My daughter was happy when I told her I'm volunteering in her classroom as part of the Meet the Artist program, giving a short history lesson on a famous artist before the students do a project inspired by them. Afterward she said, “You better wear make up.”
“How rude,” I replied, but the morning of, I put on “my face,” as my Grandma would say. My Grandma also said, “This winter’s gonna be harsh, I know because my hair is growing faster than usual.”
My Grandma made sense to me. It didn’t make sense to me that after I signed up to chaperone my daughter’s fifth grade field trip to The Redwoods, I wasn’t assigned her as a student to look after. The trip was two nights and three days, and chaperones watched over six kids day-and-night, except for a one hour break each afternoon. The day before we left on the trip, I told everyone not to be surprised if the next time they saw me I have a giant coldsore, and I packed a small suitcase with clothes and two boxes of nicotine gum.
When we arrived at camp, I attended the chaperone meeting, listening to our responsibilities, and unhearing the rule, “No gum allowed.”
I’m not a disciplinarian, and three days was just enough time for the girls to not throw a coup, and take over the cabin. I let them stay up past the bedtime, and after they found spider eggs under a bunk bed, I had to let them share beds, since they refused to sleep on the “bug bed.” By the end of the trip, I was just your average House Mom, sitting with my book in front of me, telling the girls to go to the playground, as I ferociously chewed gum.
The girls and I grew a bond because of the confidence building activities. We climbed a vertical obstacle course. After living my entire life unable to do the monkey bars, I climbed a ninety foot wall made of ladders, tires and ropes. The wildest of the activities was a rope swing, where I was hoisted up to the top of a redwood in a harness, and then let go of a rope, so I free fell, and swung back and forth, screaming in fear, and relief that the most savage camel toe of my life didn’t split me down the middle.
I realized why I couldn’t chaperone my daughter, she wouldn’t get the most out of the confidence-building exercises. Maybe it’s peer pressure, but through watching other people, courage builds up. I saw her when everyone met in the cafeteria. She’d give me a hug before saying, “I have to go to my group, and you aren’t supposed to chew gum!”
The day we left though, my daughter said more kindly, “Fuck the bus,” and she rode home with me. We listened to Kelly Clarkson and ate candy, and I noticed her hair growth in the three days was remarkable.
The next week the kids went to their dad’s and my boyfriend, whose been traveling all month, and I had a rare night together. We celebrated, and instead of eating the usual gummy, I decided to smoke from his vape pen. The gummy is perfect for me, I don’t know the chemistry but the strain works well; I watch TV with tunnel vision, laughing my ass off. Shortly after I hit this vape pen, I could tell that it is not the strain that gels with my body, or mind really.
We were watching Hulu, and every commercial was for pharmaceuticals to treat depression, or a depiction of society as Utopian, full of confident and happy people enjoying their buffalo wings or whatever. A commercial for cancer treatment medication sent me over the edge. The actress wasn’t wearing a scarf on her bald head, she was a healthy looking person. So I convinced myself our world is doomed, everyone is getting cancer because of micro plastics and electronics, and there's collective sadness from an inability to create the perceived euphoric feelings of chopping it up at chain restaurant happy hours.
I did what any sensible person would do, I smoked from the same vape pen the next night! This time I spent hours thinking about the overwhelming endorsement of censorship. The problem with abortion talking points being minimized to women’s rights, when it is an intersectional debate concerning race, class, capitalism, socio-economics and circling back to the great pharmaceutical giants working as our nation's chaperones.
I’ll vote on behalf of my women idols, but still, why doesn’t anyone talk about the sale of fetuses for science, and how abortions are good for business. It is quite interesting, especially since stem cell therapy isn't accessible to people who don’t have hundreds of thousands of dollars to spend. Ethics focuses on definition of life, rather than the selling of discarded fetus tissue. We're already in a preliminary Gattaca, evident by the nonexistent “special-ed” at my daughter’s school, and now we’ve got a Soylent Green medical industry on the rise.
The next night, I barfed out all this fear to my boyfriend. After a ten minute incessant speech, I looked at him like he should have the answers. Then I summed up all my feelings by saying, “I just don’t think I can hit that white vape pen anymore. It’s no good for my brain.”
The next day I left for a screenwriting conference, and the minute, really within one minute, I entered my hotel room I started my period. Now it made sense why I googled, “How do I know if I’m schizophrenic” that morning.
This week I received letters from all the girls I chaperoned on the field trip. They were so sweet, and reminded me how everyone is just a little weirdo in a meat suit. My daughter was very pleased when she said, “Everyone says you’re the best chaperone because you let your girls stay up late. And I heard you wiped up four giant spider eggs, and threw them in the dumpster outside.”
The last part made me cringe, and defensively I said, “I didn’t want to kill them, but as the chaperone, I felt like I had to.”
