It’s time for Passover over at The Imperfect Parent.

The tracks in our school district zig zag through and around social stature and socio-economics. And while I was busy this weekend driving over those bumpy tracks again and again to take my daughter to friends’ houses, I realized that I have preconceived notions and thoughts about people based on where and how they live.

Fancy that. I’m prejudiced.

Yesterday my daughter had a prearranged afterschool playdate. Do you call it that in 6th grade? Anyway, I’d met her friend a couple of times at school events, and she was polite and sweet. I spoke to the mother on the phone, and gave my permission for her to pick up my daughter along with her own. And I looked up their address online and through the magic of map.quest I figured out exactly where they lived in our town.

Fancy schmancy address.

I went last night, right on time, to pick up my daughter. I drove up the winding road to #5, the biggest house on the block (which isn’t always a great idea from a real estate standpoint). Inside I was greeted by a soaring foyer and I could see extensive artwork on the walls far in front of me. My daughter and her friend and another girl bounded up to me with hugs and giggles. I met the impeccably dressed mother, sweet older sister and rambunctuous little brother in his underwear. And when my daughter looked at me with feigned adoration and asked if she could stay the night, I said ok. I left feeling happy that she’d made another new friend among the rigors of junior high adjustments. I felt safe that she would be happy, and happy that she would be safe.

Did I mention this family was black?

This afternoon, after my daughter had been home from her sleepover about five hours, another friend called to invite her over. This friend had spent the night here before, so I knew her, and I also knew the invitation to visit would be coming in reciprocity. So we got the address. Equal distance as the other friend, in the other direction. We drove a mere six or seven minutes and turned down a street that looked beaten up on one side and industrial on the other. We knocked on the door and her bubbly friend, today with pink streaks in her hair, answered the door with a big smile. She called to her mom, who poked her head out and said hello and thanked me for bringing my daughter over. I said “have fun”, we’d already arranged her pick-up time, and I went back to my car, heart pounding. She didn’t invite me in or embrace me with a smile. She gave no reassuring glance or pay too much mind to my daughter entering her house. I wondered what my daughter would find when she ventured beyond the doorway. Certainly not two living rooms and a butler like the night before, but hopefully a kind and loving family home where she will have a lot of fun with her friend - a girl who in my home was polite and funny, sweet and kind. I can only assume that is a reflection of her upbringing. Yet, I wished I had been able to get a sense of things - without overstepping my bounds. She is too old for me to accompany her on playdates, and I relished the day she was old enough to go alone. But today I wished I could stay.

Did I mention this family was white?

So my prejudice is colorblind it seems, but not blind to the trappings of privilege. Was I comfortable yesterday because of the surroundings alone, or because I was made to feel comfortable. Is that bit of social polish part of being on certain rung on the ladder? I did have a bit of a tug leaving my daughter — but did so because it’s tiime to do that. Just like today. But today I was left, and am still, curious what is going on, and if she is OK. How well will she fare in an environment that might be very different from her own, and why didn’t I think of that last night? We don’t have a driver or a butler or two living rooms.

And I’m sure that none of this entered her mind at all. These girls are just that, girls. They are her friends. Black or white, tall or short, Jewish or Christian. They’re making up dances and trying on make-up. They are giggling and laughing and talking a little about boys. They are all just being themselves. My daughter shows me through her smiles and varied friendships that they are all much more alike than different.

These girls and their families are confined by the walls in which they live, only when my preconceptions shut the door and lock them in.

So I guess I could learn from my daughter’s example.

Fancy that.

Today I started taking a class, and I was as excited as a five-year-old in a plaid jumper marching up to a big brick building on a Fall day holding a pencil. But I didn’t even have to get out of my pajamas or go to the bus stop. I didn’t put on make-up or do my hair. I didn’t wear shoes and I sipped coffee from my favorite mug. I even listened to the radio!

And people wonder why I love the internet!

I am taking an internet writing course at MediaBistro. If you are interested in anything media related, it’s the hot-spot on the internet. It has media news, interviews, tips, jobs and has a place for professional freelancers to list their services.

I’m just wondering…if I’m taking a course online and I want to impress the teacher, do I leave this on her message board?

Maybe it was turning 43. Maybe it is really feeling like I need something akin to a permanent vacation. No matter, I started thinking.

And that’s never good.

