I Miss You When I Blink: Essays(34)

I have, at least, grown out of needing to see my name on an invitation. It helps that I’m at a different stage in my life and in my career. My name is visible in lots of places now; I no longer need evidence of it in that way. But it’s also true that my final major volunteer role just about did me in. So I guess I quit for some right reasons, and I quit for some wrong reasons, too. Both are correct, as is the fact that I’ll never forget that last big volunteer gig: chairing the elementary school fundraiser.



* * *



It began with a phone call. Beware this call, the one from the acquaintance at your child’s school who “just wants to bounce an idea off you.”

Letting an idea be bounced off myself is how I ended up in charge of the whole thing. Not part of it, not one committee, but the entire one-hundred-person team of volunteers. And this was no pumpkin patch; it was an art sale that was expected to move thousands and thousands of dollars’ worth of paintings, statues, and knick-knacks in order to finance teacher bonus funds, field trips, and classroom improvements. Heading up this organization was the kind of semi-full-time job that required apprenticing for a year beforehand in order to learn how it all works.

I got the call from the school’s fundraising director while I was at home recuperating from dental surgery. I could barely form words, my mouth was so packed with gauze. She said, “I know you can’t talk right now, so I’ll talk, and then after we hang up, you can email me to let me know you’ll do it.” Blood and saliva oozed from the corners of my numb lips as I listened.

“You’re so good at motivating people,” she said. “You’re the most organized room mom at school—everyone says so.”

Did everyone say so? Really? My ears perked up. I looked around my den, where broken crayons, puzzle pieces, and plastic doll limbs littered the floor, nestled among airy wads of shed dog hair.

It’s a bit of a ruse, this seduction. It’s like that trick men play on women sometimes where they say, “It’s just that you’re so good at laundry. I couldn’t possibly do it as well as you can.” That’s bullshit. Anybody can learn to fold a shirt. Paying someone a compliment is just a way to psych them into doing something. And it definitely takes a bit of psychological trickery to make someone believe they want to take on a role like this.

Because it is a hard job—it really is. In this kind of gig, there aren’t just committee meetings; there are subcommittee meetings and kickoff meetings and budgeting meetings. And preparing for each one requires forty-five trillion emails and phone calls and texts. I learned all this after I said yes—which, of course, I did. I fell for it, big-time.

There are also “staffing” meetings, where you have to decide which volunteers will be slotted into which positions. Who will be communications chair? Who can handle the finances? Who will oversee all the sales shifts at the event?

And here’s the thing: Unlike professional staff, volunteer “staff” can’t be fired, because they were never actually hired in the first place. In some ways, this is a positive thing. Most of the parents who gave their time and talents during the years I spent on this effort did so with the most generous of spirits, tirelessly showing up in suits and sweatpants and surgical scrubs and jeans to make phone calls and set up booths and smile at visitors. To this day, I love many of the wonderful friends I made during that time in the volunteer trenches. When something went wrong—say a batch of paintings arrived for sale without wires or hooks to hang them—these blessed souls showed up with drills and wire. When spirits flagged, they brought brownies and tea. They cheered each other on and thanked each other for help and made fundraising magic out of thin air. For the most part.

But you know how it is. There’s always one or two. Or five. Or twelve.

There’s always that volunteer who doesn’t listen to instructions and therefore doesn’t know you can’t stack wet paintings one upon the other. There’s always one who feeds off drama, calling separate “debriefing” sessions after larger gatherings so she can report on which fellow volunteers aren’t pulling their weight and who’s wearing inappropriately short skirts to meetings and, by the way, you-know-who’s kid got kicked off the fencing team and don’t you want to know why?

There’s always one who breaks the heel of her shoe while working a single two-hour shift that you had to beg her to take so you wouldn’t be short-staffed. She’s the one who gets on Facebook and tells her five thousand friends that she’ll never volunteer again because the event you just spent two years of your life planning is nothing but a nasty, dangerous yard sale. It’s a colossal waste of time, she says, this event that you’ve poured your time into, that has filled your inbox to the point that you’ve long since abandoned your zero-unread-messages policy, that has required so many evenings of spreadsheets and slides and note cards that you haven’t made dinner for your family more than once a week in over four months. This thing you’ve stuck with because you said you’d finish it and because sometimes it’s kind of fun and because, mostly, it will be good for the teachers, and you’re so, so grateful for teachers. What a shit show, the lady with the broken heel says, what an amateur hour. Everyone should just skip it, she tells them.

“I’m so sorry you broke your shoe,” you have to say when you call her, which you have to do. “I know it’s a . . . special shoe . . . to you.” You swallow, willing yourself to keep your composure. “Would you mind, though, just as a personal favor, maybe taking that Facebook post down? You’re absolutely right, of course, it’s a travesty that your footwear was unsafe while on school grounds. But we don’t want to upset any of our sponsors, you understand.”