Two Saturdays ago was “picture day” at my four-year-old’s soccer lesson, which takes place in the YMCA near our house.
I’ve been in the US for six years now, but only recently have I truly started to partake in the “mom” culture I’ve heard so much about (yes, fine, on TikTok): the four-year-old is in soccer and swimming lessons; as soon as we see a 20-degree forecast we plan a trip to the local playground (which happens to be on the grounds of the local primary school); I’m in a whole gaggle of moms groups on Facebook, ostensibly to make friends but, really, just to argue with people about vaccines and giving ivermectin to their toddlers to help with eczema (my POV, for what it’s worth: please do, and please don’t, respectively).
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“Picture day” seems to be a thing in every children’s activity; our 11-year-old has a picture day with his baseball team, another for soccer, a third at school. Our 13-year-old has picture day with his track team, one with marching band, another at school. It’s free to have the pictures taken, but of course then you pay to get the prints, which most Americans seem to frame and hang on the wall lining their staircases.
We have dozens of these photographs at home. They live in our document file. Sometimes I’ll put one on the fridge, but only for a few weeks, until the kitchen clutter gets on top of me and the pictures must be relegated to the file.
I blame my parents for this. They were never ones for displaying photographs of us in the house, and somehow this has carried on through me. I love hanging art on the walls, but family photos feel cringe, somehow.
As for the professional photoshoots beloved by Americans?! I could NEVER. (I mean… could I never? I kind of want to, but I fear the judgment of my Irish friends. It feels like that might be the nail in the coffin of my Irishness. “She’s gone full American now,” I can imagine my mother telling the woman in the local shop.)
Anyway. Picture day for soccer. We arrive at the Y, having entirely forgotten it’s picture day – this happened at school, too, and I sent him off with his hair sticking up in 1,000 directions, wearing a stained T-shirt (all T-shirts are stained, and I refuse to just throw them out because that seems so wasteful, although things have improved since I started using the magic stain spray, truly).
We go to the court where, thankfully, someone tells me that it’s picture day. We run back to the front of the building. I try to fix his T-shirt, his hair. I must resign myself to the fact that he’s wearing striped shorts and unicorn rainbow shin guards. Nothing can be done about this now.
Once his photo has been taken – I urge him to say “poop!” to the photographer in an attempt to elicit a semi-natural smile, rather than the gurning grimace he’d been doing before that – we go back to the court and wait for the rest of the team. I get him out a soccer ball and he runs back and forth with it. I worry he’s going to exhaust himself before practice even starts (this worry was entirely founded).
We’re there about five minutes, again, wondering, where is everyone else?! when his coach comes through the doors to tell us that they’re taking the team picture now, and everyone’s waiting for us.
How did everyone else know this? I ask myself, when we walk back through the Y, to the room where they’re taking the pictures. Why didn’t I know? What other things am I doing wrong, missing, not knowing? And how will I know that I don’t know?!
My sister has had a lot of these moments with her kids, too. When she asked why her son hadn’t been selected for an advanced maths (math, in America) class when – and this was not just a mother’s bias showing, really – he had displayed a great aptitude for maths, for example.
It turns out that, unlike in Ireland, where you’re streamed into, for example, higher level maths – although you can push for your kids to do “higher” level, rather than “ordinary”, or vice versa, if you feel that it’s in their best interests – here you have to opt in for your child to take advanced maths.
How was she to know that? She didn’t even know that she didn’t know!
There’s a lot, particularly about the school system here, that I don’t understand, although I am starting to learn certain aspects, by osmosis.
PE is not a mandatory weekly class; in some semesters, kids will have gym once a week, and then in the next they won’t have it at all. In middle school, they do need to complete a “gym” module; if they don’t (say, because they don’t select “gym” as one of their subjects), they can make it up by doing a sport during the summer months, or outside of school hours. I don’t think all sports qualify; I think they need to be linked to school, somehow.
Again, I don’t really know.
I have American friends, obviously, that I can ask for advice and information on these systems and structures that I’ve never experienced, and know nothing about.
I recently had a conversation with a friend whose 16-year-old daughter is going to graduate high school with a certain number of college credits, already under her belt. “How does this work?” I asked her. She explained, but I think I’ll need to ask again, and take notes next time.
Already having college credits when you graduate high school seems crazy to me. Let the kids be kids! Free time is important! (Does this attitude make me boomer?! I wonder) But in a country where college costs thousands of dollars per semester, you can cut down the required number of semesters to complete your college course by already having credits in hand.
I can ask my friends about this, because I know about it now – but what about the things I don’t know that I don’t know? How will I know to ask about those?!
Sometimes my frustration, the sense of being a fish out of water, the strongly held suspicion that I will never feel at home here, that I will never know all of the things I want to know, manifests as anger. Anger with my husband, specifically.
He is American. He should know all of these things (I’m sure he’d say he does). Moreover, he should know that I don’t know them, and he should tell me. But only when I’m in the mood to be lectured to, and only things I actually don’t know, not things he just thinks I don’t know, when I do, which would be insulting.
I accept that this is a fine line to tread.
Obviously, if he just took on the mental and emotional load of doing all of the kids’ stuff, I wouldn’t have to worry about any of it. I wouldn’t be wondering what academic programs I don’t know about, or what group pictures I didn’t realise were being taken.
I wouldn’t be Googling “can I bring a dog to an elementary school playground” (the answer is no) or where I can go to post a package, if my new mailbox isn’t big enough to put it in (truly a travesty); in our new housing estate, we have these tiny little lockboxes, instead of a traditional mailbox, which means that anything even remotely chunky we need to post has to be taken to, I’ve learned, a blue USPS postbox, something I had truly never noticed existing before this week.
Like I said, you don’t know what you don’t know – and, more specifically, you don’t know what you’ve never needed to know.
other things I didn’t know I didn’t know include…
* that kids recite the Pledge of Allegiance every single day at school. With hands on hearts, facing a flag.
* that you need to bring your ID everywhere with you. I mean, I knew you should probably have your drivers’ license on hand while driving, but going to an urgent care when I thought I had a concussion, only to be sent home for my ID was… unexpected.
* CHEQUES. (checks) Yes, they’re still using cheques here, and you’ll need to have them on hand to pay for the most random things. (Our lawn treatment company, for example, didn’t accept card, so the choice was to post them a cheque or to drive to their office with cash.)
* there are rules about how long your grass can be, and in certain areas you can be fined for letting it get too long (or too weedy).
I’m sure there are more. (That’s kind of the point.)
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