yes, unfortunately, she and her good-looking husband happen to be very nice…

A few minutes after the class started and we were embarking on a rousing rendition of Kookaburra, in walks this very tall, blonde, thin, lovely, unpleasant person (she had one of those stomachs that look as if she stores her organs in a crystal urn at home somewhere and only pulls them out once a day when she needs to digest her celery) carrying one of those chunky, cherubic blond babies that look rented.

She sits down next to me, yay. In between songs she initiated a conversation with “your baby is beautiful” ; this, as Stephanie and all moms know, is the only possible sentence that could make me not hate her…and she must have known too.

It turns out that she was irritatingly kind and generous of spirit and, I might add, not at all dumb.

I was actually warming up to her when she asked me if I would want another child in the future. I thought this was a sweet question coming from a woman who, obviously only had one baby and, did not yet know the body ravaging horrors of multiple childbirth .

I replied that this was my third (I stated this with that wise, slightly superior look that none of us are proud of but that we all know well) and that I was very happy to stop here. To which she replied, slightly and beautifully exasperated and without an ounce of malice or superiority, “I know, me too…but I really want to go for the fourth. My husband just feels like they are all so close in age and we should wait a couple of more years.”

I would stop here because I feel that I need not elaborate on the deluge of unhealthy thoughts running through my head at that moment ( ‘how bad can bulimia be, really…?’ to ‘ I am coming back next week with a vile of acid…’ to ‘I will go to culinary school, get a job as her cook and add thousands of calories of lard to all her meals’…), but then she added the coup de gras :”OH, are you here all summer? We should get all the kids together! What BEACH do you go to?”

I don’t remember what happened next, I might have passed out, or the class ended, Its really not important.

What is important is how badly I felt for being so insecure. Why couldn’t I just go to the beach with her and our children? What is wrong with me? she could have turned out to be a life long friend (who would hand me down last season’s Prada tote when she got her new one!).

Then I imagined her three, cherubic, well behaved blond children, running on the beach and speaking French, German, Italian and Chinese in perfect accents, wearing their slightly worn Calypso by Christianne Celle cover-ups, and my three beautiful, extremely LOUD Brazilian/Italian children screaming at me in English and Portuguese and shoving sand down each other’s throats, and me in my mumu…