Free Stop Dressing Your Six-Year-Old Like a Skank by Celia Rivenbark

Celia, will you help with the new Spanish Club after school? I know your daughter’s signed up, and we desperately need volunteers.
    ME (
snorting):
You must be desperate, toots. The only Spanish I know is Nachos Bell Grande and Jose Cuervo.
    (See, so far, so good. I’m standing firm. So why am Inow riding around with a backseat full of piñata-making materials?)
    NICE MOM (
cheerily):
Oh, that’s okay! You don’t have to speak Spanish to help out.
    (Now here’s where I should have sniffed el rat-o. She’s killing me with kindness, and I’m falling for it. See what happens next.)
    ME : You don’t? (I thought this was strange. Does this mean that I can finally perform surgery without having to attend that pesky medical school?)
    NICE MOM : Heck no! (Okay, here’s a bad sign; never trust cheery women who say Midwesterny-sounding things like “heck!” There’s just something not right about them.)
    NM : Really, we just need people to help pass out materials and maybe keep the kids from getting too loud.
    ME : Uh, okay, I guess.
    I have no idea what hit me. Was it because she was so relentlessly cheerful? Was it the thought of being able to jerk a knot in somebody else’s kid for a change?
    The next day, I reported for duty at the school cafeteria, where one of the mom-leaders came over and asked if I’d mind reading a book or two in Spanish to the kids.
    I’d been hoo-doo’ed by the chipper Midwesterner. Of course they expected me to speak Spanish.
    “No hablo español,”
I said weakly.
    “Oh, good! You’re fluent!”
    Another corralled volunteer looked at me helplessly. “I’ve had six years of French,” she said.
    “No problemo,” I assured her. “It’s probably a lot the same. Just substitute a lot of choppy sounds for that jeh-jeh-jeh-joosh stuff the French say. Oh! And be sure to add an
o
to the end of everything. I seem to remember that from high school.”
    “Okay-o,” she said gamely.
    Once the kids learned to count to twenty in Spanish, it was time to play Spanish Bingo, which is a lot like English Bingo except with a lot less cigarette smoke and black hair dye.
    I looked at my watch and realized that we’d been at it for about twelve minutos. What on earth were we going to do for the rest of the hour?
    Thank goodness, our fearless leader (“I had to learn Spanish cuz I married me a Mexican”) was on the case. Everyone would learn how to say his or her name in
espanol.
    This reminded me of Spanish 1 class when we did the same thing. While I had fantasized that my Spanish name would be exotico, it turned out to be exactly the same as it was in English.
    “But I want to be Rosalita or something,” I had whined to the beleaguered teacher.
    “Oh, yeah?” she asked. “Well, I wanna be Doris Day, but that ain’t happening either.”
    Muy
harsh.
    So, I’ve lost some of my slacker mom street cred, but not all of it. A few days after Spanish Club ended for the year, a coven of Supermoms approached me about helping with a new Brownie troop.
    “No @##$ way,” I said, feeling the smug surge of power that comes from being such a committed slack-ass. The only Brownies I had any interest in, I told them, came out of a Duncan Hines box.
    They skittered away to hassle some other victim, no doubt hissing the whole time about my “lack of commitment” and my “refusal to be a team player” and my “really wide brownie-eating ass.”
    Those Supermoms can be real bitches when you think about it.
    We could all take a lesson from men, if you ask me. Because no matter how slack a dad is, if he does the least little thing, people gush over him.
    When I went on a business trip a while back, everyone marveled at the “good job” my husband did.
    Why is that? Is it like seeing a chimpanzee play the clarinet? Sure, it’s possible, but you don’t honestly expect to ever see it in your lifetime.
    Or is it like the Arkansas rooster I remember from childhood? The one that could take your dollar bill,