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always put their best foot forward and are much more disciplined about their grooming than we are. There is a confidence to them, an ease and poise that is gradually giving way to bewilderment.
    They are bewildered because we have taken their place, a place that they didn’t even know they’d had until they lost it. Sometimes that “place” is literal. Blair and her family live in a house that one of the alumnae moms had grown up in. More often we seem to be living the lives that their parents grew up in. We have money; they don’t anymore. We have jobs with influence; they are realtors. We’ve stayed married; they haven’t.
    They have assumed too much. Their parents had always enough money; they assumed that they would as well. When they were girls, they had always been in the right dance classes; they had always been invited to the right birthday parties. As a result, they assumed that those opportunities would come to their children as a matter of course.
    But now they are living side by side with us, and we never assume that anything will ever happen as a matter of course. We believe that you have to work for everything. Just as we once studied and studied to be sure that we passed the bar exam on our first try, we now program the speed dials on our phones on the first day that a preschool day camp releases its registration forms. We use our BlackBerries and our fax machines to get our kids on a soccer team with their friends. Our kids don’t just get invited to the right birthday parties; we compete madly to be sure that our kids
host
the right birthday parties.
    We are probably very annoying.
    Several times during the year the school sponsors grade-level coffees, giving the parents (i.e., the mothers) an opportunity to network (i.e., gossip). We “new” families attend faithfully because the coffees are another chance to show the school what really great parents we are. Even the mothers who work show up on their way to the office.
    Although the alumnae mothers are very active in the school’s many fund-raising activities, they come only to the first of these coffees. Then their attendance drops off. Either they don’t need to have the staff think that they are really great parents or our obsessive interest in our children’s lives drives them nuts.
    The first sixth-grade parents’ coffee was Tuesday morning of the second week of school. It was held in the multipurpose room of the middle school. The tables had been pushed against the wall, and the chairs were arranged in a rough circle.
    I knew that Mimi Gold would not be there. Although she is just as obsessed as the rest of us, Mimi always has to miss the first coffee. She runs a nanny-placement service, and the first two weeks of September are always devoted to working out problems arising from new placements.
    But my other two close friends, Blair Branson and Annelise Rosen, had already arrived. Annelise had her purse on the chair next to her. She was saving a seat for me. We always did that sort of thing for one another.
    Of the four of us, Annelise and I met first. The girls were babies, and we were two attorneys desperate to talk about infant poo and sleep schedules. We were also both midwesterners. I am from Indiana, and Annelise is from Wisconsin; she and I are friendly, open, and pride ourselves on our unpretentiousness.
    People often mistake one of us for the other. We both are small with boyish builds. We both have our hair cut in short feathery layers, and both of us would be dishwater blondes if we didn’t spend a lot of money on highlights.
    But her features are broad and Dutch while mine are narrow and Irish. My eyes are greenish blue while hers are an unusual dramatically dark brown. We also don’t carry ourselves the same way. She is gentler than I am, more diffident, more vulnerable. Her husband, Joel, is pretty critical of her. I don’t know why she puts up with it, but she does.
    Our fourth friend, Blair Branson, is from South