Mom drama amplifies class list anxiety

The phone calls started last Tuesday.
“Do you know who your boys’ teachers are yet?”
“No, I didn’t know the lists were ready,” I said, suddenly feeling very much out of the loop.
My friend took a deep breath. “Well,” she said, “Stephanie’s mom called and said she has Mrs. Swanson, which means she already called her students yesterday, so we didn’t get her. And Mrs. Evans apparently mailed her kids a letter, so you didn’t get her.”
This friend and I are working on an arranged marriage between one of her girls and one of my twin boys, so we hoped that somehow they’d end up in the same class every year through high school.
Five minutes after we hung up, the phone rang again. It was Stephanie’s mom.
“Hey, do the boys know whose class they’re in yet?”
Just like that, I got caught up in a frenzy of conjecture. The boys begged me to do a daily fly-by at school to see if the lists had been taped up outside. I began to feel like a stage mom waiting to see if my kid got a callback to an audition.
If you want some late-summer excitement, forget the presidential race or the Olympics. Early August has its own unique fervor because this is when the elementary class lists are posted.
All over the county, friends are calling friends. Moms check with each other at church and the grocery store. Though dads somehow seem to stay out of it, everyone else wants to know who’s in their class.
For about a week, the anticipation was almost unbearable. Oh, and the boys were excited, too. After those first phone calls, my house was buzzing. Both my 8-year-olds hovered in a far corner, speculating about which teachers they would have.
Trying not to be too much of a geek about it, I listened a lot and asked a few judicious questions about the process.
Although they are young, each year they’ve had an idea of which teacher they want. From what I can tell, at this age it’s based on school bus chatter about which teachers smile a lot as they retrieve their classes from the cafeteria or which ones play along during field day.
The boys called their friends to fill in the blanks on the class roster. Finally, my son’s future father-in-law cut to the chase, drove down to the school and simply asked who was where. What a concept. Once again, all that mom drama for naught.
Sadly, it turns out my boy and his girl are separated this year, which means we’ll have to work a bit harder to keep up the arranged marriage.

Originally published in The Tennessean 8/04.