Car-Pooie 101

The following is an excerpt from my first book, which will hopefully, be available very soon! Stay tuned for details. (Image via spreadshirt.com)

I was beyond excited when Aubrey started kindergarten. I thought I would have so much extra time during the day to write, work out, and get things done around the house. Life was going to get easier. Not only was my child going to be in school learning and blossoming for roughly eight hours a day, but I wasn’t even going to have to get out of my car to get her there.

Lots of schools have carpool lines these days. It is a simple concept. You wait in a line, single file- just like you learned in school and when you get to the actual school building, you let your child out of the car and scratch off to Starbuck’s or for your weekly pedicure…or to go home to clean the toilets, whatever.

But alas, someone somewhere will screw up even the simplest of concepts for everyone involved. It happens all the time.

The tricky part, it seems, is not the dropping off of the child, but in the picking up. At Aubrey’s school, different grade levels get dismissed at different times, to keep traffic flowing. The kindergartners are released at 2:30, the first and second graders get out five minutes later, and so on with the fifth graders getting out of school at 2:45.

Now I’m no rocket scientist, but I do know how to tell time (if the clock is digital) and it seems to me that if I know my child isn’t going to be let out of the building until 2:45- I might not want to be the first one in the carpool line at, say, 2:25. But apparently, there is more than one adult in Mount Pleasant, South Carolina, who doesn’t understand that they are backing up traffic for miles because they decided to get in the carpool line twenty minutes before their child gets out of school. And because I am stuck in line behind them, blocked in by cones on one side and a sidewalk full of students on the other, I conveniently get to wait with them until their child gets out of school.

After getting stuck in the carpool line twice in two days, I decided to try another tactic. I got to the school five minutes early, like I always do, and backed into a parking place that would allow me to see directly across the parking lot to the side of the school. This was a brilliant idea, I thought to myself. Emma and Sadie were happy in the back seat. Emma was watching a movie on the DVD player and Sadie was happily gumming her toes and cooing to Emma in the car seat beside her. I could sit here with my babies until I saw Aubrey’s class coming out of the building, jump out of the car, run across the parking lot and be back in my car before the Super Mommy next to me had time to speed-dial Child Protective Services.

“MOM-MY! I dwop my sippy cup!” Emma yelled from the back seat.

I twisted around in my seat to reach her cup and as I righted myself, I pounded the steering wheel in disgust.

“AAAAAGGHHH! You can NOT be serious!” I screamed at the gold mini-van who had just driven directly in front of me to park on a grassy knoll that was most definitely not a parking space.

“What is wrong with these people? You give a woman a mini-van and all of a sudden she thinks she can just make up her own parking spaces! Just because you have your whole life written in bumper stickers on the back of your car DOESN’T give you the right to park wherever you want to! I don’t care how many honor students and gold fish you have!”

I opened my car door and stood in the door frame to see over her wide ass van and looked for Aubrey’s class. I caught the mini-van driver looking at me right before I spotted Aubrey and I did my very best to stare her into shame as I clumsily climbed down off of my car. I continued muttering as I walked past her open window, “ I really can’t believe the nerve of some people…I get here early with TWO KIDS, TWO, and park in a REAL LIVE parking space, and she thinks she can just wheel in here at the last minute and park wherever she wants to…” I was furious but I was smart enough to snatch Aubrey and run before a ridiculous member of the PTA called Child Protective Services on me for walking ten feet away from my car with my two children still in it.

As ridiculous as these people are, they’d do it. I know they would.

The PTA are brainwashing my child. Everyday Aubrey comes home from school with a printed label stuck to her shirt as she recites from heart her daily PTA pledge, “Momma, let’s go to Chick-Fil-A on Wednesday, October 7^th to have a milkshake with the principal. Everyone can go, grown-ups AND kids! We don’t have to eat dinner there, we can just go for dessert!”

“No, Aubrey.” I answer as she begins to cry because everyone is going.

“Momma, let’s go to Cici’s Pizza on Thursday, October 8^th for Spirit Night! All proceeds benefit Belle Hall Elementary!”

“No, Aubrey.” I answer as she begins to cry because everyone is going.

“Momma, if I sell ten packages of wrapping paper I can win a fabulous prize!”

Not only does my child come home from school every day with a sticker on her chest and a memorized monologue, but the school has invested in one of those annoying machines that calls you then asks you to, “hold for an important message.” If it was that important I feel sure that an actual person would call me.

PTA people, stop this! This instant! My child goes to public school for a reason! If I could afford to take a family of five out to dinner every night and had friends who didn’t buy all their wrapping paper half-price at K-Mart after Christmas every year- my kids would go to private school. And how am I supposed to get three kids dressed and out the door by 6:30 to get in line for the Spirit Night buffet at Cici’s Pizza if you won’t stop calling me? So stop it. Now.

I mean For The Love, I just sold fifteen lobsters in the middle of a recession. Oh, you don’t have to go back and read that last sentence again- you read it right the first time…LOBSTERS. I sold fifteen lobsters in the midst of the worst economic climate since the Great Depression. For $12.50 a pop.

I’ll give credit where credit is due. The lobsters were a pretty good idea. We had a lobster party with a bunch of our friends, everyone bought their own lobster and I cooked side dishes and we had a great time. But I’m not asking anybody to pay $9.99 for a 4×4 square of foil wrapping paper.

My sister teaches second grade in Alabama and her PTA is smart, they give you the option of volunteering or writing a check for fifty dollars. Sign me up. I’d pay the PTA fifty dollars to quit programming my child to peddle their wares on the streets of Mount Pleasant for some stupid plastic monkey that I could buy her for a buck at any Dollar General- but NO. She doesn’t want my crap, she wants their crap and she wants to earn it.

What kind of values are they trying to teach our kids today?