by Woog
There are other emotional, hand-wringing scenes that can occur when you are dropping off and picking up your kids from school. One I hate almost more than any other is the up-down-up.
The up-down-up is the look some mums will give you. You know the one: the quick once-over that takes in every detail of your personal appearance. The women who give the up-down-up are the ones who invariably have perfectly groomed hair, nice fingernails, sensible ballet flats on their pretty feet, and nothing but cold, hard judgment in their hearts. They get their notes in on time, their kids are always well presented and they gather smugly in terrifying groups.
They fall silent when you race in at the moment the bell rings, with your hair askew, eyes still crusted in sleep gunk and morning breath rancid. They’ve been up for hours baking organic cupcakes in their Thermomixes.
Now, it is my opinion that it takes all types of playground parents to make the world go round. But this particular specimen really irks me.
I can recall waiting at the school gate just recently, looking at my unshaven legs and wondering whether I had actually crossed into the ape species, when I noticed one of the Up-Down-Ups walking towards me.
Immediately I felt like I was back in high school, and Alexandra Langham, the meanest of the mean girls, was on her way over to me to let me know in no uncertain terms that I was a dead shit.
But, no, this mum just did the up-down-up before gliding on past. I thought I had got away with it (whatever ‘it’ was), but then she turned and said in a creepy faux-posh accent, ‘So nice to see you, Kayte.’
I mean, she wasn’t even looking at me! She was walking away from me! How could it be nice to see me? I wanted to yell out something to that effect, but then I thought again. After all, who am I to judge? Perhaps that is just the way she expresses herself. Perhaps her need to make me feel like a piece of dog excrement on the bottom of her shoe is born of some deep insecurity on her part.
And that’s the thing about school gate politics. You never really know what is going on in other people’s lives. For all I know, she might have had some terrible news, or been up all night with a vomiting child. She might have just found out that her husband of ten years has been shagging the twenty-four-year-old from work, the one with the long blonde hair and legs that go on forever. Or, of course, she might just be a rude bitch.
As your child works his or her way up through the ranks of grades, you are no longer obliged to run the gauntlet of the other mums; you can begin to consider the ‘kiss and drop’. The ‘kiss and drop’—boy, is that a game-changer. Once you go there, you will never go back.
You begin by crawling the kerb in your car, inch by excruciating inch, until you reach The Zone.
Once in The Zone, you have two minutes to say goodbye to your kids, during which they suddenly remember everything they forgot (see list above). You may alight from the car while in The Zone, but should you move more than two metres from it, or overstay your two minutes—well, you’d better have a well-paying job to cover the resulting fine. Trust me, I’m speaking from experience.
For me, though, drop-offs aren’t the problem; it’s the school pick-up where everything turns to a complete shit fight.
The most stressful part of my day had become 3.15 pm. This is the time when I go and pick up the boys from school. It is not stressful because the kids are hot and tired and hungry and bitchy (although that does lend a certain charm to proceedings). No, my issue is with the arsehole parking inspectors who patrol the streets during this time.
I pulled up to collect the kids one day, and there were two parking inspectors in attendance. One walked right up and stood next to my car. Her beady eyes narrowed as she pulled out her iPhone and—get this—set the timer. My beady eyes narrowed as I, too, pulled out my iPhone and set the timer for 120 seconds. We waited. A moment passed. A small trickle of children started to appear, none of them mine.
The parking inspector looked down at her phone then back at me.
I wound down the window.
‘Excuse me,’ I said. ‘Are you timing me?’
‘You have one and a half minutes left,’ she barked.
At that moment, my son Jack came traipsing through the school gate, meandering along with not a care in the world.
‘GET IN THE CAR QUICKLY!’ I yelled.
He turned a shocked little face to me. Poor bugger. But with barely a minute left on the clock by this time, and knowing Harry’s habit of dawdling, I was getting panicky. I addressed the inspector once more.
‘Are you telling me that I have to drive off and come back to get my other kid?’ I demanded.
