I can honestly say that I, since high school, I haven’t worried much about impressing people.\u00a0 The parental cliques on the school playground make me nothing more than amused and damned happy that I have better things to do than to gossip about my own friends and complain about my husband.\u00a0 I am very comfortable with my typical outcast position with these people – I like that they think I am weird and too “different” to get to know.\u00a0 I like that they stare in disgust at my ten year old puma tennis shoes as if they were covered in elephant dung.\u00a0 And I adore the ugly, ugly fact that once I bought a car that met their approval and\u00a0they all wanted to “hang” with me\u00a0that I\u00a0took great joy in sincerely showing no interest at all.\u00a0 My point is that I am far beyond really giving a crap who thinks what about me or my kids, especially from the PTA or PTO or whatever they call themselves these days.\u00a0 That being said, let me tell you about my most recent Harris Teeter trip.\u00a0 I may as well have been barefoot, had a cigarette hanging out from between my\u00a0knocked out\u00a0teeth and pregnant – because that’s about as classy as I felt.<\/p>\n
It was a bad, bad time of the day.\u00a0 You know, that 430pm time of the day when you just want to crawl under a rock and hide but instead you decide it would be the perfect time to load the kids in the car and go grocery shopping?\u00a0 I was tired, the kids were tired and I was starting to get that constricted feeling in my throat and that twitchy look on my face.\u00a0 I decided that, instead of shooting menacing looks to all the women in suits calling their children “dahhhling”, I would bury my face in the newest edition of OK! Magazine while we waited in line.\u00a0 I had no idea that Anna Nicole’s son died and I was having a quiet moment of reflection while I simultaneously wondered when Katie was going to\u00a0freak out\u00a0and murder Tom Cruise in his sleep.\u00a0 While I am in deep musing over the going ons in Hollywood I hear, “Um, Hi Lisa”..<\/p>\n
I look up.\u00a0 It’s her.\u00a0 It’s the leader of the cool kids on the playground.\u00a0 The ex-lawyer, lexus driving Molly Ringwold of Eakin PTO.\u00a0 And I casually put down my magazine – “Hey, June, just, you know, catching up on Anna Nicole – did you know her SON died”.\u00a0 note about lisa when she is caught off guard by someone that she knows hates her:\u00a0 she starts talking about shit she really doesn’t care about.\u00a0 incessantly.<\/em><\/p>\n “Yeah, so I guess it was a car accident”.. and as I am blathering on about it, I notice she is looking at my children with great distaste.\u00a0 I knew that were covered in dirt – I actually let them play at the playground and\u00a0only wiped the dirt off their faces,\u00a0leaving the hands and clothes\u00a0nicely covered\u00a0– the HORROR<\/em>.. Her kids had apparently had several costume changes since school let out because they looked pristine and like they just walked out of a Janie and Jack store.\u00a0 But, when I looked back at my kids (whom I had been only moderately paying attention to until her sneers prodded me into taking my nose out of OK! Magazine) I saw, to my<\/em> own malaise, my two year old daughter had apparently swiped a ten foot long beef jerky and was peeling the plastic off with her teeth and devouring it and my son was doing the pee pee dance while singing “should’a gone pee but now I ‘ll have to find a tree to go pee ooooonnn….” with great operetic flare.. I turned back around and she was walking away – “Ummm, ok, well – see you tomorrow!” I beckon – hoping she’ll nod some kind of affirmation that I wasn’t the most disgusting, negligent parent on the face of the Earth.\u00a0 She just looked over her shoulder, hiked up her Prada bag and said “um, yeah, whatever”.\u00a0<\/p>\n To make matters worse, when I got to the car I looked in mirror to give myself a little happy Stuart Smiley\u00a0affirmation but, found that\u00a0I couldn’t.\u00a0 Once I looked in the mirror and saw the really nice piece of basil that was stuck in my teeth from my afternoon snack with Maggie AND my bra strap hanging out from under my tank top (that was, prior to the shot of afternoon heat a mere<\/em><\/strong> undershirt), I had to admit that the situation didn’t look good for me and my “image”.\u00a0 I can honestly say, I was mortified.\u00a0 I am sure that she will go back and relay this information to all of her PTA pals – but that’s not the part that really bothers me.\u00a0 The part that really bothers me is that she thinks her world is reality.\u00a0 I mean, I guess it is her<\/em> reality.\u00a0 But it’s not my<\/strong><\/em> reality.\u00a0 Why couldn’t she just leave me alone and let me finish reading my trashy article about whether or not Anna Nicole’s son was on drugs and leave my daughter to her beef jerky?\u00a0 Why call out my redneck moment like that?\u00a0 Seriously.\u00a0 Just get in your SUV and drive lady.\u00a0 Just get on wit’cha bad botox injected self and let me have a bad afternoon in the privacy of my OK! magazine.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I can honestly say that I, since high school, I haven’t worried much about impressing people.\u00a0 The parental cliques on the school playground make me nothing more than amused and damned happy that I…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[59,86],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-420","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-daily-living","category-mental-health"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.familyresource.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/420","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.familyresource.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.familyresource.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.familyresource.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.familyresource.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=420"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.familyresource.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/420\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.familyresource.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=420"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.familyresource.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=420"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.familyresource.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=420"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}