Warning: Extreme Cattiness Ahead

Not sure why I thought about this today, but a while back, I learned that that the Parent-Teacher Association (PTA) of a nearby school district was being sued by an aggrieved couple.  Who the heck sues a PTA?

The full details have never been made available, so I can't say for sure what brought about the lawsuit.  What I did find very interesting, however, was the list of the PTA's co-defendants (seriously) in this suit.  Schadenfreude is not normally my bag, but this is where the cattiness comes in.

When we first moved here years ago, Thing One was an infant.  I'd gone straight from full-time school to 12-hour workdays before he was born, so staying home with him was a sudden huge psychological adjustment for me.  Plus, I knew nobody in our new area, and it was November and too chilly to go out much with a newborn.  It was a miserable, lonely first few months, with Himself working long hours and traveling a good deal.  I decided that I needed to meet some other moms, and ASAP, so I joined the local chapter of a support group for stay-at-home mothers early the following year.  It worked out well for me, and the next year I volunteered to be the Secretary for the chapter.   I was happy to do it, except inasmuch as I had to deal with the woman who was President that year.

She made my life very difficult, to put it mildly.  She was such a micromanager that she insisted that I send her drafts of the monthly chapter newsletter for her review and approval before I mailed them to the group, and there were always changes to be made.  One one particularly memorable occasion, she actually changed the style of the bullet points I had used in a draft because she didn't like the font.  I am not exaggerating in the slightest.

She was one of the more affluent moms in the group, and a name-dropper who made sure that you knew she had married into an influential family.  I once saw her at our local grocery store in the middle of a weekday afternoon in a floor-length mink coat.  She has two kids, one about Thing One's age, and one a few years older--the year I was Secretary, the older child was attending a private school some distance away.

At any rate, the list of co-defendants in this lawsuit included all of the PTA officers, besides the PTA itself and the school.   The PTA President?  My old "friend," who lives in that district.

I had three thoughts when I heard her name in this context, none of them kind:

1) Given her lack of people skills, whatever interaction she had with this couple in her capacity as PTA President probably didn't help matters.

2) Since when would she deign to send one or both of her kids to the local public school instead of the high-pinky private school her elder child had formerly been attending?  (She had previously been vocal about how she would only ever send her kids to private school.  As a public-school mom--of kids doing very well, mind you--that put my back up more than a bit.)

3) Karma is a bitch.
      
I'm probably being one too, but oh well.