Photography by Lori K. Tate
One of my favorite quotes is, “You must do the thing you think you cannot do.” It’s from Eleanor Roosevelt, and anytime I’m intimidated by an assignment, event or challenge, I look to it for strength. I even use it as the signature on my e-mail. So last week when Graydon’s teacher assistant e-mailed that they needed parents to volunteer for carpool duty so that teachers could get vaccinated, I turned to this quote.
A little background here, carpool at The Tots’ school is a well-oiled machine that involves Fosse-like choreography. For years, I opted for the walk-up option because A. I love to chat with other parents. B. Waiting in line eats up time. And C. I was terrified of the carpool line.
Back to the present. The e-mail request sat in my box, and I intended to answer it, but soon, daughter, mom and work responsibilities camouflaged it, and I forgot about it. (Nevermind that Covid fatigue has hijacked most of my cognitive skills.)
Regardless, I received another e-mail asking for help, and in a moment of bravery and duty, I said “yes.” After all these teachers have done for my kids and everyone else’s kids during the past year and all the years before that, the least I could do was throw myself into the carpool dance for an hour so that they could be protected from a ruthless virus.
When the day finally arrived, I went to the front desk to get my Covid clearance. Keep in mind that it’s been almost a year since I’d stepped foot in my children’s school, so the weight of that threw me off my game, which was on shaky ground because of the task before me.
After playing a montage in my head about how school used to be, I found my contact at the end of the hall. She was already communicating on her walkie-talkie. “This was it,” I thought. No turning back. I was about to go into the trenches— for realz.
She quickly went over the rules (all of them boiling down to not letting children walk in traffic) and instructed me to pick a station. For a few minutes, it was just me out there under the awning, enjoying a much-needed 70-degree day.
Then the invasion began.
I heard a teacher ask, “Can I tell her to let them go?” and then they just started coming. An army of minivans and SUVs displaying carpool numbers and names filled the lanes. As I looked toward the road by the school, the line of cars kept growing. It looked like that scene in Braveheart when the English army swiftly rides on horses into battle. These parents were coming for us, and they weren’t leaving until they had their kids buckled in and secure.
Keep in mind that they weren’t the only ones advancing toward us. There were the kids. Everyone from talkative kindergarteners to moody tweens, all armed with heavy backpacks, water bottles and the occasional piece of artwork. They knew the steps to this dance as I stood there with two left feet.
Regardless, I persevered by escorting a first-grader to her dad’s pick up. “This is not so bad,” I thought, as I put her in the front seat. The gracious dad smiled at me and told me she had to ride in the back. Carpool lesson number one: It’s frowned upon to put a child who needs to be in a car seat (by law) in a regular seat in front of a windshield. Check.
Somehow I safely delivered a couple more kids to their parents when a teacher asked me if I wanted to man a station or motion parents where to pull up. After hearing me sputter out a couple of sentences summing up how clueless I was, she thought it best for me to man a station — under her supervision. Thank God she threw me a life preserver. If she hadn’t, kindergarteners might have ridden home in the flatbeds of pick-ups, their artwork landing in ditches.
Despite my ineptness, the line didn’t let up. I’d shout out a kid’s name only to realize that they were standing right beside me. About 30 minutes in, my mind began zoning out until a mom in a minivan asked if I could walk her daughter to the car. The child was standing five feet from me. I apologized profusely, and luckily, this sweet mom understood where I was coming from. “Carpool is brutal,” she said in a tone usually reserved for talking to someone who’s about to go in for their first colonoscopy.
Finally, the traffic thinned, and the teachers began clearing out. They went back to their rooms to wrap up their day and tackle whatever personal responsibilities lay ahead in the afternoon. I stood there thinking that they we should all be heading to a bar after the trauma we had just survived — this from someone who hardly ever drinks alcohol.
As I picked up The Tots from their classrooms, I thought about all of the things teachers do in addition to teaching. The list is endless, involving so many skills, talents and tools, each task requiring a dose of patience, understanding and in the case of carpool, endurance and military strategy.
While we’ve all faced challenges during the past year, teachers are one of the groups that’s been stretched the most. I often think about how I would react if the entire format of my job changed over a weekend with little to no notice. I’d be horrified. Yet, that’s exactly what happened to our teachers last March. One minute they were writing lesson plans on the board for the next day. Then the next day showed up in completely different packaging. Pivot doesn’t even begin to cover the magic educators had to perform in a couple of days.
That said, when I hear people complain about teachers, it makes me as angry as it would to hear someone say something disparaging about Dolly Parton. These folks are doing an amazing job of educating our children in an unprecedented and scary situation. This past year has been a curve ball like no other, and if you didn’t sharpen your empathy skills during this mess, you need a kindness tune-up.
Consider the proverb I recently learned — “Don’t judge someone until you have walked two moons in their moccasins.” The potency of this gem is beyond relevant today. That’s why it stuck with me (that and the fact that it’s about shoes).
Working carpool line gave me an hour in the moccasins of the teachers and staff members at our school, and all I can say is thank you. Thank you for loving my kids, and thank you for proving Eleanor Roosevelt right once again. You really must do the thing you think you cannot do.
P.S. Weekly Winks will return next week.
P.S.S. Send a Wink of Goodness to a teacher and/or school staff member. They could surely use it.