The politics of school pick-up

My blogging heroine Mrs Woog wrote a post last week called The Cost of Collecting Your Kids. It was about the hell of school pick-up waiting zones, parking inspectors and fines.

There is a similar purgatory endured around my way. One mum got fined $1300 recently because the nose of her car was in a no-standing zone, then she left her sick toddler in the car while she ran across the road to grab her daughter and jay-walked in the process.

Ouch.

Since becoming a stay-at-home mum, I’ve become aware of different tribal behaviours among the school pick-up mums.

I belong to the park-and-walk-into-the-playground gang. Our local school is ENORMOUS, which sometimes means parking a looooong way from the school. I might get a closer spot if some of my members didn’t position their 4WDs smack in the middle of two spaces in their haste to have a chinwag with their girlfriends in the schoolyard. Not quite as infuriating as the ones who – the latest school newsletter informs me – are blocking people into their own driveways in their haste to collect their kids.

Occasionally, I join the walk-to-school crowd. This is pretty arduous as we live 25 minutes from the school, up a hill (ok, a slight incline) and my children are champion whiners. But there’s a certain satisfaction that comes from the family having a chance to chat/whine, exercise and cut down on exhaust emissions before the school bell. Totally negated when I forget to pack their lunchboxes and hare back up again in the car.

I find the waiting-zone gang a curious breed. Especially the ones who arrive 30 minutes before the bell so they can hog a prime spot (their fingers tightly crossed that a parking inspector doesn’t turn up). Don’t they have better things to do with their lives?

Perhaps the smartest tribe is the one whose kids have bus passes, so they can catch public transport home. While I’d miss the social aspect to school pick-up, I can see the appeal in not having to turn up at all. And the extra hour it would would add to your day.

One of my friends mixes it up, sometimes she’s arrives in person, sometimes the kids make their own way home. On the days she does turn up, she often leaves empty handed because her children decide they’d rather catch the bus than walk three blocks to her car.

The playground itself comes with its own strange rules. Everyone has their special spots to wait. Some mothers aren’t speaking to other mothers. Dads who brave the schoolyard sometimes get the cold-shoulder and suspicious looks.

Despite the social intricacies, I’m enjoying being there each afternoon to collect the Sprogs, having a backpack tossed at my feet as Sprog 2 bolts to the monkey bars to work on her callouses. Sprog 1 turns up eventually, last-kid-in-the-school, mooching and studiously ignoring anyone’s attempts to converse with her. I recently resorted to grabbing her chin and pushing it upwards in the direction of a mother addressing her, loudly suggesting that she “ANSWER THE QUESTION PLEASE”. I swear, it’s like she’s been lobotomised sometimes.

It’s fun being part of a community after so many years where home was merely a place to sleep at night. Even if it does mean baking for cake stalls, firing up sausage sizzles and hunching on teeny tiny seats for reading group, struggling out of the house at the crack of dawn for band drop-off and dodging parking inspectors.

I belong.