I’m a Working Mom Who Feels Totally Left Out at My Child’s School

I thought the days of feeling socially awkward and left out were behind me.
I mean, I’m 36 years old. I have a family, two kids, and a real, grown-up job. I’m a confident, well-educated, funny, attractive woman — and yet, there is one place where my self-confidence plummets to levels that can only be rivaled by that time in seventh grade when I cut my own bangs and had a unibrow.

Where is this place that makes me second guess every unimportant choice I made that morning and causes me to regress to the pit of my junior high despair?

Answer: My child’s school

My second grader attends an elementary school that has high-achieving students, stellar art, music and language programs, caring teachers, and very, VERY involved parents. The latter of which, I am not.

Being a working mom (a teacher myself), my involvement looks more like reading with him in the evenings and helping build science projects on the weekends and less like show up at the actual school. My time spent in that school building is limited to parents/teacher conferences, Mother’s Day tea and special programs that occur a few times a year. I am, by no means, a fixture at the school. In fact, when I do have the ability to pick my kid from school up myself, I often feel the need to introduce myself to people I’ve already met simply because it’s been so long that they’ve forgotten who I am.

The majority of the moms at his school are wealthy, stay-at-home moms, or women who are in real estate or work with their husbands on their own business. Due to this fact, nearly all of the moms do the daily drop-offs and pickups.

For them, it’s a social hour

They roll into the parking lot decked in head to toe Lululemon and get their sweeties to class. They touch base with the teacher about the auction items they are donating or the field trip they are volunteering for and then they mosey around, visiting with their mom besties. Maybe they go grab a cup of coffee together before hitting up yoga or Orange Theory.

On the rare occasion that I have a chance to pick up my own kid from school, I find myself standing alone outside of the classroom door while the other moms chit-chat about things that are not a reality in my life. I smile, they smile. Everyone is very surface-level nice.

Occasionally, one mom will approach me with, “Hey! You’re Theo’s mom, right? How’s the working going?” Sometimes I get a sympathetic comment about how hard it must be to juggle work and mom life. I get sympathetic looks that seem to say, “Poor thing! She’s trying so hard.”

It’s easy to feel inadequate and left out in these circumstances

I sometimes find myself feeling like a less-than mom because I’m not a fixture at the school and don’t have a close relationship with my kiddo’s teacher or the other parents.

But then I remember that I, like so many other mamas, hustle all day every day to be the best wife, mom, and human I can. My kids know I love them and I show up for all the important stuff.

I do have a lot of balls in the air at once.

I am trying so hard.

And I’m doing a damn good job. So are you.