PTA Confessions 🤫
I wasn't going to post about the PTA for fear of annoying the school but, well, HERE WE ARE!
Welcome to Baby Brain, a space where I – Charlotte, hi! – write about life with three small children – Poppet (m, 6 years), Pickle (m, 4 years) and Peach (f, 2 years.) Those are not their real names. These are real stories from our days.
At the start of the school year, I lost my mind.
Here is the story of that debacle:
The TLDR being that I went to the PTA AGM with the intention of doing this:
And instead did this:
And won.
(By which I mean, I ran as an unopposed PTA president candidate in a pairing with a friend. We did it on a whim. We now hold the fate of the school’s entire event calendar in our hands. LOL, WTF, HELP, etc.)
OK, so now we’re all up to date, here is what has happened since then.
(Buckle up.)
Right. Where to begin? The month was September 2024, and I was a fresh faced school mum with a dream: to be a member of the PTA. The PTA, I thought, was the pinnacle of social success within a school, it was the starting point of life long friendships. It was not, as it actually turned out to be, a disorganised shit show that didn’t have any actual physical meetings, relied on frantic Saturday evening WhatsApp messages to function, and spent a good chunk of its time accusing everyone of not doing enough to help. Furious that my dreams had been ruined by the fray, I went along to the AGM at the start of the year, got all pass agg in my delivery of statements such as “there were no meetings,” and “with all due respect…” and then, as we’ve already covered, I left with a new title, and the renewal of said dream.
I was going to help turn the PTA around.
I was going to do it with my pal, Jane.
And our other pal, Katie.
And we had absolutely no point to start from.
The handover
The day after we’d signed our lives away, Jane and I sat down.
“Right, so what we need to do first,” I remember saying, “is put in a meeting with the former PTA president, and the head teacher. Download everything they have in their heads and get to grips with any documents they have to hand over.”
“There isn’t anything,” said Jane, who has been in this world longer than I.
“What do you mean?” I said.
“Nothing is written down,” said Jane.
“Nothing at all?” I said.
“Nothing,” said Jane.
“So how do they get anything done?” I said.
“Just… Wing it?” said Jane.
“Oh my god,” I said, my chest tightening until I passed away on the floor (not really, I’m fine.)
Jane was diplomatic as I ranted – “all due respect” being my favourite line (as it seems to be in all PTA meetings) as I lamented the lack of organisation and tried really hard not to slag off the former president who, by all accounts, worked in a feverish and frantic way and yet did actually pull things off because you know, ALL DUE RESPECT, but also, WHAT THE EVER LOVING FUCK, EVELYN, WHAT AM I SUPPOSED TO DO NOW?
