When I volunteered to help with the fundraising element of my oldest daughter's Brownie troop, I never thought in a million years I would end up with the title of Cookie Mom.
That's right, I am one of those moms who stands at the green-clothed table at the door of the grocery store and oversees noisy, kinda stinky, adorable girls in green or brown vests as they try to sell you diabetes in a box.
The Girl Scout cookie racket is fairly cut and dried; do a big initial order and divvy the cookie boxes out amongst the girls in the troop. Keep up with their requests for re-orders through a reasonably easy website, and make sure you get a booth sale (i.e. green-clothed table in front of a grocery store, restaurant, park, etc.). Since I volunteered, I was determined to do my due diligence by making sure my paperwork got in on time, and answering texts from parents who needed cookies in a timely manner. Frankly, I thought I should have gotten a medal for clearing out a corner of that shit pit we call a garage for cookie storage.
All seemed to be going well until I was hit with the creeping death super cold that took out nearly half of the U.S. this past winter. I was sick that fateful day in December when the booth sale lottery took place. Apparently the booth sale lottery is the shit. You get to pick the day, time and location your troop can sell cookies. Anyone who doesn't show up to the lottery is stuck with the leftovers. I didn't stress. We were a first year troop who had never done cookie sales, so we had zero expectations.
I put in my request for a booth sale once I could drag my dead, sick ass to an upright position, and continued on with life. Three weeks, and four email requests later, I was sent a roster of dates, times, and locations. I picked my top five, hoping to secure two booth sales, so that each girl had the opportunity to participate, because they get badges for it, and badges equal bragging rights. I like to think of them as the girl version of stitches scars. The boys go to the E.R. bleeding and cut wide open from doing stupid shit and end up with a scar. The girls do accomplishments and end up with adorable badges on a vest. Yet, somehow, we are the weaker sex?!?
In the end, I got one lousy, three hour booth sale. Again, we had no expectations going into this, so I was only a little miffed, until the beginning of this week when I found out that the mom who does the booth scheduling scheduled half of the available booth sales for her own daughter's troop. Are you fucking kidding me! It's this type of bullshit that makes living in Suburbia a particularly nasty piece of Hell.
As a mom, I totally get wanting your kid to be successful and accomplish things that give them pride and self-esteem, especially if they are girls, but if you do a bunch of sickly, underhanded shit to make that accomplishment happen, you haven't helped them achieve their goal. By tipping the scales, and cheating others at the same time, you end up looking like a pathetic asshole. What happens in 10 or 15 years when your kid figures out that they sold enough cookies to get the iPad, because you locked everyone else out of selling? Whatever money you saved not buying her that iPad is going to go right to the therapist in a "everything my mother ever told me was a lie" round of sessions.
The biggest dilemma now is do I say anything or keep my mouth shut? The problem with a mostly volunteer organization is that the moment you bitch too loudly about how something is done, your ass gets chosen to do it the next year. Although it seems like something that could be easy to do, filling open spots, given the amount of politics and bullshit that I just had to deal with in the past two months hocking cookies, something tells me it would be eight weeks of Hell on Earth.
For now, I will keep quiet. I'll put this tidbit of knowledge in my back pocket, and try not to be sick as a dog next year when I will, without a doubt, because I volunteered, end up as the troop Cookie Mom. I will try to schedule two good booth sales next year, and if I get any flack, I have no problem with confronting the offender about her own gratuitous scheduling. After all, the one thing you can always count on is that the suburb dwellers hate confrontation and uncomfortable situations that might rupture their perfect little bubble of Suburbia happiness, whereas, I live for it.
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