The Burbs

This weekend I had dinner with 3 women from my neighborhood. All of them are mothers already, so as you can imagine, there was a lot of talk about kids. I don’t mind that though. I love kids and it’s also interesting to get some perspective on parenting. The scary part of the discussion came when they started talking about the other mothers in our neighborhood. Now, I didn’t realize this, but apparently the new housing development across the road from us is considered “the snobby part of town”. I know that the houses are more expensive, but the area is not what I would call rich. It is certainly middle class to upper middle class, but not big money rich.

Anyway.

The mothers in the other neighborhood are all stay-at-homes who drive big SUV’s and have that really annoying flippy hairdo. Well, the women in my hood do not like the other women and vice versa. But man oh man, the venom at the table the other night! It is no different than high school. And high school was total bullshit. I thought that once you finally escaped the soul-crushing, dumbed-down, sociologically challenged environment that they call high school, it was over. Oh no my friend. You move to the suburbs and enter High School Part 2.

I asked the girls why they even cared. They said they couldn’t help it; they got sucked in to the mentality. Now, I did not learn a lot in high school, besides how to smoke drugs in a variety of ways and that teachers are broken, broken people. But I did learn one very important lesson:

If you don’t care what they think of you, they have no power. And from this knowledge I went on to being a confidant, happy and well-adjusted adult (well, most of the time anyway).

Suffice it to say, the suburbs are ridiculous. The soccer moms, ever clad in yoga wear or those matching plastic jacket-pant combinations that make them look “sporty”, tooling around in cars that are too big for them, dropping the kids off at school or leaving them with the nanny to go get their hair done or have their stretch marks lasered off. The men who, as soon as the temperature hits above 8 degrees, are out washing their cars and cracking their first beers just after 1pm. They obsess about the cleanliness of their cars and the greenness of their lawns. The bratty children that ride their bikes on your lawn and scribble swear words in chalk on your fence simply because you are the corner lot. I could go on, but I am boring myself.

I take solace in the fact that I am not an idiot, that I have a good marriage and that I do have some female friends who share the same interests as me and aren’t whiny and vapid. At least I have that.

Office Girl.