Prologue
In the dream, she’s at the playground with her children, happy shrieks merging with the jingle of the ice cream truck, the newly installed rubber ground squishy to the touch as kids tumble down and then, in slow motion, seem to bounce right back up again. But then it registers, as she swims through the woozy state of dreamland, that she is feeling the cold, knobby rubber flush to her left cheek, pressed hard and flat against it. Deep from the city’s core, a rumbling vibrates straight through her throbbing eardrum. The subway? she thinks, still unafraid.
But she’s also aware of another sound, far off, high and ethereal, like the baby singing through the monitor on her bedside table back home, even though that makes no sense, because she’s here in the playground, she can see her own body now, the vantage point having suddenly swooped to reveal her limbs way down below, spread like a chalk outline at a crime scene. It seems curious, but more in an intriguing way than an alarming one, to be watching herself from above—if that noise from the monitor, or from wherever, would just stop already. But no, it’s persistent, getting louder and louder.
And so, with great effort, she forces herself into a seated position, and as her distorted perspective rights itself and the blood roils in rolling rhythm in her ears, she realizes that she has not been dreaming at all, that the noise is coming from a siren, that an ambulance has arrived, that people are running toward her, and that something is terribly, terribly wrong.
FIRST SEMESTER
September
Dear Mother Inferior,
We’ve tried everything! Sitting outside her door, sticker charts, pacifiers, no pacifiers . . . and somehow, my toddler just won’t go to sleep on her own. Bedtime starts at 6:30 p.m. and ends at midnight, with one of us sleeping on the floor. I know that I’m supposed to set limits, but I feel so broken, I don’t know where to start. SOS!
Love,
Conked in Ronkonkoma
P.S. Not to point out the obvious, but it’s exceedingly difficult to have sex with my husband when we are in different rooms.
Dearest Conked,
Not to point out the obvious right back atcha, but you made a sort of joke in your sign-off, and I think that places you squarely outside of SOS territory! I’ll cheers my Chardonnay to that, Momma! *laughing so hard you cry emoji*
So first things first, there is no wrong way to parent. If it’s working for you, who cares what all the other mom-shamers out there think? But you’re clearly feeling that it’s time for a new era to dawn in the nursery, and for that, another cheers to you. The first step toward making a change is admitting that you want one. And four years ago, when my Sam was about a year old, before we’d added not one but two(!) other little ones into the mix, I was done. Exhausted. Spent. Subsisting on a few two-hour chunks of sleep each night. A friend of mine told me that in France, mothers leave their hubbies alone to sleep train the kids and take a “spa vacances” by themselves, a little payback for nine months of gestating their child. And we had to try something. So off I went for a long weekend with my girlfriend and my pump, my bosom inflating and deflating every few hours like a mini, two-balloon-only Thanksgiving Day Parade. When I returned, boom, Sam was sleeping through the night, and you’d best believe nothing is sexier than a father who’s just sleep trained your child, even if he looks like a raccoon.
There are a handful of tried-and-true sleep training methods—I could list them but I know you’ve already googled them all, Conked. Maybe you’re a cry-it-outer. Maybe you’re a gradual extinction-er. Maybe you’re a co-sleeper, and about to click buy on that California King, just willing your husband’s penis not to shrivel into a raisin. But I can tell you one thing I knew for certain, the minute I read your letter: a change is gonna come (sing it, Sam Cooke! *microphone emoji*). You just want the courage to make that change happen. And can you hear that? It’s our community of mothers, cheering you on.
As I say time and time again: you got this. *small explosion emoji*
Love,
Mother Inferior
* * *
From: Ash Wempole
To: Annie Lewin
Subject: Your column!
Annie!
Your adoring editress here, back and fully restored after spending Labor Day weekend at a mud spa in the Catskills—I spent HOURS caked in mud and could literally feel my toxins being leached out of my kidneys and bloodstream and through my pores. HIGHLY RECOMMEND.
But down to biznass: loved, loved, loved this column! So full of upbeat positive energy, just what every mother needs as we hurtle into the school year. And SO. RELATABLE. I know, I know, I don’t have kids of my own but literally moments after reading your words (literally) I told my boyfriend I needed him to support me more on social, the way Dan supported you when sleep training Sam. I really think it resonated, because he even posted a pic of the urn I just sculpted and put up on my Etsy store! (No pressure but if you’re in the market for an urn—they are so not just for funerary purposes anymore, you can use them for all kinds of things—I got you, girl! Use the discount code ashsplash for 10% off, only for my fav writers!)
