nessie and yeti

you hear these stories about outrageous creatures. do they exist? are they figments of people's fevered imaginations?

i was skeptical. then i met nessie and yeti.

those aren't their real names, but they might as well have been for the goggle-eyed reaction they provoked in me. nessie, yeti and i were part of a group that toured a local elementary school this week (minneapolis is beeeeg into school choice, which translates into school research for minneapolis parents).

the school seems wonderful. i got warm fuzzies from the teachers and staff i met, from the classrooms loaded with colorful projects and flooded with light from enormous windows, from the two gyms, the full-scale theater (this is a K-5 school, remember), the outdoor prairie "classroom," etc., etc. nice place. kids doing well. happy campers all around.

but nessie and yeti were not impressed. what they were was all sniffy about how their daughter already knew her shapes and colors from preschool, thank you very much, and how she would be dragged down by other five-year-olds who still need to be taught such matters. they were all sniffy about the fact that kindergarteners didn't do homework. (to me this seemed like a GOOD thing.) they were sniffy about test scores and about which way the school population was "trending." they buttonholed the principal to get her personal assurance that the school was truly strong in academics (like the woman was going to say, "oh, no, we don't actually give a shit if they learn how to read"?)

what made nessie and yeti especially interesting to me was that i had just finished a book called perfect madness: motherhood in the age of anxiety. the book is heavy on stories of freakishly competitive parents exhausting themselves and their offspring in the quest for the perfect preschool/after-school activities resume/violin teacher/life.

as i read i thought, oh please – people aren't really like that, at least not here in the midwest (the author is very clear that she's writing about the east coast world she lives in). i just threw my 4-year-old her first real birthday party and there were no ponies or angst. josie picked out her own outfit: a pink velour gymnastics unitard shot through with silver thread, topped off with the birthday crown she made in preschool that is roughly the size of the pope's hat. some kids played the games i set up, one played in our playhouse out back, another played in my girls' closet, and one clung to her mother. we ate cupcakes. we smacked a pinata. (an aside to pinata makers: elmo? for real? you think an elmo pinata is a good idea? my kids would have lost their TINY LITTLE MINDS if we'd smacked elmo until his head popped off and candy came out.) i had a cosmo and other parents had beers. i realized later, looking at the photos, that i'd forgotten to put on shoes. no one cried, no one got put on time out, everyone had fun, and everyone got the hell out of my house after 1-1/2 hours.

but i bet nessie will anguish over her spawn's birthday parties as much as the woman in perfect madness who felt "immense stress" about not having "the perfect 'mother of the birthday boy' sweater to throw on over my jeans so that i looked chic yet casual." and that will not be nearly so much fun as having a pink drink and picking skittles off the ground.