Schools are back this week, which means parents are back on the road. The morning journey to school or nursery should be so simple – short, local, well-practiced. What could go wrong
1.Arriving late. A minor mercy amid the small child night-sleep chaos is that you often have nowhere to be in the morning; there’s a cushion of time for Mummy and Daddy to pull themselves together. No more: the giant mass of the school run darkens the sky above and stamps down its immovable timetable onto your life. They’re going to school, so you’re going to school, for the next umpteen years. Every five-minute block between the alarm and walking into the classroom door is accounted for, dedicated to the daily scavenger hunt/obstacle course of Getting Ready. The slightest snag in your choreography – a bumped head, spillage, or empty cereal box – and things can spiral. Down, of course.
2.Forgetting something. Lunch box. Coat. Homework. Library books. Milk money. Brushing teeth. Medicine. Trip payment. So many options to mix and match.
3.Refusal to go. Parents go through a mysterious change between their kid’s first and second days of school. On the first, the parents leave the child after an extended goodbye of mutual devastation. On the second, the parents tell the kid to suck it up and get into the classroom pronto because they’re late for work. That said, it can still be heart-breaking if your child doesn’t want to go, and it ramps up the jeopardy in the already nerve-tattering morning scramble. On any given day, children are liable to suddenly decide that formal education isn’t for them.
3.‘Wardrobe malfunction’. On one of Boy’s first days at school, I was sent into a blind panic by the continuous and unexplained falling down of his trousers. I had to ask another parent for assistance. But watch your own wardrobe too. The school day morning is all about getting the kids ready, and you can easily forget that the school run will be taking you, an allegedly functioning grownup, into a public place populated by grownups. Thankfully I’ve never strolled in with a toothpaste crust on my stubble or my fly down. Imagine.
4. Parking and rain. These two beasts collaborated one morning when, in a downpour, the road outside the school became so clogged with cars that both lanes came to a standstill. We all sat there facing-off through our wipers as it sank in that we were trapped. Eventually, a decisive fellow got out of his car and organised how to free ourselves up, but the experience was so perfectly bad that it felt like a parable, the moral being ‘always walk’ or ‘car-use will destroy us’, or perhaps, ‘home school your children’.
5. Injury. Walking, cycling or scooting all open a vast vista of potential mishaps, but even if you drive, plenty can go wrong. Once, Girl simply fell out of the car and cut her leg. Another time, I saw a boy we knew with a cut eye going into school. He’d also fallen out of the car, according his granny.
6. Meeting other parents. Walking into school is like entering a computer game in which little characters keep emerging from the horizon towards you, and you must make a split-second decision about what to do about them. Smile and keep walking? Stop and chat? Blank them? The faces are familiar, but what are their first names and which kids do they have in which year and class, and are they friends with your kids? Come on, remember! Now! They’re passing!
7. Small talk with teachers. I’ve discovered a few useable dad personas within myself, but I’m yet to meet ‘dad interacting normally with teacher’. What are teachers? Are they like your friends? They might be your age or younger, and you see them every day. Or are they more like ‘teachers’ – the image that’s carved into you from kids’ books or from your own schooling, strict and stern, and should be addressed Mr/Mrs/Miss/Ms? Or are they more akin to, say, a dentist, providing your family with a professional service? Or are they, as I suspect, in a category for which we have no precedent to help us relate to them?
If you do make it through this assault course all the way into the classroom safely, your steps back to the car truly are the springiest.
David Mitchell 