Mother Hood: A Great Recession Story

I wasn't thinking about my path to criminality as I hustled Jake, Rebecca and Troy through the streets to get them to school. Mostly, I was thinking about the fact that the curb on West 8th Street still wasn't fixed and that it was quite the hazard of broken concrete and buckled asphalt. It very nearly tripped me as we stopped at the light.

I leaned on Rebecca's backpack, furiously signing the stack of permission forms and fundraising promissory notes that came in constant supply with a public school education. Rebecca didn't complain when I pitched forward and had to catch myself on the Hello Kittys dangling from the zipper pockets. Maybe she didn't notice the extra weight of a toppling grown-up. Or maybe she just didn't think to mention it. In 2008, it seemed everything was falling down.

"What is all this?” I said. “Suzuki violin? A salt-water fish tank? A 5th-grade trip to Citibank headquarters? Why is the whole grade going to a bank?"

Rebecca shrugged. Jake answered for her. "It has to happen now because Matt Abramowitz's dad works there and says his department is going to get fired next quarter, so we need to go now, before the layoffs."

I tried to see his face as the light changed, and all four of us surged into the street with the crowd. "What do you know about layoffs?" I asked.

"I know about layoffs. It's when your boss throws you up a bus."

"Under the bus, moron," said Rebecca. Twins are quick to correct each other.

"Whatever."

"There's a difference."

"Shut up."

"Make me!"

"Okay, enough." I put myself between my warring twins, still guiding my youngest by keeping my palm on the top of his head as a steering mechanism. There was no question Troy wasn't looking where he was going. He kept his eyes on the screen of his handheld, his thumbs twitching madly at either end of the device. I worried that his computer usage wasn't normal. I even asked Brian to install spyware on the old laptop he'd given the kids to use. But if the monitors were delivering any kind of actionable data, I didn't know about it. Troy was thoroughly parked in the virtual. At least he didn't know the financial world was collapsing. Apparently, the twins had been briefed.

At the school flagpole, I said good-bye to the backs of Jake and Rebecca as they didn't even slow down approaching the open door. I took Troy's shiny blue portal from his hands and bent down to talk to him on his eye level. "Have a good day at school, sweetie."

"Yes, Mom," he said, with all the emotion of a robo-call. After three years of speech therapy, Troy could speak but still sounded like a visitor from another planet. "It's as if his first language isn't English," a therapist once explained to me. "So, what is his first language?" I asked. She didn't have an answer.

After the children disappeared into the great red doorway, I turned for the side entrance and headed to the PTA office. Or what Dateline producers would later call The Scene of the Crime.

I’d been a regular there since the start of school after Urban Chic Magazine had replaced my copy-editing skills with a software program. At first, I’d job-hunted from home. Then Brian's firm opted to cut costs by reducing office space, and he, too was parked in the living room all day. Brian was the reason we were not in financial straits, with his decision to specialize in personal bankruptcy law suddenly seeming more prescient with each passing day. But it was a little like being married to The Grim Reaper.

"Tom? Hi there, it’s Brian Finch from Braderly, Edelman. Time to talk turkey, my friend. The best way out of this is a quick and dirty restructuring."

"Best for who?" I called out.

So, when I told him I would be volunteering five mornings a week the kids' school, he all but cheered. "Good idea, Ava," he said. "Good for you to get out of the house," he added. He didn't say, "And not heckle me while I make a living." But it was understood.

Turned out the PTA office offered little protection from the reality of lower Manhattan's financial unraveling. The building was so crowded with economic refugees from private school, even the supply closet had been painted yellow and pressed into service as a classroom. I often saw guidance counselor Laura Batista in the halls, her dazed expression was an ongoing reminder that she'd sent her kids to their grandmother in Panama to save on childcare costs. And after the Gotts family received its third notice from the office that their daughter Samantha was not arriving at school in proper outerwear, the 4th grader turned up in what was clearly an adult-sized London Fog knockoff. The cuffs were rolled so many times they looked like donuts around the child's wrists. It was raining that day. I had to wonder if the girl's mother had gone to work in a trash bag or just let the rain ruin her suit.

Still, I'd been able to hold it together – attending to my volunteer data entry chores. Until the day of the Lunch Ladies Massacre.

That morning, I was stashed inconspicuously behind the bookcases in the front office, entering numbers into the maze of online forms. Federal funds in, state funds out, city funds redirected. It was a dizzying collection of incongruous priorities. The speed of it all quickly outstripped the school’s planning capabilities, its accounting process, even its reserve of checks. A temporary supply of blank checks from Office Depot was hastily acquired and stamped like passports with the necessary Board of Ed approvals.

