Many of the moms at my daughter's school have started asking what we're thinking about for seventh grade. My daughter just finished second.
Some of them have spent the past year on it: touring, applying, positioning. That's a year of an actual eleven-year-old's actual life spent securing the future of a twelve-year-old who doesn't exist yet. The question always arrives as the friendliest possible small talk, and it's also a quiet check. Are you on the treadmill too? Here, let me give you a hand up.
I usually make a joke, something about not being sure there'll be a world by then. It lands. We share enough politics for gallows humor. But under the joke, if I'm honest, is something less generous. Something closer to: what is wrong with all of you? What the hell happened?
It took me a while to notice that wasn't a rhetorical question. It has an actual answer, and I know it, because it happened to me.
These aren't stupid people. They're frightened, and it's the most respectable fear there is: the world is a competition, scarce and getting scarcer, and if you don't set your kid up to win it now, you've failed them in the one way a parent isn't allowed to fail. That fear is too big to look at head-on, and there's nowhere to put your hands. An application gives you somewhere. So you fill out the application.
I carried that fear for years. The ground could give way at any moment. You have to stay ready. Loving someone means protecting them from a world that's coming for them. It lived in my shoulders. I set most of it down slowly, and not through any cleverness of mine. So when I stand at pickup and hear about admissions essays, I'm not outside it, baffled. I'm a few steps down the same road, looking back at people I like who are still carrying what I used to carry.
I'm still a little angry. Not at them, though. I'm angry at whatever convinced a whole school's worth of kind, loving parents to spend their kids' real childhoods farming imaginary futures. The moms just got handed the same fear I did.
And they're the ones I'd most like to reach. The only argument I've got is my daughter: a kid growing up mostly unfrightened and present, turning into whoever she turns out to be, with a parent who's letting her. People notice. Every so often, one of them asks how.
That's the only door there is.