Little Children

I've often felt like I was having a Kate Winslet moment - you know the one - from the amazingly brilliant movie "Little Children" where she is sitting in the park - both pretending to watch her kids, pretending to read and not quite pretending to interract with the other mothers.

That scene is so brilliant because it is so true to life. I always am the Mom on the side, the one that forgot to bring a healthy and nutritous snack containing all of the essential food groups needed for healthy growing children. My kids don't want to wear the right clothes or say the right things - and damnit if I can make them. I figure part of growing kids with healthy self esteem and stong minds is allowing them the tenacity to make their own pig headed decisions. Whether I'm going to like it or not.

While Kate doesn't enjoy these other women - she might want them to like her - although doing anything about it would be against her nature. Their permapress coordinated outfits and soccer Mom hair isn't wrong it just isn't her. I understand this. If I am going to all the trouble to put on lipstick - it won't be to wear it to the park.

In this movie, we are given the horrifying news that her lover doesn't think that she's beautiful - he prefers his skinnier more polished working wife. Where, in reality, isn't Kate Winslet - normal sized girl - just beautiful? Wouldn't any of us give our left arm to be as beautiful as Kate? So, what does that say about how we feel about our own appearance every day? Do we imagine that the permapress soccer moms and their working counterparts are not only more together and on the ball than we are but that they are also better mothers and more beautiful than we are as well?

All of these questions came to me while I was sitting on a park bench yesterday. I was surrounded by gaggles of Moms watching even bigger gaggles of kids.

The Indian Moms all stick together and mutter in a language the rest of us can't understand. I don't want to think this but, I always imagine they are laughing at me or talking about me - the same as I imagine when I go to the nail salon and Amy the Vietnamese nail goddess smiles at me and laughs with the other nail goddesses. The Indian Moms always seem to have extra children more than they would normally be able to fit into the tiny townhouses on our street.

Then there are the baby sitters - who also tend to congregate together. These are the Moms so superior to you and me that they get to look after other people's kids and get paid for it. The have menus and activity plans. They walk every where (because they care for more than the legal number of kids and can't fit them all in a minivan) and are therefore far more fit and capable than I could ever be.

The other suburban Moms have been coming to the park at this time of day on this day for eons. Far longer than I who have only begun as unemployment dictated. And - by the way - I am far too disorganized to go anywhere everyday at a certain time. They are the ones who look pityingly in our direction as I failed to produce even a peice of gum for my kid who was both hungry and thirsty. My "we live 2 minutes from here - lets just go home" even got a little shake of the head from one of them.

But I kept thinking of Kate Winslet. Because in the movie she got the super cute guy (if only for a little while) and in real life she got nominated for an Oscar. Who will be laughing when that happens to me, I ask silently to the super competant Moms? Who will be laughing then?