percent of these women are married to dudes who consistently look as though they’re eight months pregnant, and who have never pulsed, scooped, or sculpted any part of their body, and definitely not at six AM. Mike still has the body he had in college: not totally ripped, but fit enough that my mom still showers him with compliments. “Mikey!” she purrs to him every time she stops over, “I can’t believe you have TWO KIDS!” She says this like Dylan and Jane came out of his body, and then ate from his nipples for ten months each.
This morning’s class is too intense for my mind to wander far. “I want you to pull up on those vaginal muscles,” Kelsey screams over a late-nineties rap song. “Pretend like this ball said something terrible about your child!”
I squeeze as hard as I can. Until my thighs burn and my legs shake.
“Squeeze! Squeeze like you’re trying to suck that ball right into you, using nothing but your legs and your vagina!”
I had dedicated this practice to my children.
ANY ZEN I HAD LEFT FROM TRYING TO SUCK AN INFLATABLE ball into my vaginal canal was gone by the time we left for school. Jane was not happy with her summer recap video. “The teacher asked for a REPORT,” she cried, as if I’d betrayed her deepest confidence. “This is a VIDEO. It’s totally wrong!”
Dylan had looked at his sister sympathetically. “I thought you’d be upset because all those photos make you look like a brontosaurus.”
Jane had responded by locking herself in the bathroom. Dylan had responded to that by telling her if she didn’t open the door, he would pee in her dresser drawer. He’d done that once in his sleep, so the threat was credible.
Mike had wandered into the hallway, eyes glued to his phone, just as I was attempting to pick the lock with a bobby pin, which is only possible on TV and in real life is just a good way to waste a bobby pin and damage your bathroom door handle. “What’s going on?” he’d asked none of us specifically, and the tension had dissipated immediately. Jane unlocked the bathroom door and slipped into Mike’s arms for a hug. Dylan apologized to his sister without being asked and used the toilet instead of her dresser drawer. Mike pulled me into his arms for a group hug with Jane, who tried to wriggle away.
“No way, Janer!” He laughed, pulling her face into his armpit. Jane screamed, and Dylan snuck out from the bathroom and jumped on Mike’s back, shouting, “Unhand her, fiend!” Our house filled with my favorite sound: the laughter of my three favorite people.
I love Mike for that—how quickly he can defuse the chaos, even if it’s him who caused it. But I hate that Mike’s only real attempt at parenting is just making everything a joke. I hate that he always swoops in for the fun stuff and conveniently misses the hard stuff. And I really, really hate Mike for waiting until 7:48 to pull his Fun Dad card. And now we were most certainly going to be late for the first day of school.
THE SPEED LIMIT ON OUR CITY STREETS IS TWENTY-FIVE. Which means you can reasonably drive thirty and make the case that you’re just keeping up with traffic. Which means I am driving extremely unreasonably—closer to forty, if I’m being honest—when our van pulls up to McKinley. We are not late. We could have actually been early if there wasn’t a pointless one-way meant to “calm traffic” that forces us to zigzag our way to the front of the school. I’m tempted every day to just take the left on Sycamore, but Jane loves rules too much. Anyway, we are not late. School begins promptly at 8:10 and it’s 8:07, and besides, there are plenty of other cars pulling up behind me. Or, at least one. A Trans Am, maybe? The kind of car you typically only see people driving ironically or in music videos from the early nineties.
Jane activates the sliding door the moment I put the van in park, and she and Dylan tumble out of the car. They both had told me all summer that this year I was to stay in the car at drop-off. Or, as Jane put it, “Under no circumstances should you exit your vehicle during school drop-off. Do you understand?” I had nodded yes every time; I had agreed to the terms of service. But on the very first day of school, when I’d always, always jumped out to hug them goodbye? It’s muscle memory that compels me to undo my seatbelt. To run around the front of my idling minivan. To pull them both close to me and smell their heads. Those first few years, I’d have to pry them off me, wipe their tears, and lovingly shove them toward the front door. But not this year. This year, before I can gather them into my arms, they’ve already merged into the stream of kids wearing too-large backpacks, no doubt containing the standard “How I Spent My Summer” report, a dull recap of their summer printed on 8.5” × 11” paper and stapled in the upper-left-hand corner, the way Jane would have liked.
My throat aches. Am I going to cry? Are they really not going to glance back at me?
“WAIT!” I shout, and I see their little bodies freeze in horror. I am addressing them. In public. I have broken our verbal contract. They turn toward me, slowly and wordlessly. Their eyes say, “If you say another word, we will both scream for help.” Their mouths shout, “WHAT?!”
There are moments in life when you have to lean into the awkwardness you’ve created. This is one of them.
“I love you guys so much!” I scream, holding my hands up in a heart shape. “I love my babies!”
Jane and Dylan blanch, more horrified than I’ve seen them since the day they walked in on Mike and me watching Fifty Shades of Grey on a Saturday morning. They both turn coolly away from me and walk toward the first day of sixth and eighth grades.
“Hey, Amy,” a crisp voice calls out.
I turn to see Gwendolyn James, standing with her posse, wearing what I’m sure she believes is a sincere-looking smile. Gwendolyn is waving at me with perfectly manicured fingers (nontoxic, small-batch polish), her giant diamond ring—#conflictfree, I knew—dazzling in the morning light. This is my punishment for embarrassing my children: I will now be forced to interact with this woman.