Will get this bad boy posted up on Rawr.com’s homepage tomorrow a.m., can’t wait for it to set the world on fiyah with its speak-truth-to-power rawness!
P.S. You are literally the only one of my writers who refuses to join Slack. I write emails for you, and you alone. *pulsing heart emoji*
Ash
She/They
Editress. Wordsmith. Potter.
@RiseFromTheAshes
Etsy store: TerraCottaAndAsh
* * *
The morning the private school kindergarten applications went live—nine a.m. sharp the Tuesday after Labor Day—Annie Lewin found herself in a preschool classroom that smelled of glue and Cray-Pas, a tiny chair digging into the small of her back. Throngs of overeager parents, she knew, had just been unleashed to start filling out essays espousing the uniqueness of their progeny, but this was the only slot when she’d been able to schedule her son’s classroom meet ’n’ greet, which was necessary “to acclimatize children to their new surroundings before the first day of classes,” or so said preschool literature. So here they were in the fours homeroom, Sam playing on the rug nearby, Annie tamping down the distorted feeling she always associated with this munchkin land, as Miss Porter pushed a packet of papers across the table.
“Of course, this year is slightly different because there’s the exmissions process,” she was saying—like something that afflicted the marshlands after Deepwater Horizon, Annie thought, willing herself to pay attention. “You’ll have a more formal conversation with Headmistress Halpert in a few weeks about applying out, but we’ve compiled some information about it here, for you to review before.”
Annie had spent the summer listening to a podcast about a wildly wealthy banking family that had lost its riches after investigators discovered that the patriarch had been Ponzi-scheming it all along. The main character, his daughter, had used an Italian word over and over again to describe their upbringing: “abbondanza.” Abundance. Lavish richness. Access. To Annie’s unseasoned eye, all the independent schools seemed to be variations on a theme, the theme being “abbondanza.” The only thing that appeared reliably different were the uniforms: this one’s made the boys look like corporate raiders, that one’s hewed closer to a monastic vibe, that other one was more yacht-chic,
all madras all the time.
It wasn’t just that the New York City kindergarten application process seemed, to Annie, like something lifted from an Onion headline—“Four-Year-Old Receives Admission to Premier School Based on His Playing of the Moonlight Sonata on Kazoo”—or that it forced her to confront her ambivalence about weaving her child into a particular swatch of the fabric of a city where she still felt the outsider, despite nearly a decade spent calling it home. It wasn’t just that she couldn’t quite believe her baby boy was almost ready for kindergarten. It was also that her bandwidth for wrestling with big questions was basically nonexistent. There was the stress of getting settled in the new apartment—something she’d allotted two months to do, but somehow, five months later, she was still unpacking—combined with the general state of the world and a phone full of depressing news, but also specific things, like the weekly column she had to file, and that no matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t get more than two hours of uninterrupted sleep. Just the night before, seemingly moments after calming her mind enough to rest, she’d swum up out of a dream to a presence standing by the bed.
“Mama, I fell out,” her middle child, Claire, had whispered hotly onto her cheek. So Annie had reluctantly swung her legs out from under the warmth of the covers for the seventh—eighth? ninth?—straight night in a row and padded her daughter back to her room, tucking her in and wondering, blearily, how on earth to keep a mobile individual within the confines of a room until the sun rose.
“Mama, you sit in da chair, with BOTH feet on da ground,” Claire had dictated, as she did every night. “And don’t close ya eyes. And head up. And den you stay a long five minutes.” Whatever that was, some nonsense measurement her child had concocted to make sense of a nebulous world she could not yet understand: a short time that you could somehow extend into a long one, an Escher painting where days and mornings and afternoons and evenings looped around, contracting and expanding at random. Had this bedtime begun a short or long two hours ago, with the fifth last book and third absolutely-no-more-songs-after-this-one rendition of “A Bushel and a Peck”? Had she been a mother for a short five years or a long five years?
