“Hey guys.” I smile back, and find myself drifting over, drawn by the irresistible gravity of social etiquette.
“I don’t know how you do it.” Gwendolyn sighs. “You leave your kids all day and go to work? You’re so strong.”
I hesitate, startled by the brazen backhanded compliment and unsure how to respond. Gwendolyn frowns, mistaking my silence. “You do work still, right?” I catch her eyeing my blazer, which . . . yes, does have a little bit of cream cheese on the lapel.
“Yes,” I say, trying to smile, “I work.”
“Well,” she says, “that’s probably why I haven’t heard back from you about this year’s Mom Squad Fiscal Plan.”
FUCK. Maybe forty-nine hours had passed since she sent her last email, and no, of course I hadn’t replied. I’d intended to reply, but I barely have time to read my emails, let alone reply to them. I’m sure, somewhere in my millions of drafts of unsent emails, there are at least thirty replies to Gwendolyn, each attempting to say as positively as possible, “Please just assign me a committee or push me off a cliff. Your choice!”
“You didn’t get my reply? Hm,” I say, playing dumb as I scroll through my phone. “I’ll resend it. I bet it got caught up in your SPAM filter.”
Gwendolyn smiles charitably, her teeth so white they look nearly iridescent. She has a face so pretty you really have to hate her, and a personality to match.
IT’S NOT THAT I DON’T LIKE GWENDOLYN. EVERYONE LIKES Gwendolyn. Everyone likes Gwendolyn, because they have to like Gwendolyn. She’s @GwendolynJamesStyle, the authority on motherhood for our school, our neighborhood, and for her 144,000 Instagram followers, who shower her with praise for things like a photo of her coffee cup placed in the perfect light of her perfectly white kitchen, or her inspirational phrases, like: Mom all day, then rosé.
I don’t get it, but I do get it. Like everyone else at McKinley, I follow everything that Gwendolyn does. It’s a form of digital self-harm, comparing my mothering to hers. Comparing my children to hers. Comparing my house, my clothes, my car, my life to hers. I’ve seen every blog post, every Instagram story. It’s a great way to make sure you avoid running into her, actually.
Seeing Gwendolyn is like being hit by a sniper: you don’t know what’s happened until she’s already taken her shot, and your guts are spilling out on the concrete in front of you. Dramatic? Maybe. Or maybe not. Maybe, if you look closely enough at something shiny and beautiful, you start to see that it’s made mostly of Instagram filters and clever angles.
When Dylan started at McKinley, one of Gwendolyn’s friends had complimented my dress. We were all volunteering at one of the many “special days” McKinley has for its students, a series of carnivals and farmer’s markets and artisanal craft fairs where the children sell their own handmade wares and donate the money to charity. That compliment had meant a lot to me. It had eased some of the anxiety I had about being so much younger and so much poorer than the other moms. They had arrived in outfits made by brands I hadn’t even heard of, bought in stores I never thought of walking into. I was shopping in the clearance section of Old Navy (still do, always will), and before I could blurt out “It only cost $8.97!,” Gwendolyn had filled the momentary silence.
“She’s in great shape because running late is her cardio,” she said breezily, and we’d all exploded in laughter. Even me. Laughing seemed easier than saying, “Wait, what do you mean? Is this about the time I tried to sneak into kindergarten orientation late—and on a conference call—and the principal called me out? Are you talking about the time that Dylan refused to perform in the holiday concert until I arrived, but my boss had called an all-hands meeting for six PM on a Thursday, so I didn’t walk in the door until the last song, which meant that Dylan spent forty-seven minutes lying on the floor of the stage?”
For months I replayed the interaction, over and over in my head, trying to decipher her secret code.
Eventually, I realized the message was loud and clear: Gwendolyn James is an asshat.
3
Carla
First day of school!!! STARTS AT 8:10 AM.
Vag waxes: 10–3
Jeopardy: 4
Karate: 5
What I Did on My Summer Vacation
By Jaxon Dunkler
This summer ruled. I heard the weather was beautiful, but I can’t confirm that, since I slept until about 3pm every day, and then spent the rest of the daylight hours sitting in a cloud of my own farts and playing Fortnite.
Every evening, I took a break from my gaming to go to baseball practice for 3 hours. My mom, who is super cool and takes Karate, drove me in her awesome car. The only bad thing about my mom is that she’s so hot that my teammate’s dads get uncomfortable around her, so she can’t come to a lot of the games.
The hottest thing about my mom is her brain. Not many people know that my mom has read the entire Harry Potter series, or that she was voted “raddest” by her high school class. She has gotten the Final Jeopardy question right twice. She loves Sudoku. She can also change the oil in a car and drive a stick. Surprising, right? Nobody expects a lady who looks like her to have it all.
This year, I’m looking forward to playing more baseball, and to having the coolest, hottest mom at McKinley.
Jaxon’s handwriting looks like a chimp got hold of a ballpoint pen. Seriously, one time a guy at the strip mall had a chimp he had taught to use a pen and if you paid him ten dollars the chimp would write your name on an index card for you. Looked just like Jaxon’s handwriting, but I still got a chimp card. I used that chimp card as an inspiration for this report. I also held the pen in my left hand, which made it look halfway believable. This year, Jaxon’s finally got a good teacher. And by a good teacher I just mean a hot dude teacher. I think any teacher is a good teacher, because anyone who can handle being around more than one kid for more than an hour at a time clearly has a gift. But none of Jaxon’s teachers have been anything near bangable. Mrs. Weaver was pretty hot, but she was stone cold. You could just tell her vagina had formed a layer of ice over it years ago.
This year, Jaxon has Mr. Nolan, the only male teacher who wasn’t alive during the Vietnam War. He’s tallish, has most of his hair, and one time when he was wearing short sleeves, I saw a little bit of a tattoo peeking out from under his sleeve. And it wasn’t one of those dopey floral tattoos that guys have now. This was a straight-up barbed-wire armband. Hot stuff, and not what you’d expect from a man with a deep side part and a collection of pastel polo shirts. Mr. Nolan is a solid six even in his pleated khakis, and you only get one chance to make a first impression. I wasted that first impression by threatening to run him over in the crosswalk last year, but I doubt he remembers every confrontation he has in the school parking lot, and this way, he’ll be able to get to know the real me through a trusted source: my dumb son who forgot to do his own summer report.
Nobody can call Jaxon dumb but me. He’s dumb in a cute way, like a puppy chasing its tail, or a baby trying to play with itself in the mirror. Nothing gets Jaxon down, and the only thing he ever worries about is baseball. I have no idea how he got into baseball, but he’s freakishly good at it. I would love to take credit for that, but I did my best to keep him out of sports. Signing a kid up for sports is just signing away your free time as a parent, and I love my Carla Time. It’s hard to even tell who is good at baseball, there’s so much standing around, but I’ve heard from a lot of coaches and a lot of parents that Jaxon is good.