Chapter 30 Lurielle
Lurielle
Ten a.m. assumed the previous day’s naps had gone well, that dinner had been eaten, everyone had slept, that no one had woken up in the middle of the night demanding water from a very specific cup, the same cup they’d demanded the previous day, which was now in the dishwasher.
It assumed that said middle-of-the-night water demands would be done in a quiet enough tone to not disturb the other sleeping child, one who was currently teething, who’d been a poor sleeper from day one, eager for an excuse to open her throat and let the whole neighborhood know of her existence.
“She’s fixin’ to be an opera singer,” Khash would say indulgently, uncaring that his little diva was screaming loud enough to shake the dishes in their cupboard.
The Act Two aria rattled Lurielle’s teeth when it was delivered in the middle of the afternoon.
In the middle of the night, it stabbed a part of her brain she hadn’t even been aware of before Kora’s arrival.
Ten a.m. assumed everyone was up and dressed with clean faces and tamed hair, that she herself was coiffed appropriately for leaving the house in flattering, color-coordinated active wear, free of spit-up-covered shoulders, which were frowned upon.
Lurielle knew the score.
She understood, at long last, how places like these operated.
It was good that she’d grown up in an enclave, she’d thought a hundred million times in the past four years.
It had been an excellent warning for the true test of professional bitchiness that lay in wait — the lion’s den she’d not realized she’d be entering the first time she’d peed on her hand, hoping to hit the test strip.
Mother’s groups were an enclave unto themselves.
All of them, but this one in particular.
She wasn’t sure if she had given birth to Kael in a particularly auspicious year full of other baby geniuses in the halls of Healers’ Memorial, but their mothers certainly acted that way.
They were fit. They were fashionable. They were entirely preoccupied with extracurriculars and enrichment programs, regularly questioning whether the public school system here was really as good as everyone claimed, or if it was merely a Hemming family-sponsored psyop to convince residents that their exorbitant property taxes were going to a worthwhile cause.
There was an orc and her kitsune wife, who talked about an art therapy program they’d discovered that aided emotional intelligence growth at home.
There was the sylvan whose tiny daughter had a different class or lesson to attend seven days a week.
The dragonborn who was extremely concerned over whether or not the public elementary school introduced Ivy League-level testing at an early enough age.
There was a troll who talked about her pole dancing aerobics, a goblin who’d received a ‘mommy makeover’ after the birth of her second, and the trio of stay-at-home fathers who were fawned over by most in the group simply by existing.
Lurielle needed to regularly remind herself that this group was not indicative of all the parents in Cambric Creek.
There were mothers on her own street who, by her standards, were completely normal, who let their kids play in the street and run across yards.
She knew that . . . but the current iteration of the Saturday morning playgroup was largely composed of Kael’s schoolmates and their younger siblings, which meant she had no escape from these mothers.
Unless they planned to move, she would be stuck with this group for the next fourteen years.
Allowing herself and her kids to exist solely on the periphery would be a mistake. Club life had taught her that. And so each week, she was there, whether she wanted to be or not.
Playgroup was held in one of the rooms at the community center, the same space where storytime was held.
The floor was covered in primary-colored foam mats, and storybook characters were painted on the eggshell-colored walls.
Baskets of Scandinavian-looking toys and low bookshelves lined the entire space; wooden animals, a miniature kitchen and a play fruitstand with felt fruit and a working checkout register.
The crown jewel of the playroom was the castle, a two-story play edifice that featured a slide, a cozy little shelter inside with beanbag chairs, and a little balcony with a high enough railing to prevent any accidents.
The first time she entered this space with Kael, Lurielle had scanned the room the way she scanned meetings at work. Who was in charge? Who talked the most? To whom did everyone else defer without quite realizing it? There was always one.
The unofficial leader of the group hadn’t changed in the intervening two years: Yanna, a sable-haired selkie.
She was there that day, of course, as Lurielle came stumbling through the door, Kora balanced on her hip, Kael already pulling her along.
You got this. This isn’t middle school anymore.
You don’t need to fit in. You don’t need to be liked.
