Stereotypes

During the last month of summer vacation, Baby Girl participated in a get-to-know-you sorta thing for the Girl Scouts chapter at her school.  She's only in Kindergarten, which is pretty young to start Girl Scouts, but they now have Daisy troops specifically for girls that age and they're supposed to meet - on average - once a month.  She absolutely LOVED it.  She's my artistic/crafty child and this was right up her alley.  There weren't a lot of other girls involved and she thought the whole thing was just fantastic.

Fast-forward to back-to-school time.  A paper comes home for GS registration.  Naively, I thought this meant you sign your daughter up and she will be assigned to a troop.  Boy, was I wrong.  It is up to the mothers of the girls (about 5 of us) to either become a leader and form a troop or not.  It REALLY pisses me off that no one seems to be willing to walk us through the process nor tell us if we can be involved in a different troop if our school can't get someone to be a leader.  What pisses me off even more?  It's just sort of ASSUMED (and you know what THAT does) that the resident stay-at-home-mom (yours truly) is the most obvious choice because, clearly, I have scads of free time in which I would typically sit around eating bon bons and watching soap operas!! (Sidenote:  Are soaps even ON any more?).  I swear, if I hear the Area "Manager" go on and on again about how she works numerous jobs, coaches cheerleading AND is the current "manager" I.WILL.SCREAM.  Look, I respect that other people are busy.  My problem is, if you can't do what you have commited to do at the level that's expected, you SHOULDN'T BE DOING IT.  Period.  Stop making excuses and let them find someone else to do it.  I could sit here and make excuses for why I can't do it but instead I'm just NOT going to do it.  Because I know that my current level of commitment to other things renders me incapable of being a troop leader to the best of my ability.  That, and the application to "volunteer" required more information than any job application I've ever filled out.  My only qualification for being a "volunteer" is that I have a 5-year-old daughter who desperately wants to join.  That's not enough (and I'm not talking about all of the background checks, etc. either because those I expected).  We'll wait a few years and try again.  In the meantime, I'm looking into dance classes.