My kids must really stink. They must smell so bad that if they were to get in your car, you'd be hard pressed to ever remove the stench.
Or maybe it's our minivan that stinks. Maybe it smells so bad that if your child was to ride in it to school, he'd have his own personal PigPen cloud and have to be sent to the nurse to be disinfected.
Or maybe it's not the smell of the vehicle but the speed at which it is driven. Maybe I drive so fast and so recklessly that if you were to let your child get into the car with me, you'd wish you'd called that phone number on the TV for some of that Gerber baby life insurance.
It's got to be one of these three things. Why else would parents be so damned resistant to carpooling?
They'd rather make 4 trips back and forth to the school in the span of an hour to accommodate all their kids' events than share a ride with the Wallachs.
They'd rather wake up at an ungodly hour on Sunday morning to drive their kid to a football game across the state - just to get there and have nothing to do for an hour in the rain before the game starts and the rest of the family arrives - than share a ride with the Wallachs.
They'd rather have 3 cars leave our street at the same time every morning to go to the same place to drop kids off - only to turn right around and come back home - than share a ride with the Wallachs.
I don't get it. We waste time and gas. We get frazzled and rush from one thing to the other. It really could be much easier if parents would only let it.
But, no. Maybe they feel that they must always be present and involved in their kids' lives. Maybe they are so kidcentric that they think they owe it to their kids to shuttle them around. Or maybe they don't want to look like they can't manage this life they've created.
Either that, or we really do stink.
Tuesday, October 13, 2009
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6 comments:
Carolyn! I just walked out in the pouring NC rain to get the mail after (dare I say?) erging, and was so pleasantly surprised to see you gracing the COVER of the Trinity Reporter! My kids got off the bus at the same time, but I had to read your article before fully acknowledging them. Great to hear what you are up to. Needless to say, I was happy to read your final comments about the getting through challenges...All my best to you,
Lou O'Brien Berl
And, damn it, get your neighbors to get over themselves and CARPOOL! : )
Lou (for even if it's Elizabeth now, it's still Lou to me),
Thanks so much for the comment. The article was fun - I think I talked TOO much about crew, of course, so the reporter distilled it down to one line. I went on about Norm Graf a bit too, if I recall.
I remember seeing an article about you in the Hartford Courant a few years back. I believe it was a love story. I was glad to read that you were doing so well. I, for one, haven't been on an erg in a million years, but hearing about your erging makes me nostalgic...
I think your last line pegs it completely. Someone has to give families permission to admit that it takes a village and parenting is very hard alone. Kudos to you for pointing this out. If we were back there, we would have ridden with your smelly kids in your messy van; )
Thanks, Dawn! We might have already carpooled at some point in our life a few years back. Who knows, my memory ain't what it was. Too much to keep track of.
Your kids do stink, but so do mine. Any kid that plays sports smells, tracks gobs of mud, and carelessly leaves half-drunk Gatorade bottles with the caps only loosely screwed on to roll and spill all over the car. Can I get a ride?
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