If you'd have told me even a year ago that I'd be able to sit at a table in a spic and span prep school gymnasium, right next to my ex--

you know, the charmer who slept with other women while we were married, who left me by the side of I-25 once in a teensy tiny bit of a rayon dress and heels in the middle of the high desert because I hadn't cleaned the house fast enough and we were running late to pick up his buddy at the Albuquerque Sunport and he was m-a-d, and who sent me to the hospital (yeah, him, remember?) just before I left him for good

--filling out the Parental Interview Form for my daughter's seventh-grade application packet, because there's only one Parental Interview Form allowed per child. Period. No matter if the child's parents live on opposite sides of the Grand Canyon.

I'd have called you a bald faced liar.

But there I was, me, the writer, in what I'd call a pretty fix for my protagonist, wielding the sharpened pencil, waxing eloquent with the answers to the questions on the Parental Interview Form about my precious girl, and actually asking for input from the other parent, and writing it down to boot.

Because darn it, the Parental Interview Form is, as far as I can tell, key to getting my kid into this excellent school with limited openings and hundreds of applicants, whose parents are all muttering and murmuring around me as they fill out their Parental Interview Forms too. And all the while I'm being nice, and polite, and smiling, I'm saying to myself, I love my daughter, I love my daughter, I love my daughter.

Nearly last--but not quite, I see a few other parents rubbing the erasers of their No. 2 pencils to stubs--I make my way through the sea of folding tables to turn our completed form and pencils into the grinning admissions counselor and then return to gather my things and sit on the opposite side of the table, where I manage a little small talk, a series of masterful riffs to a virtually speechless audience, about horses, and orchards, and honeybees, as I wait for my daughter to finish her interview.