When Claire’s breathing slowed, Annie had tiptoed back to bed, willing herself to drift easily to sleep, but of course her uncooperative brain whirred away, amped up on scattered to-dos and disconnected thoughts, crushing the prospect of sleep as if it were a juice box in a compactor: she needed to get Claire clothes that fit her properly, that didn’t cut deeply into her wrists at the cuffs; the sticky thing that went on the bottom of the tub to prevent slips was getting moldy—How much mold was okay? Or was that mildew? What was mildew, exactly? What were the downstream health consequences of packing the kids salami sandwiches for lunch again? Would their preservative intake eventually allow them to be embalmed, like Lenin,
but sans any added chemicals? It was all Annie could do to stop herself from sling-shotting out of bed to start preparing breakfast and troubleshooting by moonlight.
And on her husband, Dan, blissfully snored, cocooned in his clearheadedness, as her cloudy head spun circles.
“I imagine you’ll be taking advantage of Sawyer’s early application option for Sam, since Mr. Lewin graduated from there, right?” Miss Porter continued, dragging Annie back into the classroom.
Sawyer. Right.
Because Dan was an alum, Sam had access to a special pre-application pool at the city’s most coveted school—everyone just knew, of course, but there was also the U.S. News & World Report rankings—which was open to all alumni, siblings, and staff members, with admissions decisions relayed a full four months before general applicants. Annie had first learned about it when Sam entered the twos class at the Bartleby Neighborhood School and she’d been invited to the mom-only, school-specific WhatsApp chain. Though she’d quickly muted the “Bartleby Babes,” that frenetic, disembodied Greek chorus that lived in her phone, when she had the bandwidth to dive in, it had proven endlessly fascinating to watch the queen bees buzz about. Clicking open the chain was akin to unleashing the Furies—best done purposefully, and with full awareness of the emotional consequences. Conservatively, half the things written there could be lifted and leaked to the Post for a tidy sum, and Annie often found herself taking screenshots and texting them to her college friend, Camila, so they could have a laugh together about the insanity of her new reality. Camila’s son would go to the local, bilingual public school in Berkeley. No connected families, no unconnected families, no interviews or letters of recommendation, no admissions or exmissions. Just: school.
The so-called double-or-nothing incident had dominated the admissions chatter that first year.
MAYA: Babes, do I have some news for you. Strap in those seat belts, or clip into that Peloton.
CHRISTINE: *ear emoji*
LEONORA: *ear emoji*
BELINDA: *ear emoji*
YAEL: OMG lol am actually on a Peloton now, I see you, Samira *high five emoji* #rideordie
SAMIRA: *high five emoji* *flexed bicep emoji* #yesoryes
MAYA: Mmmk, so ladeez, remember how Peter Park had that clause in his nanny’s contract that if Leo got into Sawyer, they’d give her a $15k bonus? And how the nanny spent that whole admissions year doing STEAM enrichment with him in the park?
(Flurry of thumbs-ups)
YAEL: Ahem, he referred to her as a “governess,” she did have that PhD *omg emoji*
(Smattering of ha-ha’s)
MAYA: So the day they got the acceptance letter, the Parks offered her double or nothing if she could get Leo’s cousin in this year! She just told my nanny at the playground!
(Explosion of exclamation points)
MAYA: She took the bet!
CHRISTINE: [GIF of a googly-eyed Aziz Ansari making it rain dollar bills]
Back then, the entire premise had seemed utterly preposterous—Prepping a child for a kindergarten interview? Paying your nanny to do it for you?—but as Sam graduated to the threes classroom, and then onto the fours, as Claire joined the school, as baby Max was born, all but ensuring a full five years as a Bartleby family, Annie came to realize a singular truth about how its community viewed kindergarten admissions in the most cutthroat city in the world: that every part of the process was an opportunity to massively bungle something that would then set one’s child on the wrong path to the wrong life. Slip on one banana peel, and bam, it was ta-ta, Ivies, and hello, Bucknell, which might as well have been hello, ditch digging. Letter of recommendation from someone too famous, but not intellectual enough? Ding. Someone intellectual, but too obscure? Ding. Ninety-second video too blurry? Too professionally produced? Ding, ding. Parents’ job too middle manager-y? Ding. College alma mater too midwestern? Ding, ding, ding. And why not just sidestep the private school rat race and send your child to public school, where Annie, herself, had received a perfectly adequate education just forty miles outside the city? Bartleby parents often claimed they had “mixed feelings” about not honestly considering that route, but then conversations—after the obligatory guilty-with-an-explanation throat clearing about the system being broken—tended to boil down to, Are you really going to deny him the chance to take a class in high-end sneaker development?
