Am I a bad mom? I ask myself this question much as I’m sure every mom must ask it when a conflict arises between Mom giving the kids what they want versus doing Mom doing something for herself. In my case, what my kids, Princess specifically, are asking for lots of play dates. What I’m asking for is a couple of hours to myself every afternoon to do some work.

It’s a sticky issue. There aren’t a lot of little girls Princess’ age in the neighborhood. Only two, to be exact. Everyone else is either a boy, and only wants to hang with other boys, or quite a few years older than Princess. Of the two little girls who are Princess’ age, one is getting ready to leave for a cross-country trip this summer. The other lives within walking distance, but I’d have to walk over with Princess (no biggie, I can always use the exercise) AND… Pixie is not invited to go with her.

I hate that. As with Princess, there are only two children in the neighborhood around Pixie’s age. One of them is sister to the girl who’s about to leave on that cross-country trip, so she won’t be around either. The other is allergic to just about everything under the sun, so arranging play dates requires a lot of pre-planning and logistical discussion (choosing a restaurant can we all eat at, scrubbing my kids down before going over to make sure they’re allergen-free, etc.).

So essentially, Pixie is out of luck in the local friends department. I’ve made arrangements to have Princess’ one little friend come over here a couple of mornings a week, to ensure that Pixie isn’t left out when the girls play together, but even then it’s a crap shoot they’ll all get along. Every time this particular kid comes over, she has a nasty habit of dragging Princess into her room and slamming the door on Pixie, who then comes sobbing to me. I’m going to try to prevent that scenario from happening this summer by making the kids play outside all morning while I garden (and I’ve already told the other mom that’s going to be the rule – girls stay outside!). Even so, I can’t guarantee Pixie will included in the older girls’ games.

All this means I’m not inclined to have Princess’ friend over every day of the week (especially since she also annoys the hell out of me). In fact, I’m thinking along the lines of one or two mornings a week at most. Then I’ve got a standing agreement to meet with a friend of mine and her kids one morning a week. Patty’s got two boys, one Princess’ age and one Pixie’s age. It’s a bit of a drive to get together with them, but doable once a week. That gives us three mornings a week of play dates. And of course I’ve planned to take one day a week for day trips, just me and the girls, to the beach, the museum, Busch Gardens… I’m thinking that’s pretty good right? Plenty of activity all summer and lots of play dates with other kids!

Except Princess keeps whining that she wants to see her one girlfriend every day, in the afternoon, either at her house, where Pixie is not invited to come play, or here, where I will be hard at work writing the next great American smut novel.

My plan was that I would devote the entire first half of the day to the girls – play dates, gardening, going to the pool, throwing water balloons, karate classes, arts and crafts, etc. Princess’ little friend could come over during that time and join us for some outdoor fun. Then we’d come in for lunch and after lunch, when it’s hot enough outside you could fry an egg on the front porch, the girls would go upstairs to their rooms and play together. Quietly. While I worked in the office for a few hours.

I thought that arrangement sounded quite fair. They’d get to see friends and have all the fun they wanted in the mornings, I’d get the work time I so desperately need in the afternoon. But when I discuss this with Princess, I get a lot of arguing about how it isn’t fair, she never gets to see her friends often enough, she’s bored, she’s lonely, why can’t she play outside by herself, she won’t run out into the street, she won’t let her sister run out into the street, the three girls could play very quietly in her room and no one would fight or set the house on fire while I was working, etc., etc., etc.

Am I wrong? Should I try to have Princess’ friend over in the afternoons? Or have I set a reasonable schedule for all of us? I can’t say. I will say I’m not budging from that schedule. No kidding, I have a novel to write this summer, and a website to massively update. I can’t afford not to work those hours. Princess will get to see her friend once or twice a week, see some other kids once a week, and go on some fun trips every week. That’s enough, right?

Now to figure out how to quit feeling like a bad mom every time she asks for a play date…

Before I had kids, I used to go to the bookstore all the time. Seriously, I lived there. I even dreamed that I owned a house that was a bookstore, complete with a fancy cafe and all the cappuccino I could drink.

After having my first child, I quit going to bookstores for a while. It was just too hard. I couldn’t browse for books while handling a screaming baby. It got a little easier as Cassie got older and developed an interest in books, but even then I frequently found myself trapped in the kids’ section of the store, watching my daughter tear around the place and wishing I could somehow magically transport myself to the magazines, science fiction, mystery, non-fiction… Any part of the store that didn’t involve Disney Princess books and Thomas the Tank Engine.

Now that Cassie is in kindergarten and Sam is almost ready for preschool, I’d begun to look forward to the day when I’d be able to hit the bookstore alone. I could browse for hours without listening to someone whine “I’m boooooored!” I could order a piece of cheesecake at the cafe and not worry about someone dropping it on the floor before I could get a bite. I could have coffee and not have to argue with a small tot over why they can’t have another sip of my delicious and highly caffeinated beverage. Then came today.

