Back To School

The time has come and the teenager has bravely returned to school, which means of course I have become school run mom again.

It's the usual bun fight every morning  to see who can drop their kid off closest to the school gate.  Heaven forbid some kid might have to walk 25 yards more than another.  The teenager's school is on a main road - there's a three lane highway outside the school and every morning at least two of these lanes are blocked - the inside with parked cars belonging to students - the second with parents dropping off.  The school does have a drive-in drop-off zone but most parents seem to feel this is beneath them and prefer to throw their kids out on the highway instead.

Picking up at the end of the day is even worse - being British and knowing what my teenager has legs for, I go and wait a couple of hundred yards away from school in  a nearby supermarket car park so that the teenager can dawdle across the road to meet me.  A significant number of parents just block the highway and double park whilst they wait the 10-15 minutes or so for their kids to emerge.  Why the Pasadena police haven't cottoned onto this blatant disregard for the law I have no idea considering all the other minor misdemeanors they are so keen to write a ticket for.   They'd make enough money in one afternoon's worth of traffic fines to fund their entire Christmas Ball.

Apart from anything else of course this hardly teaches learner drivers good habits and most of these high school kids will already have passed, or will be about to take their driving tests. As it seems to be the done thing here to buy your kid a brand new SUV for their 16th birthday, it would certainly be a good idea for parents to set an example of how to drive it - or not to drive it as the case may be.

Either way the new school year means another attempt at integrating myself into the school community with parent association meetings, cookie bakes and voluntary service hours.  Last year I just managed to scrape enough “hours” together with a final donation of a couple of bottles of wine for some after school event to avoid being "fined" for lack of commitment. 

I have to say I find the whole parental involvement thing in American schools slightly weird.  I'm just not the super-school-mom I ought to be.  There's definitely no sweet sixteen SUV on the horizon in this family, nor was I impressed by the start of term school photograph order form – did I wish my teenager to be digitally enhanced to “eliminate any spots and blemishes”?  Well I love my teenager warts and all (not that she has any warts I hasten to add) but of course she was very keen to be airbrushed.  My argument that it was a school photo not a glamour shoot sadly fell on deaf ears. What kind of LA mom  am I?

Is there something so very wrong these days with being seen as who you really are? Or has the humble school photo  become another misrepresentation of perfection in a society that has an awful lot spots and blemishes of its own it would like to hide?