‘If you’re not gone in forty-five seconds, I will have to book you,’ she replied officiously.
I have never despised anyone in my life as much as I despised that parking inspector at that moment. I know she was just doing her job, but I think she would be far more suited to a career in correctional services.
I would be completely shit at being a parking inspector. I would be all like, ‘Oh, don’t worry about it, take your time. I know what kids are like . . .’
I asked the parking inspector if she would mind explaining to my son that I had not abandoned him and would be back shortly to collect him. I asked her to comfort him if he became upset when he came out of the gates and saw me driving off with his brother in the car.
‘I won’t know which one he is,’ she said, watching the timer.
‘That’s easy,’ I snapped. ‘HE WILL BE THE HYSTERICAL ONE!’
With fourteen seconds to go, she started to frame her shot. That is what they do now. They take a photo so that, if you should dream of contesting the fine, they just produce the photographic evidence of your wrongdoing and tell you to shut up and cough up.
Feeling mightily pissed off, I turned the key in the ignition.
Just then, Harry came through the gate. Catching sight of me, he smiled and waved.
‘RUN, RUN, RUN, RUN!’ I screamed out the window.
It was like a scene from a very tense movie. A movie about a desperate mum trying to pick up her kids from school. I would call this movie: Mum Smack Down.
Harry started to run.
And then the parking inspector said—she actually said to my son: ‘Your mum is about to get into trouble.’
‘I AM NOT ABOUT TO GET INTO TROUBLE!’ I yelled out the window. And as the door shut behind Harry, and with no time left on the clock, I pulled out of the line. As I drove off, I did what any sensible, mature lady would do. I flipped her the one-fingered salute. But I did it so she could not see it. Because she still had the camera at the ready, and I am sure there is a fine for flipping parking inspectors the bird.
Parking inspectors might give me the shits, but at least they don’t freak the living hell out of me in the way that lollipop ladies do.
This one time I had walked the kids to school, kissed them each goodbye and then, my mind completely elsewhere, absentmindedly crossed at the school crossing. I was waving to the car that had stopped for me when, all of a sudden, there was the most alarming screech . . .
I stopped in my tracks in the middle of the crossing, thinking I was about to be hit by an oncoming car—but no. The screech had come from an extraordinarily pissed-off lollipop lady.
Uh-oh. I had done the unthinkable.
I had attempted to cross the road without permission.
I am fully aware that lollipop ladies across the land do so much to keep our children safe. It is an important job; there is no doubt about it, and I’m not questioning that for a moment. And I will admit that the fault was my mine; my mind was in Disneyland, and not on the task at hand, which was to obey her rules.
‘Oh my God, I am so sorry,’ I stammered.
‘No, you’re not!’ she retorted and threw her stop sign down onto the road.
By this time, a large crowd of obedient parents had gathered by the kerb, all patiently waiting for the lollipop lady to signal to them that it was safe to move across the road. I really
wanted to just die, then and there. I didn’t know whether I should go back and join the waiting crowd, or continue forward. So I did what any moron would do.
I stood, cemented to the spot, as cars crossed in front of me and behind me. (It was at this point that I had a flashback to that great arcade game of the eighties. You know the one, right? Frogger?) I was hoping like hell that one of those sinkholes I had recently read about in the papers would appear beneath my feet. Not a huge sinkhole—I didn’t want to take anyone else with me; perhaps just a two-metre version.
Eventually, my tormentor must have decided that I had suffered enough humiliation, for she marched towards me, blowing her whistle. She fixed me with her steely gaze until, cowed, I was forced to look away. As I feebly navigated through the crowd coming the other way, I caught a few glimpses of sympathy, and I took this as a sign that I wasn’t the first to fall foul of the lollipop lady’s militant behaviour.
But lollipop ladies aren’t the only militants in the school.
Are we ready to discuss the P&C?
