It’s the first week of school, and for the first time in 17 years not one of my kids needs a ride to school in the morning or will be looking for me as they file out of school following the release bell.
Seventeen years ago when when we lived in Venezuela, our oldest son entered kindergarten and we began the school pick up and drop off routine. Since then, for nine months of the year, my schedule has been dictated by what time the school bell rings in the morning and again in the afternoon (some years it was three different bells ringing).
When we moved to Texas I met a neighbor who also had four kids near the ages of ours. I wondered if we might partner and share the load of getting our kids to school, and she kindly replied, “I don’t do carpooling.”
A few years–and many gas tanks–later, I have experienced the rich benefits of getting my kids (and sometimes their friends) back and forth to school. There have been some seasons that we shared the task of getting all our kids to school with a neighbor, but for the most part, whenever we’ve had the option, my husband or I have tried to be in the driver’s seat.
Here are four reasons why I am thankful that my neighbor said, “I don’t do carpooling.”
- The route to school is built in time with the kids. When demands of our over-scheduled culture crowd out rare moments to spend with our kids, the car ride is a regular time that we can count on being together. Last year my husband gained an hour and a half a week with our son by driving him back and forth.
- Sometimes the best conversations occur with kids when they are riding in the car. There is something a little less threatening about talking without having to look at each other in the eyes.
- School is fresh on their minds when they walk out the school doors, so we often get a glimpse into their day that we otherwise would miss if we ask them about it a couple of hours later. By the time they throw their backpack on the floor and pull something out of the refrigerator they often have forgotten what was bothering them earlier–those of us with gray hair aren’t the only ones suffering from short term memory loss).
- When friends are in the car, sometimes they forget that we are even driving in the front seat as they begin rambling between themselves about the events of the day. I would never hear as much from my kids when I asked, “How was your day?” as I would hear in those moments of eavesdropping on the conversation in the back seat–yep, a helpful parenting technique is to become a skilled eavesdropper. A back seat of friends would give me a privileged perspective of what was happening in their world (sometimes I felt like taking a wrong turn just to extend the drive).
Don’t let me give you the wrong impression–all of the times I’ve spent in the car weren’t gold nuggets to be treasured. In fact, most of them were nothing special. They were often quiet, sometimes boring and occasionally even tense. But a gold digger sifts through a lot of plain soil in order to find those special treasures. I was willing to drive the miles to be available for those timely conversations.
When my youngest walked out the front door yesterday with his car keys in hand, I realized that an era had come to an end in the GreenHouse. I’m so thankful that our jobs have allowed us the privilege of driving our kids to school through the years and that we live in a small city that we could manage the distances between home, work, school, and practices in the evenings.
If you have a choice, be the one who drives your kids to school. Be thankful for the opportunity, because soon they’ll have their own car full of their friends (with no mother eavesdropping in the driver’s seat).
