Working Title in Progress

Chapter One

Cate walked in the front door of Bellstower preschool holding tightly to the hand of her four year old daughter. She presented an exterior that was calm and clipped, her eyes focused laser-like on the unfolding scene before her. Inside, however, she was raging. What am I doing here? I don’t belong. We don’t belong she thought. She looked dwn at her daughter Aislinn, saw her quietly skeptical demeanor and wondered how she would fare.

The scene laid out before Cate was one of coming and going, chatter and utter chaos. Drop-off for the afternoon preschool session was always like this. Parents, mostly mothers, many toting younger siblings arriving to drop-off a single child yet having to leave with one or two more in tow. Cate thought about this. At least she had three hours of freedom after she dropped Aislinn off. Her eldest child Laken, was in second grade and therefore wouldn’t return home until thirty minutes after Aislinn was picked up. Cate looked around again and sighed audibly. This was the apex of suburban motherhood. All these women who may or may not have given up careers to procreate several times over  and then stay home to raise their charges. Most of them relied on husbands who made decent salaries and could rather easily support a wife and several children. These women primarily drove oversize SUVs or midlife cop-out mini vans with all the bells and whistles intact. Cate often wondered how she ended up her, a veritable fish out of water. How did she arrive at this place? It was nothing she ever aspired to yet she knew that life had a way of taking you by the hand and leading you along when you didn’t take the time to stand up and state what it was that you wanted, clearly, decisively. Now that so much time had gone by she wasn’t sure what she wanted anymore. She only knew that it wasn’t this.

She believed deep down that she was had one-up on these women who spent all day, every day running, running from store to store, play date to play date, doctor’s appointment to doctor’s appointment, organized activity, to birthday party and then back again. Filling each child’s plate to heaping full of one activity or another but really running the whole times from themselves because they had to feel empty, empty, and useless and to afraid the face the fact that one day they were going to die and all this “stuff” would mean nothing. Their children would grow to have their own lives, some successful, some not but not one of them having been molded into anything positive from all this “fluff”. Filler, is what she liked to call it.

Oh dear God, there had to be something more. . .