A TALE OF TWO MOMMIES

YOU DON'T HAVE TO CAVE UNDER THE UNBEARABLE WEIGHT OF PRESCHOOL PRESSURE By Lorraine Duffy Merkl "If you were giving birth on The Great Lawn, someone would pop up between your legs and ask, 'So, what schools you think you'll apply to?'" About 12 years ago, that's how I described to a non-New Yorker the obsession some Manhattanites have with "school." I remember being told when my son was 2 to "get my dialing finger ready," and "start punching the numbers at 8:59 a.m. the day after Labor Day." The whole thing was stupid, scary and stressful-all so a toddler could go to a school that he did not even need. According to the city's Department of Education website, kindergarten, let alone nursery school, is not even mandatory. You couldn't talk to another mother on the playground without being told that with the "right" Manhattan preschool, your kid would get into Harvard. (If this is true, then how do you explain someone who grew up in Iowa and attended the local public school getting into the Ivy League?) But as I mentioned, this was more than a decade ago. Surely by now times had changed. Yeah, well. In the past few weeks, I've come across my share of articles in the vein of, "Getting into preschool-one mother's journey," and their counterparts, "An expert shares the secrets of filling out the preschool application." Still this goes on? Still? Guess so, since The Parents League is still offering seminars. Quite frankly, I'm shocked that every year at this time, the publishers of The Ivy Chronicles don't take full advantage of the paranoia and trot out the Karen Quinn novel, under the guise of alerting freaked-out parents to what the process is really like-reminding them that the work of the former application consultant may be fiction, but it is based on fact. Allow me to offer some facts of my own in "A Tale Of Two Mommies": One lives on Park Avenue where her husband is the building's super. Their child attended parochial school for pre-K and grammar school. They gave more volunteer time than money to the school, but supported financially whenever they could. The other mom lives in an Upper East Side penthouse. Her child attended private school from nursery through 8th grade. The amount of money spent on tuition, plus generous donations to the institution's development fund, could wipe out the debt of a small country. I know both families, who don't know each other; but they will. This fall they'll both begin at the same high school. I feel for people who truly believe that where their toddler learns to play with blocks is going to have some effect on where they matriculate when they're 18. The fact is that the child you know at 2 (or 5 or 9) is not the one you will know at 12. Unless you are a controlling psycho-parent whose robot-kid will go along no-questions-asked with whatever life plan you've created, you will begin to see a young person who has ideas and goals all their own. Hence the reason that friends of mine who thought their son would go the traditional parochial high school route are currently looking into LaGuardia Arts (the Fame school) because from performing in his grammar school plays, their boy now wants to be an actor. All that having been said, if you are focusing on private school, get that dialing finger ready and good luck. However, if you don't get in or weren't planning to go that route anyway, don't feel that your kid will be left behind. It's not where they start, parents, it's where they finish. Lorraine Duffy Merkl is an Upper East Sider. Her column appears every other week.