‘Hell Is Other Parents’ echoes ‘No Exit’ theme

Can time spent in a Mommy and Me class really be likened to a stint in the depths of h-e-double-hockey-sticks? To reflect on whether the comparison holds true, consider the insights shared in the new book “Hell Is Other Parents: And Other Tales of Maternal Combustion” by Deborah Copaken Kogan. Here is an excerpt.  

I read “No Exit,” Sartre’s famous existentialist play, in my early 20s, and I remember thinking at the time that it was interesting on a conceptual level but not on a literal one. Hell might very well be other people, okay, sure, but under what far-fetched conditions would anyone ever actually be trapped forever in the company of strangers with no sleep or means of escape?

Then I became a parent.

And I realized that anyone who defines hell as being stuck for eternity with an adulterous deserter, a lesbian sadist, and a narcissistic baby-murderer has never spent an hour at a Mommy and Me class. Or killed a Saturday afternoon in the children’s shoe store in my neighborhood, with its sign-up sheet 30 kids deep and shoe projectiles flying across the aisles. Or been forced into any seemingly innocuous but secretly agenda-laden interaction with the parent of your child’s peer.

What would Sartre have made of the Mommy and Me mother who angrily cupped her hands over her toddler’s ears the minute my then-2-year-old son, pointing to a cardboard cutout of Cookie Monster, identified him thus? “Sam’s never eaten a cookie!” yell-whispered this mother, a former lawyer who ran her spotless home like a military outpost, battling daily assaults against sugar.

What kind of pungent riposte would Sartre have invented to counterbalance the Mommy and Me teacher, a mother herself, who said to the one other working mother in the class — that would be me — “It’s really a shame you have to work. Jacob seems so sad the days you’re not here.”

Or to this line, delivered many years ago by a father at my son’s preschool, who, upon being called at home one particularly snowy evening in the obligatory parent phone chain, replied, “You call the next person on the list and tell them there’s a snow day tomorrow. I’m busy.”

Is it just me?
I began to wonder if it was just me until I started asking around and realized I wasn’t alone in my inferno. There was the mother in the children’s shoe store who yelled at my friend Esther’s 3-year-old daughter for licking a pair of boots. When Esther ran over to apologize, explaining that her daughter was a special-needs child, the woman turned to her and said, with untrammeled venom, “But those were the last pair!”

There was the capitalist father who scolded our then-12-year-old, a highly sensitive boy who’d just purchased and proudly donned an orange Che Guevara T-shirt, for supporting a socialist: “You know,” he said, “Che was a sadist.” There were the parents in our son’s preschool who fired their German au pair for cooking store-bought pasta instead of making it from scratch. This actually turned out to be a boon for us, since we hired the young fraulein after our own nanny was poached, in the children’s section of our local Barnes & Noble, by a corporate lawyer who could not understand why I lost my temper when she called our home afterward for a reference.

Then there was ... well, let’s call her Inez, in honor of “No Exit.” Inez is a parent at my daughter’s school, the kind of woman without whom urban public schools like ours would not survive. She works tirelessly on school committees, volunteers every year as a class parent, chaperones field trips, spends her lunch hours patrolling the cafeteria, and uses whatever spare time she has left to write and send out e-mails such as “trip sign-up — please check my list!!” and “Mr. [redacted] needs paper towels and tissues ASAP!!!” She is the parent who sent out the e-mail headed: “tennis ball noise abatement project,” asking for volunteers to help score tennis balls with a knife, so that they might be placed under the legs of each chair in the school, thus eliminating, once and for all, the sound of scraping.

I was willing to overlook Inez’s eccentricities, exclamation points, and ball-stabbing zeal not only because I understood her value to the school community, but also because our daughters were best friends. In fact, I took pride in my ability to get along with Inez, despite the gulf between our parenting styles, and I believed, deep down, she felt the same way about me. She might not have condoned the fact that my children watch PG-13 movies or that I shuttle them around the city on a Vespa, but she seemed to be willing to let her prejudices drop, like so many pierced tennis balls, for the sake of our daughters’ friendship.

Then one night my husband and I arrived home late from seeing a movie and found a note my daughter Sasha, then 9 years old, had left on the dining room table: “Urgent. Call Inez as soon as you get home. She said it doesn’t matter what time.” It was past 11 o’clock when we read this, but I did as instructed, wondering what could be so urgent that it would require our immediate response.

“Hi, Inez,” I said, when she picked up the phone. “What’s wrong?”

