The breaking point, in the end, was the e-mail about the soda bottle.
There it was, the latest of roughly 20 missives that week, warning that if I failed to send my youngest child to preschool the next day with a two-liter bottle, she would not be permitted to participate in a puppet-making workshop.
Among the other e-mails I'd gotten that week: pleas for Styrofoam meat trays (recycling project), field-trip driving, and attendance at a play and a candle-lighting ceremony (both held midday, which is fantastic if you work and drive in Los Angeles); and an urgent reminder from the mother making the preschool yearbook, addressed to "Mommies," imploring them to interview their children about what they want to be when they grow up and let her know "as soon as possible!" (Side note to anyone sending class e-mails: Unless I have wiped your behind or paid you a dollar to try an avocado, please do not address me as "Mommy.")
So there I was, ranting as I made my way to Ralphs market at 9 p.m. to buy a huge bottle of root beer, the contents of which I would promptly dump in the sink, so my 4-year-old wouldn't be an outcast among her puppeteer classmates.
We, the people, have hit an obligation wall. The endless requests for materials, time, and input are so overwhelming that it's almost impossible not to begin every single day gripped with fear over what may be forthcoming or, worse, what was forgotten.
Let me be clear: I have no problem filling the holes left by ever-shrinking public-school budgets. The occasional supplies and a homemade cake once a semester are well within my reach. And blessed are those parent volunteers who quietly grant-write, fund-raise, and traffic-monitor us all into a better world.
But it seems to me that technology—which allows us to ask much of many at any hour, day or night—and an overly involved parenting culture have combined to slowly drive us all insane, with marginal benefit to the objects of this forced labor: our kids.
Every mom fantasizes about the Bill Maher–esque "new rules" she'd like to enforce. Here are some of mine: No more debates, via lengthy, reply-to-all e-mails, over field-trip menus. Skip the fruit platter at an event once in a while. And didn't I just fork over $100 for a totally unnecessary mosaic tile for the school playground? Then how about asking someone else to spend her Saturday installing it?
And let's exercise a bit more discernment about what activities truly require our participation. School plays, poetry night, and recitals seem like no-brainers—who isn't moved by a group of 3-year-olds singing off-key in semi-unison? But how did we get to the point where childhood experiences are somehow invalid if there is a lack of a parental witness?
I am not asking for a free pass from these obligations, just a few more rest stops along the way. It is the gift we can give one another and, by proxy, our children, who remind us how lovely it is to occupy that ephemeral space of having nothing in particular to do.
