Working Mom Meets PTO – and Survives | The Working Mommy's Manual

I am very anti this whole “working mom vs. stay at home mom” conspiracy. And when I meet the mean eighth-grade-girl who thought it up I’m going to thank her for single-handedly setting women back about a century. And by thanking I mean slapping. But as much as I like joining hands with my stay-at-home-sistas I have to confess that there is one frontier I’ve always regarded as their territory alone: the PTO. Upon deep self-examination it might have more than a little to do with me not wanting to get sucked into bake sale fundraisers – so basically my own laziness. And I also must confess that I’ve always thought that the kind of moms who join PTO are probably the kind of gals who would make fun of my lame attempts to be crafty and be able to point out the many ways I am damaging my kids by working. Can you say hypocrite?

My reasons for avoiding the PTO are even further undercut as one of my best friends was the PTO president two years in a row. And she is one of the coolest chicks i know. in my defense I always thought she was different. At least that’s what I told myself.

And last on my list of reasons why I avoided the PTO like a plane full of Ebola patients is I really felt those gals had it all under control. All this working mom was going to do was screw up what women like them have been handling since the dawn of organized education.

So with my staggering list of justifications for avoiding the PTO it is really pretty astonishing, even to myself, even now that I ended up going to my very first PTO meeting last week. And it was awesome.

Okay, first of all the women were not the Stepford-Wife version of Heathers that I had imagined in my head. They were hilarious and warm and a ton of fun. But guess what I found out? The money those gals raise from the daddy-daughter dance, and magazine sales, and selling spirit-wear, and, and, and…pay for things like our freaking school library! That’s right there would be no flipping library in our school if these women didn’t volunteer their time to do things that no one else wants to deal with. They also pay for lunch and recess monitors and about a dozen other things without which a school just wouldn’t be a school. I literally lost count because I was so overwhelmed with all this work they do FOR MY KID! Holy crap did I feel like an ingrate!

And in yet another Homer Simpsonesque “Doh!” moment, I found out that had taken thirty seconds out of my life and bothered to “like” the elementary school PTO’s Facebook page I would have known all more this and more. Totally bad-mom-moment – yet none of the PTO sneered or rolled their eyes at my total apathy and idiocy.

So what was the take away? What was my learning moment? It’s that these women are great and they are doing really important things that our kids need! And here’s the action items, my friends, they need us. They don’t need us to take on some overwhelming project. They need us to help out with our skill set when and where we can. So for instance, I am not afraid to ask and I don’t take no for an answer. So I’m going to help drive our parents social media connectivity to our school. It might involve me crashing a school function or two with an iPad and not leaving until every parent at our elementary school I has friended our Facebook page but this girl loves a challenge!

So go to your next PTO meeting and get involved. We can this do this! We can make our schools better in our own way! And if you need help finding out when the next meeting is just friend your school’s Facebook page.

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