I needed to get some gift cards for Cassie’s teachers. The bookstore seemed like the best bet for a teacher gift. I grabbed my wallet, coat and keys and turned to Sam.

“Okay, let’s go to the bookstore!”

“No! I don wanna go bookstore! I stay home with Dada!”

“Huh? Uh… I’m going to the bookstore, sweetie. You know, books? Thomas the Tank Engine? Disney Princess stories? Cookies and brownies and treats? Let’s get your coat on, okay?”

“NOOOOOOOOOOOOOO! I stay HOME with DADA!”

I looked at my husband. He looked back at me and shrugged. “Go ahead. She can stay here with me.”

So I went. And I hated it. I didn’t have anyone to sit with me at the cafe. I didn’t have anyone to chat with as I browsed for books. I didn’t have anyone to ask if we could please buy a princess book. I was so damned lonely I almost cried.

Next time I go to the bookstore, Sam doesn’t get a choice. That little fart is going with me. It’s just no fun on my own anymore.

Cassie went on a field trip to an apple orchard earlier this week and came back with one small red and green apple.

“Mama! Let’s make pie!”

How do you explain to a five-year-old that one small apple will not make a whole pie?  You don’t.  You figure out how to make pie instead.

We have a couple of kids’ cook books at home, so we dug through them until I found a recipe for jam tarts.  We used the basic recipe for the crust and rolled and cut out two crusts about 6 inches across.  These went into two of the cups of an extra large muffin tin I have.

“Mama, that’s not a pie plate!”

“No, it’s a mini-pie plate.  If we had more apples, we’d make more crusts and fill up the other four cups.  But we have one apple so we’re only making two mini-pies.”

I crossed my fingers and watched the cogs turn in her brain as she mulled that over.

“Okay.  I like mini-pies!”

Then we chopped up the one small apple and added it to a mix of brown sugar, butter, dried cranberries and walnuts.  I figured if we used plenty of dried cranberries and walnuts, we could get away with just one apple.

“Mama, how come we’re adding so much stuff to the apple?”

“It’ll add extra flavor and make the pie taste more yummy.”

“Okay. I like yummy pies!”

Once we had the pies filled, we still had some leftover scraps of pastry so I pulled out some cookie cutters and we made decorative tops for the pies.  This went over very well, especially since we have fairy, star, dragonfly and bumble bee cookie cutters.

“Yeah!  We made fairy pies!”

“Yes we did, sweetie.”

The pies went into the over for about 25 minutes and came out looking scrumptious.  I let Cassie pull out some livid pink decorator icing and we added that to the pie crusts.  Then Sam woke up from her nap and Michael came and we all headed out to the elementary school for open house.  All evening, Cassie talked about how much she wanted pie.

“Well, sweetie, when we get home, we’ll all have some pie.  You and Sam can share one pie and Daddy and I will share the other.”

Only that wasn’t what happened.  Cassie decided she had to have a pie all to herself, and then Sam decided she had to have a pie all to herself and that just left this one teeny-tiny jam tart I had made with the final leftover scraps of pastry and some orang marmalade.  The jam tart was good, but the smell of those pies was just killing me.  I had to wait until after both girls ate the tops of the pies and then abandoned them before I could steal a bite.

So that’s how you make two pies and one teeny-tiny jam tart from one apple and you better make sure you make that little jam tart because if you have two little girls, there’s no way in hell you will get a slice of pie.

Here’s some pictures of the pies:

The mini-pies before decoration.

The mini-pies after decoration.

The world’s smallest jam tart (shown larger than actual size).

Chef Cassie prepares to decorate the pies.

Sam offers her opinion (“Okay, I’ll eat it. No Mama, you can’t have any!”).

If there was an Olympic event for making mountains out of mole hills, I think I would have won a gold medal this week.  Or maybe not.  Maybe my intuition about certain recent events is right on target.  It’s hard to say because I’m rather biased about this particular topic.  And that topic is…

Popularity.  As in, who’s cool in school and who gets treated like crap.  You’d think that at the age of 39 I’d have gotten past all that by now.  Well, think again.  Ever since Cassie started kindergarten a few weeks ago, this particular issue has hit me like a ton of bricks.

Let me explain.  Twice last week, Cass came home from school in a very unhappy state.  The first time, she came off the bus sobbing because, as she put it, “So-and-so was mean to me!”  The second time, she waited until we were at home before disintegrating into tears.  When I finally got her calmed down enough to ask what was wrong, I got the same answer as before.  Some kids at school were mean to her.

What does that mean, the kids are being mean to her?  In the course of the past week it has meant: other kids pulling and hitting on Cassie’s backpack while she’s standing in line; one child scratching Cassie’s hand while trying to get her to turn around and sit forward on the bus (was it horseplay? accidental? deliberate?); name calling; being played with and then abruptly ignored; and other minor events.

