Yes, I still want you to listen to the podcast on motherhood and writing. But in the meantime, here is one more installment of my essay entitled “My Bus” from the new anthology, “The Maternal is Political.” I’ll be joining a trio of writers more accomplished than me at a reading and signing of the book this Saturday at 5 p.m. at Vroman’s Bookstore in Pasadena. Here’s how to find the first and second excerpts of the essay online.
It is understandable that in our colossal engine of American enterprise, every aspect of life has been reduced to a sales transaction. Everything is a product, every product is a brand, and every brand is a shiny bauble of marketing assembled by campaigners more clever than we.
So it was uncomfortably obvious to us, while my husband and I toured private schools, that we were the customers, and we were there to be sold something. We were being sold an educational philosophy. We were being sold a community. We were being sold social values. We were being sold security. We were being sold success. We were being sold a different kind of world, fabricated out of kids who looked alike and parents who thought alike. We were being sold on the most ambitious and fearful part of ourselves. It seemed phony and even un-American.
Of course, it wasn’t un-American in the least. It was the dark and corruptible soul of America. We whispered to one another as we paraded the pristine hallways, “Where are the schools like the ones we went to?” We might as well have been asking, “Where is the country like the one we grew up in?”
In our newly cynical view, all the assurances of product excellence and consumer protection seemed disingenuous when applied to education. We were aimless and unconvinced as the decision deadline approached.
Then our daughter took the wheel.
After three years of schlepping 16 miles roundtrip to a fancy preschool, pushing on even farther to the rarely accomplished playdate, and routinely crossing multiple city limits to attend a birthday party, my daughter staged a mini-revolt. “Where are my friends?” she wailed on one particularly woeful weekend, stuck in the wonkish company of dear old mom and dad. Looking up, we saw her point. We had gone hunting for her brilliant future, and we’d overlooked her front yard. We’d been chasing her birthright and had ignored her birthplace. This was where she lived. This was her world. This was where she wanted to belong. Where were her friends? We scheduled a visit to the public school down the block.
There, in the porticoed walls of an 80-year-old building, on a rolling lawn under leafy grandfather trees, amok with hundreds of ordinary urchins, awash with the inimitable aromas of dirt, disinfectant, and cafeteria lunch was the school like the schools we remembered. The hallways were a little scruffy. The classrooms were bustling. The teachers were educators. The parents were participants. The kids were just neighborhood kids. The money was scarce, but the opportunity was wide open and free.
We were reminded, once again, that this was the best our country could offer. It was the best our country had ever offered. And we had turned out okay.
That you could spend nearly a thousand dollars we don’t yet have, to save the crippled cause of a poor public school, for a clutch of stuff that you didn’t much want, a blurry galaxy rendered through the bottom of a bottomless champagne glass: a tripod telescope, Dodgers seats, a studio tour and four seats at a TV show taping. That you could pan this fool’s gold and thus deliver our daughter to a stretch of celestial awe beyond the arc of the moon. All to see the stars! The stars!