17
PARENTS AND CITIZENS, UNITE
One of the many extracurricular roles that parents take on is that of committee member. From the soccer club to the school fete, many of the clubs and institutions through which your child will pass will rely on parent volunteers for both management and fundraising.
I have done my time on several such committees and most have left a bad taste in my mouth.
I once went to a P&C meeting (only one) at which the president stood up on stage brandishing a pile of papers outlining parents’ ideas for fundraising. He then ‘filed them in the bin’. Literally. There was a bin there and he chucked the papers into it.
Many parents, when asked if they are ‘on the P&C’, will recoil in horror at the very thought. This is because the P&C is notorious for power plays, politics, bribery and corruption. Sounds like fun, hey?
So at the top of the heap you have the P&C, the powerbrokers. Feeding into this exclusive, elected group are other committees, such as the Canteen Committee, the Parents Auxiliary, the Band Committee, the Uniform Shop Committee, the Health and Welfare Committee, and the committee for parents who just don’t give a fuck. These are known as the No-Shows, the ones who can be relied on not to put their hand up for anything. Some may consider these parents to be the smartest of the lot.
But the truth is that schools need volunteers and committees. I mean, how else would you ever find out the gossip? Do a shift at the canteen, and I guarantee you will come away with all kinds of useless tidbits about people whom you don’t even know.
But back to the big kahunas on the P&C committee. The peak body of public school parent groups in New South Wales is the P&C Federation, an organisation that was established in 1912—and was dissolved in 2014 ahead of a revamp. It was in such a shambles that the education minister was forced to step in and give everyone a spanking.
Why?
Because they could not keep their shit together. The federation was positively plagued with bullying and infighting. So if this is happening at the highest level, what do you think is happening at the school down the street?
Bullying and infighting!
The fact is, though, schools just could not run without parent volunteers. The problem is that volunteers are getting harder to find. That’s because in 57 per cent of Australian families both parents work.
Although she worked part time, my mum also did canteen. I can still remember the excitement of those days when Mum was on canteen. I also recall being very, very popular with my fellow students that day, as they were all hoping I would choose them to be my best friend, thus giving them the golden ticket to canteen freedom at lunch.
Mum would spread lashings of butter onto pink-iced finger buns and dole them out to me and my friends. These days there would be no bright pink finger bun, but something organic, gluten-free and tasteless, so you would not go back to class after recess all hyped up on sugar. Thanks to the P&C, the good stuff, like finger buns, has been banned from our canteens. And don’t get me started on monkey bars . . .
Still, I shouldn’t cast aspersions. After all, there’s no way I’m putting my hand up to be the president of the P&C. And, frankly, I’m not qualified. The ideal P&C president should have a résumé that includes the following:
• Time spent working as a hostage negotiator for the federal police.
• A business degree and, preferably, an MBA.
• Experience in dealing with trolls on Facebook.
• Previous dealings with the United Nations.
• Some sort of qualification in health and nutrition.
• At LEAST a brown belt in karate.
• Membership of any of the major political parties.
• Superior finger-pointing skills.
• The ability to lip-read.
• The ability to say SOD OFF in several different languages, bearing in mind that we are a multicultural society.
REAL HOUSEWIVES (AND HUSBANDS) OF THE P&C*
Now of course I am generalising here. I am sure most parents and citizens groups are run with no fuss, by intelligent people with no hidden agendas . . . *shifts eyes quickly* . . . but I asked parents from across the country to share with me some stories of what is going on in their neck of the woods, and here are a few gems that came in:
The principal and the president hate each other and once they had to be physically separated at a meeting.
The P&C at our school has been taken over by want-to-be marketing-degree mums who think they know everything!
At my niece’s primary school, some of the P&C people started up a little swingers group.
