Soccer camp is this week, which means two fifteen minutes drives, twice a day. The drive back is more nerve-wracking, because there's the issue of making it home in time to meet Olive's bus. Namely, it Can't Be Done. Sabina is more than capable of meeting the bus, preparing Olive's snack and getting her all set up with Pot, but I feel pretty strongly that shvitzing in the car and silently praying to make all the lights is instrumental to Olive's uneventful arrival. On Tuesday and Thursdays there is also speech therapy sessions with MRMaria, which meet within striking distance of soccer camp but nowhere near the soccer camp time slot. Then on Wednesday, there's a youth group meeting for Sabina: again near soccer camp, but beginning and ending several hours before soccer camp starts. I know, it could be a lot worse. Olive's camp experience involves no driving for me whatsoever, and I've managed to spend the first 11 years of my parenting experience avoiding these day-chopping to-and-fros that women before me have endured for tens of years.
There's nothing in the sphere of mothering duties that makes me feel like I'm coming up short as much as the driving. The other moms make it look so easy, pulling into the correct firelane and weaving through the phalanx of orange traffic cones. I see them in their high pony-tails and yoga pants, looking as if the timing of their drives is something they barely have to think about.
I feel a sense of camaraderie when I first pull into the appropriate parking lot, and as if we should all be leaping from our minivans and high-fiving each other or even embracing. We all made it! We're relatively on time! Let the record show that we have accomplished one more measurable and heinous task in the name of our children's happiness and well-roundedness! It's the same feeling I'd get after a session of breastfeeding when I really hadn't felt like sitting still but the baby wanted it: the satisfaction of snapping the nursing flap closed afterwards, that sense of a successful, small sacrifice.
But when I get out of the car, none of the other moms (or occasionally, dads) look as if they've paid any emotional toll. I try to tell myself that other things bother them, other things register as winceable duties. Maybe they're taxed by the diapers, the sleeplessness, the juice that must go into the orange sippy cup and not the blue sippy cup, the crayon marks, the biting and the MINE! MINE! MINE! stage. Maybe they're Not Baby People, and the driving is a drop in the bucket compared to the spitting up and ill-timed bouts of stranger anxiety. Maybe they'd rather drive thirty miles over potholes with frequent stops for freight train crossings than deal with a child who needs help wiping but feels most emphatically that he does not.
When my children learn to drive? LB is handling all the behind-the-wheel practice sessions.
maybe you need a better sound system in the car! :) i strongly believe that all those hours of arrowsmith and johnny cash have enriched my son's life.
Posted by: Elizabeth | July 14, 2009 at 06:25 AM
Agree with Elizabeth on this one. I always insist on a nice stereo in the car. Makes the driving much easier. But then, this is Jen's driving and maybe no radio would be good. The least amount of distractions the better off those around her will be. LOL
Posted by: Debbie | July 14, 2009 at 06:41 AM
The paragraph beginning, "I feel a sense of camraderie. . ." is pure gold. I'm not into the driving-everywhere stage yet, but I sure can identify with the nursing thing! I dislike driving, but I don't think my dislike/anxiety reaches Jensian levels. I am sending you a psychic high-five through the ether.
Posted by: tamara | July 14, 2009 at 08:20 AM
When you're driving, for me the key thing is that BOTH OF THEM ARE STRAPPED IN. And when they want stuff or drop stuff or row with each other, I am allowed to say 'I am not dealing with it because I have to concentrate on driving.' It's like a free pass to just ignore them.
Posted by: The Coffee Lady | July 14, 2009 at 08:29 AM
Well,what can I say?---as you(and now the world) knows.I don't know how to drive. I better be good because the Dante hell for me will be an eternity behind the wheel. But maybe,fighting doctors and nurses and nursing a baby when no one else did will be my salvation.Ojala!
Posted by: Irma | July 14, 2009 at 09:06 AM
Irma, I have a feeling you're good as far as the afterlife is concerned. :)
Posted by: tamara | July 14, 2009 at 01:07 PM
My eldest child is 14 and this summer is the first time I've done so much daily back-and-forth driving, because he's going to camp three towns away. I've never had to drive them to school because we live two blocks away. I've never been part of a car pool, either.
Which means I'm only now discovering how all the other moms get so much done. If you're up and dressed and have finished a Major Task by 8:30 in the morning, what are five or six other errands? It's overcoming inertia that always eluded me.
Oh well--live and learn! Maybe.
Posted by: Poppy Buxom | July 14, 2009 at 09:40 PM
"tens of years" :D
Posted by: Miss Susan | July 14, 2009 at 11:11 PM
This is actually the first year that the children at Casa de Larue have been picked up by bus, in FRONT OF THE HOUSE.
I had a margarita to celebrate this.
Also? I consider my car time my sanctuary - it is often the only time I am alone that doesn't involve the bathroom. One would think that teenagers only want to be alone, but this would not always be the case. It is a conundrum.
Posted by: Larue | July 14, 2009 at 11:46 PM