The other day I got an email from Niuniu’s school. Gist: we’re hosting a potluck for new families — interested parents, please sign up!
Sure, why not. I’ll sign up.
In my head: it’s obviously in the school cafeteria, everyone brings a dish, you eat a little, you chat a little. Right?
Then I opened the signup page, read the details, and my jaw hit the floor.
Who comes up with a requirement like that?
Is this how private school works?
Back in public school, parents were asked to contribute time, contribute muscle, contribute money (not much of it) — never once a house.
And for an i-person — an introvert — this is the stuff of nightmares.
Invite a crowd of complete strangers, whose only connection to you is that your kids share a school, into your own home?
Do people actually volunteer for this?
Okay, fine — maybe it’s not an introvert-versus-extrovert problem. Maybe it’s a square-footage problem.
If our house were the size of Bill Gates’s, I can’t even imagine how outgoing I’d be.
…But house aside, private school really is spectacularly introvert-unfriendly.
One month into the school year, I’ve met more strangers than in a whole year of public school.
The kid hadn’t even started yet, and the events began rolling in the moment she was admitted.
Surely it settles down once school actually starts? It does not. It gets worse.
My inbox gets school mail every single day.
Never mind how much time all this takes — if you’re an e-person, an extrovert, this probably sounds delightful. A fish in water.
But if you’re an i-person like Niu-ma, every event invitation lands like a wedding invitation on a broke man’s doormat, and all you can do is howl:
But you have no choice. So before every outing you run the full pep talk: go, you have to go, you can’t not go, it’s for the kid, even just showing your face counts…
And once you’re there, you summon every last drop of extrovert energy in your body: greet, small-talk, find topics, smile…
Back home, dead tired, you absolutely refuse to sleep. You stay up late doing nothing meaningful whatsoever: the most brainless shows, the trashiest snacks, the most doomscrolling…
You need to be alone. You need to heal. You need to claw back every precious minute of solitude, with interest.
And honestly, it’s not just private school. The whole world runs on hard mode for introvert parents.
When the kids are little, you take them to the park, the playground, toddler classes, playdates…
Once they’re in school, you take them to the bus stop, to after-school classes, to school events, to birthday parties…
And not strangers you brush past on the street, either — people you are now inexplicably bound to, through no fault of your own except your child.
You can’t dodge them and you can’t escape them. Your insides may be screaming, but your duty to the kid keeps the smile bolted on.
Introvert parents get exposure therapy every single day — and never, ever get cured.
Which makes you realize: an introvert parent who also chooses private school is making a truly heroic sacrifice.
Niu-ma still cannot fathom why anyone would volunteer to throw a house party for strangers — but volunteers there were. This round, eight families signed up to host new-family potlucks.
I hope every one of them is a genuine, socializing-loving e-person, and not an introvert doing extrovert cosplay like Niu-ma.
We picked the house closest to ours: a beautiful home near Lake Washington. The hosts, immigrants from Turkey, were warm, friendly and generous, with a whole table of Mediterranean dishes.
Niu-ma, as always, came fully prepped and deployed her entire repertoire of sparkling conversation.
At some point someone sighed happily: isn’t this school wonderful — always organizing these social events, bringing the parents closer together.
Heads nodded all around. I smiled and said nothing.
In my head I was already flying home, curling up in front of my computer with the internet and a bowl of ice cream.
My social battery was blinking red, and there wasn’t much time left to recharge. Because in two days — it’s the school’s park volunteer day!
