A few disclaimers, before I go further. I was probably dressed like a celebrity trying to hide from photographers, complete with inappropriate dress, oversized sweater, scarf and hat. G was probably also inappropriately dressed, and by that I mean barefoot and not wearing her own sweater. And I am known to be pretty sensitive to condescending and/or patronizing behavior. I have been since I was a wee bairn. And I may have been moderately hungover. Hangovers make me cranky.
But it was a beautiful day! Check it:
I turn my head to the right. And there I see them, a group of parents from G's school. including the principal and his wife, sitting on a picnic blanket together and talking loudly and raucously as they share organic snack cakes and keep vulture eyes on their various children.
Oh shit, I think. At least they are over by the little kids area and we're over here on the other side of the playground.
FYI, NEVER think that. Because your toddler will immediately run over to you, dump her shoes in your lap and tear off barefoot toward the people you are happy not to be interacting with. She got to the swing set and called me over at the top of her lungs to push her. But she said "please" so I didn't really have grounds for refusal.
I get there and realize that my fear of being forced to interact with these people is completely unfounded, as they all ignore me. Completely. Even after the kids make the connection that some of them are in the same kindergarten class and some of them are in the class next door.
Whatever, I'm cool with that. All these parents are between fifteen and twenty years older than me, and I guarantee you that none of them were out drinking too much the night before. Also that none of them finished their evening at three ante-meridian with take-out nachos from the delightful Mexican-Californian biker* on their front porch. Interacting with them would probably be painfully awkward for everyone involved, so I'm quite happy to be spared the increase in my head pains.
But then things start to happen. A group of boys (dark skinned, which I must point out since I live in the whitest-white-bread neighborhood ever) with toy guns appear as if by magic and start pretending to shoot each other as they chase all over the playground area. A grizzled, old white man in a USMC baseball cap sits in a camo-print camp chair on the very far edge of the playground and doesn't really watch them.
Ok, now, yeah, a bunch of eight- to fourteen-year-olds running over the toddler play area is a recipe for disaster. Some eighteen-month-old will get run over, or some four-year-old will try to climb and jump like the big kids are and break something. I get it. So the principal of my kids' school asking the boys to go play somewhere else is not really out of line.
BUT THEN. HIS WIFE. This woman has got to be the most loud-mouthed, judgmental, politically correct, condescending thing in the ENTIRE WORLD. Before the boys leave, she starts talking (at the top of her considerable voice) about the inappropriateness of guns as toys. She bullies all the other parents in her little picnic into acquiescing to her superior viewpoint. And she openly (and still loudly) wonders at parents who "dump" their kids at a playground "with weapons."
First of all, the kids can hear you, lady, and you're not exactly showing them any kind of respect. Second, the other parents in your little clique are aware of how disrespectful you're being but you've got them cowed because you treat life like middle-school and you have to be the Queen Fucking Bee. Third, the guardian of these kids, probably a foster parent or grandparent, can hear you, and I guarantee you he doesn't need your moralizing from the high-and-mighty throne of your affluence. Being well off and liberal doesn't give you the right to passive-aggressively tell everyone else in the world how to live.
It took most of my self-control not to whirl around and tell her off. But I do try not to swear in front of my own kid, and I don't think I could have accomplished the verbal tonge-lashing this woman needed without dropping at least two f-bombs. Also, yelling at people is no way to solve anything, and berating this woman loudly for berating the state of these kids loudly would have been ineffective at best. So I held my tongue. It was hard.
But then I got my sweet revenge. You see, by this time, I had tamed the hangover (we'd been at the park for close to two hours) enough to be playing with my sweet little girl. We were sitting in the sand, raking it into a pile and smoothing the sides, digging a circular hole around it, placing rocks and sticks. The whole thing was actually quite soothing, building this mountainous castle, and the feel of the sand slipping over and through our fingers was delightful. I started making a rock garden outside the castle as she kept working on the walls, and suddenly other children were there to help us.
First, the daughter and son of Mrs. Judgmental Loudmouth. Then another boy from the playgroup.
AND THEN: the youngest three boys of the gun-toting group came to see what we were up to. Two were six-year-old twins; one was an eight year old. They came and sat down with us, wondered what we were doing. I told them. They asked if they could help. I asked them to please put the guns down somewhere else and join us.
And they did. We spent a solid forty minutes, the group of us, coming sand into a pile and then another pile and building a bridge between them. We put flags on top and dug a ditch around. We created an entire rock and stick garden around the exterior, and raked the sand in into patterns that included the first letter of each kids' name.
And Mrs. Judgmental Loudmouth sat on her fat ass on a camp chair not five feet away from me, and looked slightly aghast the entire time I played with her children and the gun boys and my kid. And she couldn't say a word. Because we were all quite happy together.
When her husband came to collect the kids into the minivan to drive home, he smiled at me and said hello and thank you and I smiled back and said hello and then I turned to her and with all the courtesy I could muster I sat up straight like a steel ramrod and looked her dead in the eye and gave her my most mega-watt smile ever and doffed my cloche to her. I totally saw her teeth clench. It was a beautiful moment.
(I'm totally a bad person and I'm going to hell but what the fuck ever.)
*I am going to get that awesome old biker hippie to teach me how to make tortillas if it's the last thing I do. Serious.
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