These are things that I don´t understand.....

Sometimes it pays to be poor. This would be lovely if we were just a tad poorer than we are.
Unfortunately, we´re always in the "no-[pay] José!" category.

It has been a rotten day, so this is rotten rant #286.

I have told you all about my trips to the pre-school we wanted Ari to go to. Sadly, it didn´t want Ari to go there. The system decided it would do everything in its power to keep average people like us away.

Again, I rushed, I went through the red tape, I tried to jump through the hoops, tried the "enchufe" route by approaching the helpful principal of the school, but all of this to no avail. Ari, Anika, and I walked over to the school one last time this morning and discovered that it has no place for normal people. Let me explain:

STUPIDLY, admission revolves around a point-system. The only category that made any sense to me was the proximity of home to school. We got all the points for that: the school is 3 minutes away from our house. That´s where our chances ended. Ari, along with about 50 other kids, was on the no-admission list. 85% of the prospective students have siblings that already attend the school. The remainder of the "plazas" were given to the poor, the disabled, and those students who come from "familias numerosas" (families with more than 3 children).

No waiting-lists, no first in line, nothing else matters at all. I´ve been thinking and fuming all day. You see, the thing that strikes me is this: Daniel and I are not rich. We wouldn´t even say that we´re middle class. Really. There is a reason I am looking for a job. We don´t own a car, we don´t own a home, and we certainly don´t dress the part of pijos. We do, however, live in a nice neighborhood. Not a fancy neighborhood, but a young family-oriented area of our city. There is a serious shortage of schools due to this. As a result, well over 100 kids (of Ari´s age, especially) are in the same situation: school-less due to a lack of points. Where are they going to go? Am I going to have to get Ari up at dawn, so that she can attend a school on the other side of town? Is she going to be assigned to one of the few schools that actually has a place for her, probably because it is completely run-down, and all the other kids were assigned places in our neighborhood because their parents don´t make any money?? ANY money.

That´s the strange thing. Even the majority of the kids on the not-admitted list happened to have points in the money-section. How did they get points there? Are people THAT poor? How can they live here, in our nice neighborhood, if we have a really hard time getting by from month to month on what we consider a pretty average income? (in order to have gotten those points, they have to be earning just one half or quarter of what we earn).

I am dumbfounded. I really am. We are not wealthy enough to let Ari attend any of the international schools in Madrid... We can´t even afford the car to drive her there!
We are certainly not reaping the benefits of the wealthy, not by any stretch of the imagination. But we are not poor enough to get anything else, either. We are, apparently, in the rotten middle.

Don´t get me wrong: I am grateful for what we have. We have a (nice) roof above our heads, food in our fridge, clothes to wear, etc. But I thought we could, (especially through my manic efforts & punctuality) at least, send Ari to a "decent" school in our neighborhood. So that I can go to work & help us make it from one month to the next. If Daniel made 1/4 of what he makes, we´d have a place on that list. And that really infuriates me. We weren´t trying to get Ari into a posh school.

I tried, by the way, to find out if we could still send her to a pseudo-private school (concertado). There is one just down the street. See, this option would be cheaper than either a private school or daycare, so I figured it may be our only option. As I was standing there, at reception desk, I saw a line of 3-year olds with their teacher, reciting "Hail- Mary" and blowing kisses at her shrine. It is, after all, funded by the opus dei; I doubted much whether that´s the place for Ari.

We are just not rich enough, not poor enough, and not Catholic enough.

We are falling through the cracks.