Around me the office hummed quietly, punctuated only by the anti-aircraft fire of Madeline Taubman, the admin veteran permanently parked at the school's welcome desk. "Don't just stand there, do your job!" she barked at two unfortunate 3rd graders who had entered timidly proffering a stack of attendance sheets. The girls hurled their paperwork into the wire basket on the desk and fled. Madeline continued to mutter darkly about department regulations and felony murder as she returned to her work, stamping "FINAL NOTICE" in deep red ink onto a stack of sky-blue kindergarten flyers.

Just before lunch, the email landed. Principal Bloomfield's secretary gasped. Madeline swore. The librarian and art teacher both showed up in the office at the same time, waving print outs and yelling. Outside the door, I heard children filing towards the cafeteria.

"Lunchroom duty is not in our contract!"

"I have multiple food sensitivities and cannot possibly tolerate a work environment in which –"

"Is this a joke? All of us on lunchroom and recess rotation?"

"When is faculty lunch scheduled? Midnight?"

"- dairy, peanuts, monosodium glutamate – "

"My phone rings like crazy at lunch hour. That's when half the parents call. If I'm not at my desk – "

" – aspartame, soy, cruciferous vegetables –"

I left my post to lean over Madeline's shoulder and read that "effective immediately" the full roster of "cafeteria attendants" would be "removed from the budget" and replaced by "existing staff." While the existing staff registered its unhappiness, I looked out into the hall. Amid the surging mob of unattended children stood Lorraine Palinowski – the school’s senior lunch lady. Senior was no term of endearment. She was probably 60 – maybe older, it was hard to tell how well the hot lunch fumes had preserved her hair and skin. But while I didn't know her age, I knew her circumstances. In addition to supporting herself, she funneled every spare dollar to keep her mother in a private Alzheimer's care facility. The alternative, she told me once back when I used to volunteer for lunchroom duty (before Rebecca had asked me to please stop humiliating her with my presence), is a state-run nursing home. "When the patients wander off, they tie them to the chairs," she said.

Looking back, I'd have to say that’s when I snapped. The school staff would take on new duties without pay. The children would spend their only 40 minutes of un-schooled time supervised by angry adults. The three lunch ladies would walk out into a cratering economy. And Mary Palinowski would spend the rest of her days tied to the furniture.

When the principal himself came out of his office to shepherd his underlings to the cafeteria, all the adults filed out into the halls – all but me. A silence fell on the office.

That’s when I did it.

I sat down at Madeline's computer, and clicked into the system I knew held Washington's latest serving of funds, and authorized a check for $5,000 cash. I looked up Lorraine's home address and stuffed the check in with a little yellow sticky note "From a friend" inside. I didn't know how much Alzheimer care that would buy, but I didn't over-think the matter. My fingers moved as though tapped by a reflex hammer.

Later that night, however, I thought about it a lot. In fact, it's all I thought about as I watched the high beams of nighttime traffic play across my ceiling. I had embezzled $5,000 from a New York City public school. I was, of course, going to jail.

So, I didn't bother to work once I arrived in the PTA office the next day. I just sat and waited for my action to spark the obvious reaction. At 10:30, Bloomfield's secretary waved to me and pointed to her boss' door. I went in quietly, sure I could feel the righteous glare of Madeline Taubman on my back.

Richard Bloomfield, a man in his early 50s with a visible paunch and a graying comb-over, tilted back in his creaky standard-issue swivel chair. He motioned for me to sit in the grey strait back before his desk.

"I’m not sure what to say about this, Mrs. Finch," he said, waving a dot matrix printout over his head.

I waited for the hammer to fall. I wondered if I'd be allowed to call Brian to come collect the kids at 3.

"It's really quite incredible," Bloomfield continued.

Rebecca could show him where I keep the music lesson schedules.

"I've never seen anything like it in my 20 years as an administrator."

Troy's speech therapy was paid up through March.

"And I can only say –"

Jake's soccer socks would last another season.

"… keep up the good work."

I cocked my head to the side to see if that would help his words make sense.

“I never thought we'd make that federal deadline. Your speedy work means we won't have to return any of the funding." Bloomfield stood and offered his hand across the desk. "Thank you," he said.

I took the hand. "My pleasure," I managed. I headed back to my corner, passing the welcome desk, where a miserable child sat slumped in the plastic visitor's chair and Madeline was leaving yet another voicemail for his mother. "If we don't hear from you, you can pick him up at the 22nd precinct." I plopped down in my seat and didn’t move. Until the office emptied at noon.

$100 gift card from Burlington Coat Factory for the Gotts family.

The trick to successful embezzling is to keep a cool head and not get greedy.

$250 for Laura Batista – and a list of emergency babysitting services.

That night while my family slept, I crept into Troy's room and grabbed the old laptop from the toy box to continue my work.

$410 for Mr. Kohn, the lower-grade science teacher, who had maxed out his credit card to keep his lab stocked with live snails and viable chicken eggs.

