Need to vent about frustrating interaction with another mom

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08/26/2020 12:24

Subject: Need to vent about frustrating interaction with another mom

quote

Anonymous

I was out with our 3-year-old this morning and ran into a fellow mom I have not seen in over a year and a half. They live in our neighborhood but spent last year abroad for her husband's job and then the first half of this year staying with her family (I think they were originally just waiting for their tenants to vacate and then decided to stay for a while when the pandemic started).

At first it was friendly, just remarking on how much the kids have grown, etc.

But then she asked me about pre-school. I told her our PK3 kid will be doing DL at our in-bound elementary school. I kind of laughed about it -- we don't expect a ton from distance preschool, but we didn't want to unenroll our child and deprive the school of funding (or IB school has trouble with enrollment numbers and funding). We figure if it's not working out we can probably just stop logging in, since PK is optional in DC.

At this point the other mom made some comment about how she could imagine DL being useful for some PK students "but probably not whatever [my kid's school] is offering." This by itself was obnoxious -- I know our IB school doesn't have some elite reputation but it's still rude to say something like to someone's face, IMO. All of the kids at our school deserve a good education, and making some snide comment about that education is classist.

But then I made the mistake of saying we are planning on doing the lottery next year to see if we can get our kid into another school, since ours has real issues for the upper grades (and I think relies overmuch on suspensions and other punitive methods for dealing with behavioral issues, many of which are largely due to the challenges out of these kids' control). I mentioned another neighborhood school, which happens to be the IB school for this woman's kid. It's also not one of the highly sought after schools, but I really liked it when we visited last year and seems to do a better job of keeping kids engaged and less overall truancy.

That's when she went on a rant about how people should have to attend their IB school and how she thought it was "selfish" of us to try to get our kid into a different neighborhood school. Which is bizarre because she had literally just made a comment about how she didn't think our current school was very good! It felt like the entire conversation was just her trying tell me that my family isn't good enough to go to a "good" school and that we need to learn our place.

Plus this woman's kid isn't even in school yet and won't start for another year or two (I can't remember when the kid's birthday is). And since they are in-bound, they are guaranteed a spot if they want it -- nothing we do will impact that. So none of this even concerns her, and she's never been through the lottery/enrollment process so knows nothing about how stressful it can be. They haven't even been living in DC for over a year and half! I think they've only been back a month. But she's suddenly protective of her IB school that she's probably never even been inside.

Anyway, the whole interaction just left me with a bad taste in my mouth. I don't understand why parents are so often so judgmental and competitive with one another. It makes challenging situations so much worse. I'll be avoiding this woman in the future. I sincerely wish I'd used the excuse of our masks and not having seen her in ages to pretend not to recognize her this morning.