I've probably bitched about it in this space, but when Primera was a preschooler, I had her at a "typical" preschooler from ages two-three, then when she was three-four she went 1/2 day at the typical preschool and 1/2 day at a therapeutic program. That first year was a really bad year: my mother's health started going downhill midyear, and then by the end of the school year it was apparent that she was really, really ill, and indeed she died in midsummer. So all during that year I was confronting the extent of my kid's disability and thinking, "Well, I can't find out my kid is autistic and my mom is dying all in the same year, can I?" That just seemed like an unusual amount of Shit to Hit the Fan in one year, especially in what had seemed a pretty ordinary life (I had not yet learned that no one gets out untouched).

Anywho. So we were new back in town, and my kid started the year out just getting services, and then it turns out she needed SEIT services (not German for to be; stands for Special Education Itinerant Teacher). At this school were a bunch of mothers who were mostly younger and thinner than I. They uniformly ignored me. They communicated on some frequency I could not hear. They came to Primera's birthday party and snubbed me. Even my mother, a notably charitable person, commented stiffly that they weren't too friendly. I spent most of the rest of the year ignoring and getting ignored as we waited for our kids to be picked up. I would stand in the back, my son in a baby stroller, staring at the walls. A lot of the time the teacher would need to talk to me because of something that had happened in class.

Anyway, the snubbing and the stares hurt at the time, enough that I'm still very angry all these years later. And just today, whom should I see but the High Priestess of them all, the Queen Bee ringleader, the center of the Gold & Meyer morning bagel kaffeeklatsch that I was of course never ever invited to, at the local amusement park. I had an amazingly strong wave of hate. Still. You'd think I'd get over it, but no.