Some quick searches turned up a variety of methodologies. I opted for The Salami Method – taking thin slices from a variety of accounts – as described by www.IAmRobinHood.com.

$150 to the parents of 2nd grader Elias Darrin – to get the family car out of impound.

It works especially well in big organizations buffeted by layoffs and other stresses.

$200 to the family of Grace Garcia – to cover pizzas for the 9-year-old's birthday party.

To downtrodden employees, it all looks close enough to normal.

I also used my late-night computer time to search for recipients. Not all of them would march through the school’s front office, I reasoned. I registered for an email newsletter called NeedFeed which scanned the Internet for individuals in financial straits. I set the search parameters to my zip code and every few days, a new case would arrive in my in-box.

I was careful to move only small amounts from a variety of accounts so that no one transaction raised an alarm. I moved from computer to computer in the office to spread any suspicious activity around. I dealt in unmarked temp checks made out to cash.

I was equally careful to keep a steady supply of needy cases – not that it required much work on my part. They seemed to land conveniently in my email, just as I would wrap up the previous case. Families from the school, patients of the local pediatrician, and even a request by a neighborhood association to fix the broken curb on West 8th Street. The timing of each case felt almost magical. Clearly, God was on my side.

In the mornings, I would wait for the crowd of kids to thin before I made my way into the school. The school security officer greeted the army of volunteers as we paraded in. He touched his cap as we shuffled along. I felt like Clark Kent as the guard's eyes failed to see me for who I really had become.

My newfound mission in life altered my outlook. No longer a helpless bystander, I made my way through the world secure in my superpowers. I just smiled when Rebecca returned all my conversational advances with "Whatever." I baked trays of Snicker Doodles for Jake's soccer team. I listened to Troy for hours as he recited the stats of his online game playing. I sat up late at night watching the news so I would be awake when Brian finally came to bed. I made love to him all during Letterman. It wasn't his fault, I understood now. We were all doing what we had to do in this brave new world.

Besides, I had no need to pick little fights with Brian when Principal Bloomfield was proving an enjoyable adversary. By March, mere months after he'd patted me on the back for my superior data entry skills, he was suspicious. Probably because I'd discovered his super secret personal slush fund and began (once in a while) slicing from that salami. It drove him crazy, I could tell. I could hear the swivel chair squeaking madly behind the closed door. But his ability to pinpoint the culprit was limited. What was he going to say? Who's been stealing my stolen money?

It was warm and sunny the morning I arrived with the kids at the flagpole and stayed a moment to look for another mom I hoped to guilt into helping me with the next class potluck dinner. "Jake, honey, which one is Dylan Franco?" I asked, peering into the crowd of parents and kids.

"You mean Dylan Nicholas." It was Troy speaking.

"What, sweetie?" I said, my eyes still scanning the schoolyard.

"Dylan Nicholas. You want Dylan Nicholas. His family is next," said Troy.

"Next? What do you mean?

"Shut up, shrimp!" snapped Rebecca. Sharply, even for her.

I looked at my daughter. Then back at Troy. "Troy, why do you think I want to see Dylan Nicholas?"

Rebecca grabbed her brother by his backpack straps and shoved him towards the school doors. She followed him a few steps and then paused to look back at me.

"There's no such thing as NeedFeed," she said.

Then she was gone.

In the hours that followed, I sat at my post and listened to the sound of the coming reckoning. The squeaking of the chair behind the closed doors was getting more insistent. Mid-morning, an IT crew from the district office arrived in the building and began installing new keystroke monitoring software. "Just do everything the same way you did it before," the technician told each computer user as he made his way around the room, desk to desk. "The software knows what it's looking for."

Bloomfield was closing in. And when he cornered his foe, I knew now, he’d find more than just me.

That night I took the laptop from the playroom and tossed it down the garbage chute along with Troy's handheld. I didn't bother to look at the tracking devices Brian had installed on both to see that they had revealed my every move to my children. And that they in turn had set up every next move for me.

The next morning, I put on my burgundy Eileen Fisher. It had three-quarter sleeves. Room, I reasoned, for handcuffs. No call to look mussed on my perp walk.

I made one transaction that day: a $100,000 check made out in my name. No subtle salami slice, that. I topped off my volunteer shift with a $10,000 shoe shopping spree. That would get attention, I knew. I wore the Jimmy Choo Leopard stilettos to my arraignment. The courtroom artist did them justice.

I do get visitors. Brian and the kids on Sundays. Sometimes, to my surprise, Madeline Taubman. She comes with horror stories from the cafeteria, updates on rules broken by faculty members and injustices delivered to the school staff via email.

Once in a while, she tells me of a well-timed windfall in the school community. I just smile. If Rebecca needs me, she'll let me know.

The End