At Ross Elementary School, I gained fame, or notoriety, as the room mother who dumpster dives. Like most legends, it's not completely true. When Daisy was in third grade, I didn't dive dumpsters, so much as I pawed through an entire neighborhood's worth of driveway recycling bins at 6:30 a.m. in search of empty food cans.
I needed 600 cans so every child at Ross could make a tin can snowman as a take-home craft at the classroom "winter holiday" parties. A month out, I started feeding the family canned corn, canned beans and canned tomatoes--but a family of four that doesn't like soggy canned vegetables isn't going to plow through 600 cans worth so kids they don't know can make tin can snowmen that'll probably get left on the school bus. And that's how I discovered the joys of other people's recycling.
No one actually asked if I'd come up with 600 cans--and I didn't singlehandedly. But at that point in my life, I always wanted every child to have what every other child had, and for holiday parties to be mellow.
Today, I'm not as concerned about everybody else's child as I used to be, but I still come running when Daisy calls. That's why, tonight, I'm sleeping on the sofa in her house in Columbia. Tomorrow, I'll be "room mother" for the day at her sorority as girls go through "Rush." My duties, I'm told, are to fill cups with water, collect trash and throw it in the dumpster out back.
I don't plan to dumpster dive. But if Daisy asked, if she really needed me to do that for her, I probably would. She is my daughter and I love her grown-up self every bit as much as I loved her as a nine-year-old.
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