Yes. Shoe designing.
A click through Sawyer’s website revealed that since Dan’s time there three decades before, the school had completed four capital campaigns. The new and improved campus now boasted two separate rooftop turfs, a state-of-the-art music wing where the sixth-grade choir recorded its annual multifaith holiday album, and a five-thousand-square-foot “maker’s studio” where students could learn how to make 3D-printed custom Nike sneakers from an actual ex-Nike designer.
“Why on earth does he need to learn how to make shoes?” Annie had asked Dan that August, just weeks before the application portal opened up. Her great-grandparents had been shoemakers in Poland. Wasn’t the idea to be upwardly mobile? “Is he going to be a
cobbler?”
“It’s not about the shoemaking, it’s about the exposure,” Dan had said, furiously pecking out a message on Slack. “You want him exposed to all sorts of things, to figure out what strikes the passion, the fire. I loved my time there, and honestly, Annie, most mothers would kill to have an in at Sawyer.”
“I’d literally—literally—kill for Greg to have gone to one of these schools,” Belinda Brenner had just about echoed at last year’s preschool benefit (theme: Burning Man on Park Avenue), with a little knowing wink, as if Annie had married expressly with this moment in mind, like a Victorian heroine securing her fate with the right dance partner. “Us unconnected families who have to apply with the masses, we’re like ships out at sea, just looking for a port in the storm. We’re not even gonna try at Sawyer. I’ve run the numbers, and with all the connected families this year, there’s just no way.” She then turned on an Oliver-Twist-cum-Eliza-Doolittle accent, hands clasped in supplication. “Please, sir, educate my baby! Please teach him his letters and numbers!”
Crazy. These people were all crazy.
Yet Annie had been led to understand that an acceptance at Sawyer would be the golden ticket. And a rejection, particularly given Dan’s connection, the ultimate mark of failure. Statistically, various reporters crowed, it was harder to get into Sawyer than it was to get into Harvard, but a spot at Sawyer almost guaranteed a spot at Harvard, so it was like taking out two particularly rare birds with one stone.
Even the non-crazies seemed to be in agreement. Laura, the only other mother at Bartleby Annie had ever actually liked, had grown up in the city and attended the premier all-girls’ school.
“Look,” she’d told Annie one day at the swings, “if Jack weren’t ‘exceptional,’ which is what we’re calling him now, I guess, and going the specialized school route, I’d absolutely be considering Sawyer. It’s a great school, it really is—the facilities, the faculty, the best of the best.”
Annie had always assumed that, like her, her children would go to the local public school. But falling in love with Dan and moving to New York City had, like a choose-your-own-adventure fork in a book, hurtled her down a different storyline, and then—with the sudden windfall he’d made a few months before application season, and the purchase of the apartment just outside the school district with the wonderful public school, and into one with middling scores—onto a different bookshelf.
“But what do you even mean when you say ‘best’?” Annie had countered, snatching Claire up just before she got clocked in the head by Max’s rapidly descending feet. “Aren’t there many things that make the ‘best’ environment for a kid? And don’t all those studies show that when you control for income and if the parents went
to college and stuff, it basically wipes out any tangible differences between private, public, homeschooling, whatever?”
“Oh, c’mon, Annie, let’s be real,” Laura had replied, giving Jack a shove. “Everyone knows that school choice is where values and principles go to die. You don’t sacrifice your own child at the altar of ideals, particularly if that child is Sam and is basically already reading. The worst sin would be putting him into an environment where he’d be bored out of his mind. You really want him to be the smartest kid in the room, like you were?”
