My Daughter Was Disinvited From Her Best Friend’s Birthday Party
And other holier-than-thou Christian School antics
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If you look at my profile you’ll see that I’ve had a few ups and downs, making the antics of the sanctimonious Pharisee parents at my daughter’s private Christian school look as trivial as they truly are.
All the same, I’m sure people will enjoy hearing about the holier-than-thou upper middle class evangelical Christian school crowd in Southern California in the late 90s and early 2000s.
The summer before my daughter was set to start kindergarten, I had a wonderful time spending time with her every day: going to the park, making cookies, playing with friends.
How could this be? I’d worked since I was 13, fulltime or fulltime-plus since I was in college.
I had resigned from my job as Executive Director of Family Service Assn. in Redlands because I’d made the choice to go back to school to get my MFA in Creative Writing at Chapman University.
That was before tens of thousands of people were signing up for student loans to get that degree — but that’s a story for another day.
It was only a few days after I’d stopped working that the YWCA called for me to come get her and take her home. Permanently.
Why?
I will quote the program director, “She was licking another child’s shoe.”
There was some kind of crazy expel-the-preschooler fever going on at the YWCA that summer — my daughter was one of about 15 kids that the weird program director expelled.
But because I actually was home from work for a few weeks, I suddenly became a blessed and happy stay at home mom.
It was one of those golden times of life.
But then it was time to start her in kindergarten. Through a quirk of fate, Mike and I had bought a house so close to the orange grove where I’d grown up that Meredith was going to attend my same elementary school: Franklin Elementary.
So I went on over to the familiar schoolgrounds but 25 years had passed. Franklin was on a year-round schedule to accommodate the many children who needed to attend. There were…
