Notes from the School Pickup Line

Or, WHY ARE WE ALL HERE

2:40 p.m.: I know I have to leave in five literal actual minutes to pick up my kid from school, but I really just want to finish this spreadsheet I am working on and if I don't get these last few cells filled in, I think I might scream. I get it done and set my status to "Do Not Disturb" for half an hour, which is wildly optimistic, but I'm nothing if not an optimist.

2:46 p.m.: I switch out my Zoom-friendly cardigan for a hoodie and step into a pair of old Keds, grab my keys, wallet and a mask (just in case!) and head for the car. It's raining pretty hard but I am sure it will be fine. This is what I always say: "I'm sure it will be fine." My gravestone is probably going to read "Here lies Emily, she was pretty sure it would be fine, but it wasn't and now she's dead." But that's maybe the anxiety talking.  

2:57 p.m.: I make it down to the school in about 10 minutes, which should theoretically mean I can get a good parking spot, but I absolutely do not, because everyone else has also gotten here early to get a good parking space. We don't have a real drop-off and pickup line; it's just a regular, narrow street in a residential neighborhood. I squeeze my car in perilously close to someone's SUV and say my usual silent blessing to all the people who live on this block and have their neighborhood turned completely upside down twice a week for 180 days of the year.
 

School gets out at 2:15 so if you don't get in the pickup line by 1:00 you don't love your kid.

— Simon Holland (@simoncholland) August 5, 2016

2:59 p.m.: I am standing on the sidewalk and trying not to look at my phone, but what else the hell am I going to do while I stand on a sidewalk in the rain? 

3:00 p.m.: I am looking at my phone and, despite the Do Not Disturb, answering messages from no fewer than three work colleagues, but then immediately adding "Sorry I'm picking up my daughter right now, I will look at that in a little bit!! :) :) :) :)"

3:02 p.m.: Someone a few feet away from me is on his phone with what I can only assume is a client, assuring them that they will be reading the email in mere moments and that they is absolutely, positively not doing anything other than working right now. They're seconds away from the computer. They are about to respond to the email. They promise. We all bathe in the glow of this very convincing little white lie, because how many of us are bound up in similar promises and white lies? How many of us have told ourselves that the school pickup only takes a few minutes?

3:04 p.m.: My toes are wet, and I am sweaty. I have a meeting at 3:30 p.m. The woman standing to my right is wearing well-fitting scrubs that look expensive and for some reason I imagine she's a physical therapist or that she works in sports medicine. I don't know where I came up with that, but I am bored even though I have only been here for a few minutes.3:06 p.m.: Looking at all of us — the stay-at-home parents in their Adidas slides and sweatshirts, the older siblings who rushed here from the high school to fetch a little brother or sister, the professionals with flexible schedules and expensive athleisure, the young moms with toddlers in their little wagons — I am filled with a question so urgent and vexing that I am sorely tempted to scream it at the top of my lungs:
WHAT ARE WE ALL DOING HERE?
 

There's no room in my heart for hate. The Elementary School parking lot and everyone in it took that space long ago.

— Burning Mom (@MomOnFire) January 20, 2017

I mean, on the one hand, I know what we're doing here. We're picking up our kids from school. But why are we picking up our kids from school? Why are our kids not riding the bus home or walking? Sure, there's the mom with her little son who walked here from her house around the corner — too close for her first-grader to ride the bus. But then there's the working dad who scoops his fourth-grader up in a minivan to drop him off at a friend's house or a baby-sitter while Dad goes back to work — because you can only give the school one drop-off location if your kid rides the bus, never mind if they go to the baby-sitter's on Tuesdays and their grandma's house on Wednesdays and to soccer practice on Thursdays and next week they're at their mom's house. There's the high school kid picking up her little sister, because the high school is closer to the elementary school than home is, plus she has to get back to school in time for soccer practice, so she brings her little sister with her until Mom gets off work and can pick her up.

Then there's me — I could send my kid on the bus, but there's a massive bus driver shortage and the buses haven't even been arriving at the school until at least a half hour past dismissal, and then it's a 45-minute ride before my kid would actually make it home, and the school has asked very nicely that those of us who can transport our own kids probably should for COVID reasons, so, here we are. Here we all are.

Because the other unsaid thing here, of course, is that our kids — some of whom are 8, 9, 10, 11 years old — can't be alone. They can't go by themselves. They need us to release them, to collect them, to walk them, to drive them, to shepherd them where they need to go.

So we stand in the rain and we wait. We set our away messages to "do not disturb" and we say we'll be right back and we try to make it work. But every day, every single day, it all seems a little bit impossible. And every day I wonder, What are we all doing here?

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This has been the second September installment of Think of the Children, a twice-monthly newsletter about the intersection of parenting and education. If you enjoyed the newsletter, won't you forward to a friend or share it on social media? As always, I appreciate your support and feedback.