“What’s wrong,” she said, sounding livid, “is that someone, and I’m not sure who, told my daughter she had sex with a lemming.”

“Really?” I said, trying to let that particular abutment of words — sex, lemming — sink in without laughing.

“Yes really,” she said, not amused, explaining that she’d both e-mailed the school and called every parent of our daughters’ friends — nine households in all — to get to the bottom of it. She wanted me to confront my daughter, immediately if possible, to find out what, if anything, Sasha knew about the incident. She was also concerned that our daughters had started hanging out with the kind of kids who were kicking dodgeballs onto the roof of the school: the kind of kids, she’d warned her daughter, who might one day end up doing drugs. But the whole dodgeball affair paled in comparison to the one about sex with a lemming.

Most things, I thought, paled in comparison to sex with a lemming, even for lemmings, but I kept my mouth shut. “Well, I appreciate your bringing all this to my attention,” I said, “but Sasha’s asleep right now,” thinking, as I said it, that I should have been too, “and I don’t really want to wake her up.” I was also confused: how could Inez’s daughter not have known which of her friends had told her she’d had sex with a lemming? “My son likes to say the word lemming,” I said — and really, I thought, when you get right down to it, who doesn’t? — “so I wouldn’t be surprised if it were Sasha. But the sex part gives me pause. Anyway, I’ll let you know what I find out tomorrow.”

A scholastic scandal
The next morning, I woke Sasha and brought her into my bed for a snuggle and a little chat. “Sasha,” I said, “did you tell Alice that she had sex with a lemming?” It should be noted that Alice, (not her real name), is one of those children teachers dream about having in their classrooms and parents exult over having in their homes. She is sensitive, kind, well behaved, bookish, and hyperintelligent, countering an innate shyness — think Beth from “Little Women” minus the scarlet fever — with a puppylike eagerness to please.

Sasha rolled her eyes. “No,” she said, as if that were the most absurd question anyone had ever asked. “I didn’t tell her she had sex with a lemming. I told her she humped a lemming.”

“Um, Sasha?” I said, trying to keep a straight face. “Do you know what humped means?”

“No,” she said, looking worried.

“It means to have sex,” I said.

“Uh-oh,” said my daughter. The only disciplinary problem we’d ever had with Sasha up to that point was when she was 3 years old, and her father and I were called in to speak with the head of her preschool, who forbade us from making playdates with boys. When we asked why — Sasha’s best friends, at that time, were all boys — the headmistress explained, gravely, that our daughter had been taking the boys from her class into the dress-up area, tying them up with a jump rope, and turning them into her slaves. Willingly, she added, but still.

“Yeah, uh-oh,” I said. “You know it’s wrong to say something like that to your friend, right?”

Sasha looked crestfallen, tears silently sliding down her cheeks. “Yes,” she said, “but ...”

“But what?”

“But she called me a goody-good again, so I —”

“That’s no excuse,” I said, cutting her off. “I told you two wrongs don’t make a right.” During the prior month, Sasha had been complaining that Alice kept calling her a “goody-good” during lunch. When she asked my advice on how to deal with it, I told her that the next time her friend — or anyone else — resorted to name-calling, she should simply get up from the table and move seats.

“Just listen to me!” said Sasha, the tears falling faster now. “After she called me a goody-good, I moved to a different table, just like you said, but then Alice stopped talking to me, so I was trying to make her laugh when we were lined up for recess by telling her jokes, so she’d be my friend again. That’s why I said, you know, the thing about the lemmings. To make her laugh.”

“Oh,” I said, wondering when copulating rodents had replaced knock-knock jokes in my daughter’s arsenal of zingers. “Unfortunately, however, here’s the deal: Inez has called every one of your friends’ parents to tell them about this.” I listed all the families, one by one. “Plus she e-mailed your teacher and the principal.”

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“What?!” Sasha blanched. Then she broke down sobbing. “That’s it!” she bawled. “I’m never going back to school again!” She buried her nose in my neck and left it there, leaking, for several long minutes. Then she popped her head back into the shoulderless world and yelled, “Why did Inez call all the other parents? This was between me and Alice!”

“I don’t know,” I said. “That’s the part that doesn’t really make sense to me either.” I held her shaking body to me and tried to calm her down.

An hour later, with her equally apoplectic infant brother in tow, I walked — okay, pulled — Sasha the 12 blocks south to her school. When we arrived, she refused to go up to her classroom. “Look,” I said. “Regardless of what happened, you still have to go to school.”

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