There are a lot of stereotypes about those who get involved. Not all are bad—there are always the quiet, industrious few who just get on with it and don’t seek the limelight. Then you have the slightly more ambitious parents (lawyers, teachers, medical professionals in their other lives) who join the executive so they can have a bit more say on how things are done. The treasurer is usually a mum with an accounting or bookkeeping background and multiple children. The secretary—someone with an admin background or (in our case) a work-from-home dad with excellent IT skills and a sharp sense of humour. Then you have the vice-presidents, who are usually best mates with the narcissistic president; often the role of the VP is simply to massage the president’s ego. And of course you have the martyr who runs around DOING EVERYTHING, always looking flustered and stressed, but won’t say no to the next Bunnings’ barbeque or cake stall. You can never thank this person enough.
My P&C time was like being in a Real Housewives of . . . episode. As president, I basically sat there watching insane women go at each other hammer and tongs. You can’t help but get caught in the crossfire. I am now studying psychology so I can counsel all their kids when they end up in therapy.
A few years back, a P&C I was involved with had every single committee member resign. There was an epic all-in text/email/phone brawl between the tuckshop supervisor and P&C committee. The tuckshop supervisor believed the food should be both cheap and nutritious, but the P&C wanted the tuckshop to make a significant profit. There was name-calling, food was thrown and many tears were shed.
My favourite story is when someone proposed adding an optional tunic for girls to our uniforms and at the P&C meeting to discuss this a parent stood up and quoted High Court verdicts on human rights. Others brought up the feminist movement of the 1970s. It was the most absurd evening of my life.
*Please note that, the above anecdotes notwithstanding, the author acknowledges that many P&C committees do amazing work, and work in harmony, promoting parental involvement in schools in a rewarding and positive way, without political agendas or power struggles. She just could not find any of them to interview.
18
WHAT’S ON YOUR SANDWICH?
So, let’s discuss about school lunches . . . Talk about complicated! You practically need a degree in nutrition to plan a school lunch these days. But wh
en did the obsession with the healthy school lunch begin?
At the turn of the nineteenth century, when compulsory school attendance was introduced, you were sent to school with a belly full of porridge. Once there, you would spend the day reciting poetry by rote and learning other useful life skills. For lunch you would have bread and jam, or bread and dripping.
Just as an aside, have you ever wondered what dripping is? I have, so I did a little research . . . When a joint of meat is roasted, all the fat and sinew drip out and congeal. This ‘meat’ jelly is what’s known as dripping. It was smeared onto bread, which was then wrapped up in wax paper and carried to school, often entombed in a metal tin. By lunchtime, the sandwich had often really heated up and was turned into mush. Nom.
Then in 1922 something happened that would revolutionise school lunches. An outfit called the Fred Walker Company used brewers’ yeast to develop a product that they called Pure Vegetable Extract. Catchy, huh? Fortunately, some bright spark changed the name to Vegemite, and out to market it went. And the rest is history, right?
Well, no—not quite. Australians weren’t buying it, figuratively or literally; they were already heavily into the English version, Marmite. So in 1928 the Fred Walker Company tried a rebrand; Vegemite was reintroduced to consumers under the name Parwill. Because if Marmite, then Parwill. Get it? And, no, I am not making this up.
As a marketing initiative, it was an epic fail. The name was changed back to Vegemite and, next thing you know, the British Medical Association was getting all excited about its medicinal benefits. It was so jam-packed with vitamin B that they recommended embracing it with gusto.
And with gusto it was duly embraced! Because we love our Vegemite, we all adore our Vegemite; it puts a rose in every cheek. Today we buy over 22 million jars of the stuff, and it is still our most popular sandwich spread.
When I was growing up, sandwiches were still the main staple of the school lunch pail. And by pail, I mean a metal tin. I desperately wanted a Mork and Mindy lunch pail. I mean, everyone else had one so why not me? I also wanted a big clunky drink bottle, made of plastic containing plenty of evil PVA to contaminate my Tang. Not that there was any Tang in my pail, for I was a child of the bubbler era, which meant I was either in a serious state of dehydration because the bubblers were broken or I was completely soaked because the bubblers were working a little too well. There seemed to be no middle ground between these two states.
