Give Me Punctuality, or Give Me Death!

School driving just might be my personal Waterloo.

I blame it on my dad (and he in turn blames it on his dad).  Dad is such a stickler about being on time that "on time" to him really means early.  Somehow that passed on to me, and nothing creates as much stress in my life as running late.  This has been a challenge for years-- as any parent can attest, kids mess up your schedule.  Now, being my father's daughter, I learned a long time ago that for every child I had I needed to tack on an extra 10 minutes to the target "leave" time so that we wouldn't be late.  For example, if church started at 9 am, and I needed to leave at 8:35 to get there on time, but I had three kids, then I mentally told myself we needed to leave by 8:05.  Inevitably, by the time I had all the last minute shoes found and last minute bathroom trips finished and kids buckled into car seats, we would be leaving right about 8:30 to 8:35.  (Yes, this is really how I did things back in the day when I had a 1 year old, a 3 year old and a 5 year old.)  The only wrench was my husband.  No matter how much I had myself mentally convinced it was time to leave at 8:05, I couldn't get Terence on board.  He, naturally, would look at the clock and say "We don't even need to load the car for another 30 minutes!"  The end result was a mom with all the young children in the car, on time, and waiting on dad who still hadn't gotten his tie on or grabbed breakfast.  But I couldn't physically force Terence to be ready on time.  That meant that I was actually more likely to be to church on time when he was working and I was flying solo with three rugrats.  Grrrr.  (Yeah, there was some frustration there.)

Anyway.  Now that the kids are a little older, I've cut down that window a little.  Even with five kids, I only tell the kids it's time to load the car 25 minutes early for church.  Sometimes they are actually in the car on time, and other times not, but either way we are never actually late to church.  (And since Terence almost always has meetings before church, he doesn't impact it at all.)  For the punctuality-obsessed person that I am, it means I am much less stressed when we get to church.  

But this does not work for school days.  Mostly because to set a load the car time 25 minutes earlier would mean no one would get enough sleep.  It's been tricky for years-- between road construction and tight drop off windows, getting us out the door at the right time was challenging.  But once M got into high school, it morphed into a whole new level of insanity.  Then this year, the difficulty ratcheted upward again.  B's start time for junior high moved up ten minutes, and J needed a ride to seminary as well. On top of that, our area of the valley is building houses like crazy again and since the county apparently didn't learn anything from the last building boom, they are not keeping up with the roads.  So the traffic has gotten dramatically congested (again). 

Yippee.  Now, mind you, I grew up in Southern California.  I am not unused to traffic.  Even our pain in the posterior traffic here still does not compare to out there.  It is not the congested bumper-to-bumper stuff that is killing me.  It is the stress about being on time.  Half the problem is getting M out the door on time.  The other time is the completely unpredictable traffic on my route.

This week we had the joy of a freight train breaking down and blocking the road in between one school and the other, and I didn't find out about it until Terence called me when I was almost to the first school.  (Not that it would have mattered.  One of the challenges of our area is the lack of alternative routes.)  We got M dropped off on time, but then spent thirty minutes in an eternal line of cars inching their way up to the only road that went under the train tracks so we could get around.

Yeah, I didn't handle it very well.  As soon as I realized there was no way I was going to get B to school on time (and possibly K & S as well) and that I would be late to pick up J from seminary, my blood pressure started to rise.  I could tell, because the pressure in my head just built into a throbbing headache.  Not good.  It didn't help that K & S decided to have a loud argument in the back seat over something stupid.  (I can't even remember now.  It was probably something like whether or not lava can kill you.  Their arguments are usually like that.)

Eventually I got a hold of Terence again and he went to pick up J and his friend from seminary, so that eased a little of the stress.  But still.  B was missing her 1st period science test by that point.  I almost, *almost* decided to throw in the towel, take the kids to the local movie theater, and see if they had any showings for Avengers End Game at 8:00 in the morning.  But I'm the adult, and I had work to do, and the kids still needed to go to school, so I held it together long enough to deliver them all to school.  Luckily, B's teacher rescheduled her science test and the K & S got a freebie from being late because the school pushed their start time back 15 minutes.

Still.  I know being on time is important.  But when I'm not, and there is nothing I can do about it, I've got to learn to relax.  Or one of these days, it might just kill me.  Literally.