So Apparently My Son's School Auction is NOT About Me

A few years ago, I decided it would be a good idea to volunteer for a preschool auction to get attention. I mean, "be part of the community."

What follows is a true story, not that anyone should have a hard time believing it. You can also find other comedic true stories of mine here.

My son started at a part-time preschool when he was two—just a few hours a week and mostly for socialization. Given that this was my first foray into having a child attend “school,” I had it in my head that I needed to be the perfect school volunteer mom. Never mind that I was working full time remotely, and never mind that I had no reliable childcare outside of this preschool. For some reason, I was convinced I would be Queen of the Volunteer Moms, and this totally made-up thing was really important to my identity.

Why was this so important to me? Well, let’s put it into context. It was 2022, and for the past two years, the combination of my OCD and late-night breastfeeding scrolls through doomer Twitter had convinced me that even if I or a loved one had a mild case of covid, we’d suddenly drop dead five years later from some silently simmering complication. I wanted to avoid it at all costs. While my shoes quite literally collected dust, it wasn’t until 2022 when I started warming up to the possibility that I might socialize indoors with other people again. But because I had spent the first year of my motherhood completely locked inside with no outside social connections outside of my son’s pediatrician, I had zero mom friends. Making friends has always been hard for me, mostly because of my tendency to want to entertain people and be the main character instead of really connecting with people, so covid just made my existing social issues worse. I saw my son’s preschool as my one chance to make mom friends before it was too late. I had to make up for lost time—other moms had their Lamaze classes and baby yoga, and I had Eric Feigl Ding’s tweets.

This particular preschool encouraged parents to stay with the children all “day” (it was a couple hours) until the kids were fully comfortable being left alone. Given that I was just as scared of separation as my son was (totally healthy, I promise) I was fine with this. On the first day, all the kids were accompanied by their parents for the full “school day.” I assumed this meant I would have plenty of time to socialize with other parents. I soon discovered that most of these people were not actually the children’s parents at all—and I thought I was being so woke by assuming that a bunch of white toddlers had been born to fifty-year-old Filipino women. Oh well. I would find other ways to make parent friends, I just knew it.

I tried to pal around with the other parents at pickup and drop-off, but I didn’t have much luck there. When I saw one mom drop her tiny two-year-old off with a comically large Thomas the Tank Engine backpack that appeared to be empty, I jokingly asked her, “What could that little guy possibly be carrying in there?” to which she answered, “His EpiPen.”