Annie thought the system had worked for her until she arrived, Bambi-like, on Harvard’s campus, the first graduate of her suburban New Jersey public high school to get into an Ivy in years. Her own mother still worked as the librarian there, shelving books and making recommendations in the comforting room where Annie had sat after school studying each day, a social outcast just waiting to find her people. It didn’t happen immediately, the loss of innocence. Almost instantly, she fell in with a group of friends at the Crimson, so couldn’t have cared less about the fancy social clubs that lined Mount Auburn Street, where various heirs and roman-numeral-affixed classmates held court; or about the ritzy prep school kids, like her freshmen-year roommate, a well-meaning but wildly dysregulated girl who was unsuccessfully trying to hide an eating disorder, which led naive little Annie to scatter peanut butter sandwich squares in the common room in the hopes that she’d be moved to ingest a nibble of something, anything, more caloric than straight vodka and the occasional handful of raw almonds. Take your black-tie parties; Annie was fine in the stacks or the dorms, drinking cheap wine and having pseudo-deep conversations with similarly nerdy friends.
But eventually, she started to internalize that while there were doors that were obviously shut to her due to factors way beyond her control, there were, too, doors that she didn’t even know existed. Doors that people were opening, in houses that had been built in different
solar systems.
“It’s like the secret menu at the fast-food place,” Dan would say, whenever she expressed ambivalence about sending Sam into the belly of the beast. “You want him to know it’s there. What he does with it is up to him.”
Annie forced her focus back to Bartleby, pulling two pages at random from Miss Porter’s folder. One was titled “Kindergarten Independent School Application Essay Pointers,” another “How to Dress for Success: Your Kindergarten Interview.”
“So whichever route you choose, you’re going to need to write a personal statement expressing why it is your top choice,” Miss Porter continued, as Annie’s eyes scanned the words “Peter Pan collar” and “culottes.” “And you’re going to need to include Sam’s favorite extracurriculars, his strengths and weaknesses, that kind of thing.”
His extracurriculars? Didn’t you need curriculars to have extracurriculars?
“And I always tell parents at this point in the process,” Miss Porter continued, “before it’s really started up in earnest, that it has gotten more vicious than it’s ever been. More and more people are having two, three, sometimes four children, and so all the siblings suck up spots at the schools because of preferential treatment, plus there are the last-minute donations from heavy hitters.” She smiled conspiratorially. “You and your husband, as double Harvards, would ten years ago have been put in a special bucket but now, crazy as it may seem, there are so many of you!”
The horror.
The two women turned their focus to Sam, who was happily constructing a tower out of unit blocks. Sometimes his beauty, his perfection, temporarily blinded Annie, made it so that when she looked away again, every time she blinked, she’d see different perfect parts of his body projected on her eyelids. The gentle taper of his eyebrows. The arrowhead-shaped birthmark on his left shoulder blade. His tiny earlobe, begging to be nibbled. At just four years out of the womb, he was still close enough to the otherworld to be pristine and unmarred by all this bullshit.
She was just a suburban public school kid, swimming upstream in a world Dan understood intimately. What did she know? Maybe Sam would be the next Manolo.
“We’re gonna have a fun year together, aren’t we, Sam?” Miss Porter called over to him.
“Can’t wait!” her charmer chirped, flashing a big smile.
* * *
BARTLEBY NEIGHBORHOOD SCHOOL
14a East 77th Street
New York, NY 10075
“Where Play Is Work”
KINDERGARTEN INDEPENDENT SCHOOL APPLICATION ESSAY POINTERS
Dearest Fours Parents,
We are excitedly readying the classrooms for the first day of school and eagerly await your smiling faces in the halls. One order of business before we get to the meat of this note: We are—can you believe it?—already starting to plan for our annual gala, which will be themed “Gatsby (the Baz Luhrmann Version)”* and held at the Cosmopolitan Club before Christmas break. A quick reminder to check the Google spreadsheet with designated tasks on it, and email the planning committee at [email protected] with any queries.
Now, to the matter at hand: In addition to your in-person interview, your family’s personal statement is one of the most important parts of your kindergarten application. It allows you to tell the school, in 500 words or fewer, what makes your child unique and wonderful. We are proud of our exmissions record, which remains one of the most successful in the city, and are excited to help you and your family find the perfect match. While there is no one right way to write an essay—we even had one family secure a spot at their top school with a submission that was written entirely in iambic pentameter—we urge you to consider the following guidelines when crafting your statement: ...
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