It started with the muffins. The ones I didn’t bake but bought in a panic at 7:42 a.m., then transferred to a Tupperware with enough guilt to season them. “Homemade-style,” the box said. That counts, right? My son said they tasted like regret. Fair.
I’d promised myself I wouldn’t go to the PTA meeting. I’d promised that to my child, my calendar, my last remaining nerve. But I got roped in at pickup when someone said, “We really need a strong parent voice on the healthy lunches subcommittee,” and I must’ve blacked out because suddenly I was saying yes and holding a folder.
I showed up late. The meeting had already started and the only seat left was between a woman who brought her own clipboard and a dad who kept whispering facts about seed oils. There were name tags. There was a PowerPoint. There was an audible sigh when I tried to open a fizzy water.
The agenda was six pages long. Six. Pages. We debated the difference between “nut-free” and “nut-aware” for seventeen minutes. A woman in a cardigan suggested we all follow the school’s Instagram more closely to “stay engaged,” and I laughed so suddenly I choked on a muffin crumb. No one else laughed.
Then came the real kicker. They were looking for someone to “own” the spring fundraiser. Someone “creative but dependable.” Someone with “energy.” Ten heads turned. All of them toward me. I panicked. I smiled in that way people smile before something catches fire. “I’m actually really busy with work right now,” I lied. I do not currently have a job. Unless you count wiping ketchup off walls and googling “how to get glue out of hair.”
Still, somehow—I swear I don’t know how—I left that room signed up to manage the bake sale and help design the event flier. I floated to the parking lot in a fog of people-pleasing and unresolved trauma.
In the car, I just sat there. No music. No movement. Just the hollow echo of someone who went in for thirty minutes and came out with a clipboard and an existential crisis.
My son climbed into the backseat, looked at me, and said, “Did they give you homework too?”
I don’t remember driving home. But I do remember reheating one of those sad muffins and eating it cold, over the sink, while muttering something about escaping to Idaho with a fake passport and a new identity.