After contemplating all the very real reasons I can’t take a week off and disappear into five-star oblivion without the kids or the dogs, but with an occasional diversion, I thought about a place I used to live, and how it might be just the place to go and live out my golden years, i.e. retire. So I started googling.

And that’s never good.

I lived in Tucson, Arizona from 1997 to 1999, a short-lived jaunt into academia for my ex. We took off for destination desert and didn’t look back. We had a walled yard and I watered flowers in January. My minivan thermometer registered 127 degrees, if only once. There were javalina, scorpions, snakes and mountain lions, roaming, crawling, slithering and meandering around. In the summer you stayed inside, in the winter you went outside. The Santa Catalina mountains soared above us, with our expansive windows giving us a view holidays are made us. The sky was always blue. We joked often, the ex and I, in days of yore, that Tucson weathermen had the best job. What did they say? “Tomorrow it will be sunny with blue skies.” And the day after? “Blue skies and sunny.” I swear that living there for two years I never knew what month it was. East coast born and bred, and having lived then in Ohio and Illinois already, I had to close one eye and squint in order to remember if it was April or January, although August in it’s oven-likeness, was pretty obvious. I recall driving home from the park with my ex and the kids, in my ex’s prize Jeep. Not Cherokee…but Jeep hardtop, his dream car after years of both of us driving parent purchased vehicles that had lasted for more than a decade. The top was off, the kids were in the back and we’d just played baseball - our team of four. It was February and mid-70’s. We already knew that we were heading for the midwest in June and just looked at eachother thinking the same thing? “Were we crazy?”

Fast-forward to yesterday and some memories dredged up. I started to think about the mountain view I owned at my window every morning and the mandarin, fushcia and violet sunsets at my doorstep every evening. The moon hung so low in the sky it was not hard to remember that we were high above sea level, and the stars scattered the nightly sky as if they were jacks that I’d tossed on the ground in front of me for plucking.

And then I remembered, I hated it.

It was just too many hours, six months two, six months three, from the East Coast. And it was just too casual. I felt I needed to live some place it wasn’t ALWAYS ok to wear flip flops. And since nature suits me best in a vase in the middle of the dining room table, I did not really care about preserving the habitats for the rattlesnakes or not Birkenstock squashing a tarantula found in my bathtub. I never really found my groove there. Maybe it was because part of the year it was too hot to wear mascara. Maybe because it’s transient. No one is from Tucson.

And with that rocky desert soil, its really hard to dig roots.

The memories strangely have little to do with my ex, which is rather telling. I did like living some place that many people never even visit. I liked being six hours from San Diego and two from Phoenix. I felt larger than life when I was there, like it wasn’t quite real for a Philly gal to navigate her minivan days knowing the mountains were always north. I remember discovering supermarket sushi and learning to make guacamole, and to like it. I recall many visitors and sightseeing excursions. I can hear my little kids laughing, and feel cold hard satillo tile floors beneath my feet.

So I think it would be fun to go back…to visit. It would be new and it would be familiar. And I could see if my memories match reality.

On second thought that’s probably a very good reason to stay exactly where I am.

Although…

This is an actual photo from one of my favorite places, just across the street from where we lived. One of those orange roof dots in the distance was my home. The view also faced north and was similar.

After 37 weeks which was really 28 years of waiting, my son arrived amidst the confusion of labor’s nonprogression and an emergency cesearian.

That was fifteen years ago.

Today as he turns the big one-five, he’ll be tangled and tossled again, and perhaps even screaming, when he tries to figure out his video iPod.

Rarely do I meet someone who says that their life turned out exactly as they had planned, that they’d met all their goals, acheived all their dreams, realized all their hopes, vanquished all their fears. Frankly if I did, I’d probably run the other way.

But I am one of the lucky ones, because motherhood, even in the tumultous state in which I live it, has never disappointed me. It has met my needs and exceeded my expectations. It has made me a better person, it has fulfilled parts of me and forced me to realize others. And while I look for an escape hatch every now and then, it’s only for a reprieve not a reassignment.

So again today, when I can catch a quiet moment, I will put my arms around his now broad shoulders and and rest his head on my shoulder — where it still fits perfectly — and I’ll tell what I tell him every three-four — the untarnished truth.

He made me what I always wanted to be. That is what sets him apart and makes him unique and remarkably special. He is responsible for me becoming a mommy.

And still at 15, he’ll smile. Then he’ll ask when he can start learning to drive.