I know enough about kids at this point to know that I’m not getting the entire story from Cass.  I’ve e-mailed her teacher and talked with her to confirm that Cassie has not become the class pariah.  The backpack incident was horseplay and Cassie wasn’t the only target that afternoon.  I’ve also talked with the mother of the child who scratched Cassie’s hand, to try and ascertain what happened that day.  We’re both chalking it up to personality differences and a misunderstanding at this point.

So there may or may not be a problem.  At the school open house tonight, Cassie seemed to have a lot of fun playing with a few of her classmates (I gave my number to the moms in question in hopes of setting up play dates). And Cassie’s teacher says Cass has a great time in school.  But then I keep thinking about the two days Cass came home crying last week, followed by mornings where she did not want to go the the bus stop and see the girl who scratched her, and I can’t help but worry.  You see, I was one of the most unpopular kids in my school.  It started in first grade and it only got worse as I grew up.  Name calling, snubbing, a little outright hazing and plenty of rumor mongering.  At age seven the popular girls liked to pretend I didn’t exist even though we sat at the same table and were assigned to work on projects together. By fourth grade, one little twit started a rumor that I was stuffing my bra even though I didn’t own a fucking bra yet.  In seventh grade, at my first dance, one of the most popular girls in school threw a soda in my face just because I showed up and it pissed her off.  Mary remembers that night.  She grabbed my right arm to keep me from punching that girl’s lights out.  So I hit the bitch with a left hook instead. 

Speaking of Mary, my best friend and partner in crime, she and I became the school lesbians after we decided to go to ring dance together because we couldn’t get dates.  (Recall back in those days that being a lesbian was a hanging offense… like it isn’t anymore, right?).  Anyway, Mary was just as popular as I was all through school, but by that point, the name calling didn’t really phaze either of us anymore so we hammed it up for all we were worth and to this day people ask if we’ve eloped to California yet.  Hey, they’d understand us there.

By 1987, my senior year in high school, I had quite the reputation.  I was gay, a witch (because I did a research paper on the Salem witch trials), and a socio-path who enjoyed dissecting cats (that last was actually true, but the cat was dead when I got it).  When the time came to vote for senior superlatives, I got ‘most artistic’ and ‘worst dressed.’  The same snarky little bitch that had accused me of stuffing my bra in the fourth grade nominated me for the later title.  Mary was voted ‘most anti-social.’  Today she’s a nurse who gives people colonoscopies if they aren’t nice to her.

So I went through all that shit and survived, and when I left college (yes, I had problems with the popular crowd even in college, thanks to my fellow fuck-head ROTC cadets) I thought I had finally escaped it all.  I went out into the world and became recognized as someone who was smart, competent, hard working, decisive, aggressive, and more than a little scary/crazy and not to be fucked with (and all these terms come from various job reviews and military evaluation reports I have received over the years).  I was in charge wherever I went, I had my friends who had stood by me all through school, I was away from the assholes who tried to make my life miserable, and on the rare occasion when I did run into said assholes, I just pulled out that scary/crazy confident aspect of me and they backed right the fuck off.

I grew up, and I grew out of the popularity contest.

And then I had a child who started kindergarten this fall and I am right back in the middle of that shit.

Is it really a problem yet?  Has my girl entered the popularity contest and been found wanting?  Or am I just too fucking paranoid thanks to my own bad experiences?  I so do not want to see Cassie go through what I did, and no, don’t even suggest that if I came through it a better person so will she.  I’ve only highlighted a little of the endless sadism I had to endure.  My kid does not need to face that to become a better, stronger person.  No one does.  So it raises my hackles when she comes home crying, sobbing, about how the kids at school are treating her.  I fear I see the hints of what is to come.  Cassie is me all over in many way, the younger me who didn’t have the razor sharp tongue and the scary-as-shit take-no-prisoners attitude.  She’s a smart, sweet, goofy kid who’s just entered a world where smart, sweet, goofy kids get turned into shark bait.

What to do, what to do?  I’m trying to get her out to see her friends more — her real friends like Mary’s son and the little girl down the street who’s allergic to everything under the sun and thus will probably never go to a regular school.  And I’m trying to help her find new friends by reaching out to the moms of the classmates she does seem to get along with.  But that one little girl, the same one who goes to Cassie’s bus stop, is in Cassie’s class, that same kid who scratched my baby and made her cry… I got a bad feeling about her.  I’ve got this sense that she’s one of the sharks, and somehow, some way, I have got to prevent her from eating Cassie alive.

I was Miss Unpopularity 1987, voted ‘Worst Dressed,’ ‘Least Liked,’ and ‘Most Likely to be Spit Upon’ by my fellow classmates.  That is not a title my daughter should have to inherit.