It's nothing personal. It's just business.

Strictly between us, there is a group of mothers who scare the snot out of me. For want of a better phrase, let’s call them Executive Class. These women graduated from Yale in three years, graduated top of their class at Wharton Business School and made Senior V.P. of New Media before they turned 26. At 28, they married brilliantly. At 31, as they had planned since middle school, they had Child #1, followed exactly eighteen months later by Child #2. Having had the second child, they give up their nanny and choose to stay home with the children. They then take all this insane drive and business acumen and apply it to the lives of tiny, little children.

These women usually love me, because I am so rarely doing anything right. Frequently, one of them can be found standing next to me at the playground murmuring in my ear, “How brave of you to keep letting her eat string cheese. We took Thor vegan after reading about the rate of premature sexual development in cheese-eaters”. Executive Class moms want to hear about where you are applying to school, because they can then tell you about how they applied there as a safety for Milo or Athena, but have every hope of getting into a much better school because they are in a book club with Better School’s director of admissions.

EC mothers don’t sleep, because sleeping cuts into time they could be spending gathering data on the vaccination debate. The children of EC mothers are always advanced. A woman capable of delivering six straight profitable quarters to her corner of the Time-Warner empire is certainly capable of making sure her toddler can differentiate between an emu and an egret. If there is something in which her children are not advanced, the EC mother will find a coach. If there is no way of improving her child’s ability in a field, the EC mother will attempt to remove it. If you've ever been handed a petition to get Duck, Duck, Goose removed from your pre-school, because it is unfairly biased against the slow, know that an EC mother was wielding the clipboard.

For ten months of the year, the Executive Class mother is merely a peripheral voice chiding me about how I’m a lazy, inept parent; to which I say something like “Well, duh…”. But for two months each year, they go from being dress-extras in my life to featured players. A friend of mine has a little charity she runs. I’m not being coy, I’m not socializing with the head of the Red Cross or anything; it’s truly small, but it does some good work in the world of animal-welfare and I’m proud to call this woman my friend. Like most people running charitable endeavors virtually alone, she is exhausted most of the time so, in a moment of insanity, I offered to help her by supervising the youngest volunteers. My friend sees encouraging and training the next generation of volunteers as part of her mission and I think she should be beatified for this. As much of the training is about reminding them, over and over again, that texting their friends from a bean bag chair isn’t an act of charity, my job is to make sure that we have no more than three teenagers hanging around the shelter at any given time.

Most of the year, the volunteers come in of their own accord. From January to March, however, my phone calls triple because the EC mothers are either trying to pack their child’s high-school application full of volunteering work, or they suddenly realized the child hadn’t fulfilled her school-mandated volunteering hours, many of which mysteriously have to be completed by March 1st. These women call me, their phone tucked into their chins, preparing to type their volunteering hours into Outlook. What amazes me is that every single one of them starts the conversation the same way:

“My daughter Imogen needs to volunteer. She’ll be there from 2:00 to 4:00 on Saturday. Will there be someone there to sign the letter of recommendation I wrote for you?”

When I suggest that a) everyone wants Saturdays, b) Saturdays are booked until October, and c) I can give her Wednesdays, she gets outraged.

“But…Wednesdays are when Imogen has Behavioral Psychology and Art Appreciation after-school. I need Saturday afternoon. We have to get this done by the end of this week,” she whines. Then, after several minutes of carrying on about how important this is to Imogen’s future, I break down and offer her Saturday morning.

“No, we can’t do that. Imogen has Yoga for Pre-Teens and her test-taking tutor. No, we’re going to have to stay with Saturday afternoon.”

The same intractability and hard-headedness which worked so well negotiating multimillion-dollar contracts is now expended on getting their children notes from strangers which prove that they copied and filed for 120 minutes for a good cause. I don’t like bullies, even when they have much nicer handbags than I do. After a half-hour or so they usually hang up on me, having tasted that rarest of all flavors: thwarted.

And you already know this mother and child show up on Saturday afternoon, with the mother swearing that I was fine with it, right?

For years, I have felt guilty about edging away from these women if possible. Mothering is hard, and I should respect anyone who is trying to do it to the best of their ability. And then it occurred to me: I don’t have to like anyone who turns what should be a gratifying communal activity into a competitive sport. Since nearly everything the Executive Class mother does is based on the assumption that she and her kids are going to be the winners, what does that make the rest of us?