ONE
FROM: Meredith Lawton
DATE: September 24, 2018
SUBJECT: Introduction to our son, Harrison Rutherford Lawton
TO: Josephine Bordelon
Dear Josephine,
I’m Meredith Lawton, close friend of Beatrice Pembrook, who I’m sure you know is a past board chair of Fairchild Country Day School and fourth generation Fairchild alum. It was so good of Beatrice to honor her parents, Ginger and Alfred, after their untimely death by building the school a state-of-the-art black box theatre and a rooftop Olympic swimming pool. Beatrice is such a gem and she should be reaching out to you shortly on behalf of our son, Harrison.
I know admissions season just opened, but last spring we worked on our essays with a Stanford writing coach and have spent the summer perfecting them with our editor from Golden Gate Books so we may be the first to submit our application on the WeeScholars website. I would particularly like to draw your attention to paragraph #4 of essay question #5. I believe it to be a wonderful representation of how worldly and culturally competent Harrison already is at four years, ten months:
“At almost five years of age Harrison has glamped in huts in the Indian Himalayas, cruised down the Mekong in Laos, ridden on a Sherpa’s shoulders to Paro Taktsang (the Tiger’s Nest Monastery) in Bhutan, been recognized as a reincarnated lama in Nepal, and fed exotic fish all over the world from Mexico to the Great Barrier Reef (thank goodness Harrison got to experience THE REEF before it died completely from environmental hazard—terrible tragedy).”
We will be seeing a lot of each other this year and I look forward to meeting you on our school tour in the beginning of October. If there is anything you would like to learn about Harrison and our family beforehand please do not hesitate to e-mail or call (just not before 10:30 a.m. as I am most likely in yoga, Barry’s Boot Camp, or at my weekly cryotherapy appointment).
With much gratitude,
Meredith Lawton
P.S. I couldn’t resist sending this adorable picture of Harrison celebrating Chinese New Year in Shanghai. Christopher had to be there for work so OF COURSE we brought Harrison along; one is never too young to be exposed to Mandarin!
I finish reading globe-trotting-mom’s e-mail, shift my weight onto one leg at my standing desk—an ergonomic no-no—and look up to a God I’m not 100 percent sure exists because if She did, She certainly wouldn’t let people like Meredith Lawton procreate. Or do yoga. Nothing worse than a karmic salutation that screams, I’ve found mind body bliss and I’m now superior to you in this life and in the next.
“Tiger moms are so 2011,” I say to a silent, still-empty school campus, except for my own seventeen-year-old daughter, Etta, stretching her enviably smooth mocha, I-can-eat-Slim-Jims-and-Flamin’-Hot-Cheetos-for-lunch, ballerina body on the other side of my office. She doesn’t bother to acknowledge my deeply profound thought, her sound-canceling headphones to blame.
PRIVATE SCHOOL ADMISSIONS ARE NOW OPEN. Subtext: Let the freaking out, sucking up, buying in, overstating, underlistening, overselling, calling in of favors, pushing boundaries, and, in general, appalling parental antics begin. There should be a torch I light every Monday after Labor Day that stays lit until March 15—since urban private school admissions really are the Olympics of parenting. Instead, I’ve created a tasteful banner at the top of the Fairchild Country Day School website announcing: NOW ACCEPTING APPLICATIONS. With a single click on the link, parents are invited to learn more about Fairchild admissions and embrace the truth that their upcoming year will be lost to an abyss of essays, interviews, veiled dinner party conversation, stressful pillow talk, and heavy self-medication, all in the name of kindergarten.
Let’s call private school admissions what it is, an obsession for all those families who desperately want a spot on the private school crazy train. In San Francisco, it’s a bit different than the famed stories of cutthroat manipulation and desperation that define the Upper East Side of New York City. Don’t get me wrong, San Francisco has its overabundance of the rich and anxious, too, but here they’re well concealed behind a dirty SUV with a surfboard on top, HOKA running shoes, retro T-shirts, ripped jeans, flip-flops, and a shitload of stock options. The more Bay Area parents feign “It’s all good, everything will work out,” my stats show what a higher pain-in-the-ass quotient they are.
I actually welcome the occasional New York transplant family who comes into parent interviews owning their perceived superiority in head-to-toe Prada and gray banker suits attempting to establish their dominance through the traditional where they went to school, what they do, and where they work (usually someplace with three last names) introduction. With upfront elitism you immediately know with whom you’re dealing and where you stand. When elitism hides behind a white ribbed tank top, aviator sunglasses, and a messy bun it’s much more difficult to figure out from where an ambush may come. That’s why you can’t be fooled by the San Francisco mom in her 24/7 painted-on yoga pants who looks like your best friend or the 100 percent organic lady right out of Goop’s weekly online newsletter. Sometimes she’s as sweet and detoxed as she looks, but just as often behind that barre-class bod is a momster so determined to get her child into the best school she would toss you off the Golden Gate Bridge while sipping her green juice if she thought your kid was in direct kindergarten competition with hers.
Over the years I’ve learned the cultural subtlety of West Coast admissions. The first lesson came early in my career when my baby, Etta, was in first grade at Fairchild and I was in my second year as an admissions assistant. I made my first and only mistake of slipping from business English into what Aunt Viv calls “home speak” and getting a little too chummy with an applicant mom who was sweatin’ it because her son was channeling mini-Mussolini meets Donald Trump during his kindergarten visit.
“I know how you feel, Charlotte, I’m a mama, too, and sometimes our babies can bring us to our knees.” I gave her a big smile in motherly solidarity, but thinking back on it I probably showed too much tooth as this hundred-pound Barbie popped back, “Why you shore is, honey!” and patted my forearm to seal our new “sistahood.” Since that moment, I’ve had to endure Charlotte’s ridiculous banter as her son has moved through the grades at Fairchild and her warped sense of our friendship has grown. Luckily, I’m a quick study and I’ve never slipped into anything resembling black speak again without being related to my audience. Well, except for Lola. I also never told my aunt Viv about my early career slip. She would have skinned me alive.
“Can we go yet? I’ll freak if I’m late,” Etta yells, to hear herself above her headphones as she rolls her upper torso up from the hideous, stained maroon industrial carpet, her legs split east to west. My office is budgeted for a remodel next year.
I glance at Etta over the top of my computer. After seventeen years it still shocks me that I birthed a child who goes apoplectic if she’s not ten minutes early to everything. I didn’t even notice when my period was six weeks late eighteen years ago. Time and I have a very loose relationship. “Two Josie minutes,” I yell back, holding up a peace sign. Etta’s trained to know that means “ten real-time minutes.”