You’re wearing the viral butt-lifting leggings. You have nothing to stress over.
It was a mantra she repeated every single time she walked into this room, every morning slightly after ten. The start time was an abomination, and she couldn’t be blamed for never actually making it.
Yanna was already sitting cross-legged on the floor, posture serene, wearing an oversized linen tunic top and an expression of calm authority. Her toddler sat nearby, quietly stacking wooden blocks with an unsettling degree of focus.
There were clusters of mothers throughout the space, most orbiting the selkie, a few others sitting on the outskirts, scrolling on their phones.
There were the professional yappers, who never stopped comparing the running tally of scholastic achievements and milestones met by their little ones; the CSA almond moms, who carried a ridiculous amount of healthy snacks with them everywhere they went; and the social media moms, sometimes livestreaming right there, telling their followers all about their plans for themselves and their littles ones that day.
Lurielle tried to occupy the in-between. She was allergic to cliques and had no desire to play into the cronyism of acceptance . . . but she was going to be stuck with these mothers for fourteen years, and she didn’t want to be on the outside of things, either.
By the time Kael was in preschool, she had learned that, like the workplace, the hallowed halls of motherhood came with their own specific language.
She knew the code behind one of her peers in the office asking for ‘a deep dive to discuss a kinetic disassembly,’ as well as the simultaneous acknowledgment of ‘moving the needle with an easy win’ and a ‘thermal event.’ Engineering shorthand for things were falling apart on the back-end, shit caught fire, and had fucked up the entire product timeline.
The conversation would then shift into ‘deliverables,’ ‘dependencies,’ and the ‘length of the runway.’
Every corporate space had its own lingo, industry jargon by which one operated. The mother’s group had the same.
“. . . we’re doing Montessori at home too. It just aligns so well with our values.”
“Gentle,” she murmured to Kael as he wriggled free of her hand, lunging towards the basket of trucks.
“. . . her vocabulary just exploded at twenty-two months.”
Lurielle watched as Kael approached a gnoll from his class, offering a truck, then snatching it back as if he’d changed his mind on the virtues of sharing.
“Hey,” she called gently, “let’s try again, okay?” She breathed a small sigh of relief when he did, successfully. A tally on the board in her mind. “Great job. It’s more fun when we share together.”
“. . . Oh, I know! We don’t really do screen time at all.”
“That’s a hard limit for me.”
Lurielle smiled thinly to herself as Kora wriggled down, determined to cross the room without Lurielle’s interference.
She did screen time. She did it unapologetically, and sometimes joyfully, especially on those days she was desperate for a breath, refusing to believe her children would be irreparably damaged by twenty minutes of a puppet show that taught sharing and kindness, while she went to the bathroom alone and sat without someone climbing on her.
They also did reading and imagination play, outdoor exploration and structured routines.
I contain multitudes, and so do my kids.
Kael and the gnoll zoomed past, narrowly missing the neat stack of blocks. The serene toddler looked up, mildly affronted.
“Sorry,” Lurielle offered automatically, wincing at herself. What are you apologizing for?! They’re kids. If he knocked them over, that would be a teachable moment for him.
Yanna gave her a beatific smile. “It’s good for them to learn spatial awareness.”
Lurielle smiled, biting back a laugh. Or a scream? Could be either. Or both.
As she sat, hovering on the edge of being part of the group and just outside it, she found herself cataloguing everything.
Which kids were speaking in full sentences?
Who was walking with total balance? How they played, how they interacted, which parents hovered, which seemed disinterested. Who was sharing, who was tantruming.
There was no end of metrics she could apply to the playroom.
Her competitive streak had long been dormant, but Lurielle found that motherhood had awakened it like a sleeping dragon once they started doing things regularly outside the house.
She hated that part of herself, but couldn’t seem to turn it off.
She hated that she noticed how quickly Kora navigated the room, how confidently she approached new kids, even the older ones, how Kael was waiting his turn in line for the marble run, neither pushing nor acting impatient.
She hated how badly she wanted to win at a game she claimed not to be playing.