“I can do Monday mornings. I think. Wait –” the woman hesitated, her expression abstracted. “Yes, I can do Mondays but I’ll only have two seats free until later in the fall. Then I’ll have three.” She took a swig of coffee and looked across the pretty Bethesda kitchen at the other parents gathered there. “That would help us,” said a young father, as he brushed cake crumbs into the sink. “We could do Tuesdays and Thursday mornings. But we only have two seats.”
“I have room for three every day except Fridays,” said another woman.
“Fridays we have cello,” a third woman put in gloomily, changing the subject. “In Gaithersburg.”
This information brought a groan of pity. It was the first day of September, the academic year was already underway, and among them, the members of this hastily called conclave were trying to work out how to get at least 25 children to and from at least eight different schools. Though possessing varied backgrounds and interests, the parents were united not only in their need to arrange car pools but also in their dread of hitting Interstate 270 at rush hour.
“I thought ballet three times a week was bad. Gaithersburg on Friday afternoons totally wins the prize.”
“I know,” the cello child’s mother shrugged, “but what can you do?”
“Three times a week?” another woman asked, going further off topic. “It must be getting serious.”
“Point shoes this spring,” confirmed the ballet girl’s mother.
“OK, OK” an organized-sounding voice said, “So where do we stand with mornings? Any progress?”
There was not any progress, but there was a great deal of animated conversation as the parents tried to work out who could drive whom, and how often.
Each family’s schedule seemed to differ from every other’s. Not only that, but each child’s schedule had such baroque encrustations that it could not be neatly lined up with any other child’s schedule. One kid had early-morning reading tutor, but every other Wednesday. One had chess club until 5:45 on Thursdays. A passel of boys was playing soccer, but some were in elementary school, some in middle school, and two in high school, so of course their practice times would be different and did anyone know what time the weekday games usually ended, anyway?
Then there was the matter of vehicles. Everyone had some room in their car, but it too varied wildly. Parents who’d already sent children to college had downsized to smaller cars. Some had minivans, but also big families, so had few seats to spare. Babies had arrived in two of the families over the summer, and while they were undoubtedly sweet and beloved they also wrecked last year’s painstakingly arranged driving rotation.
“There ought to be an app for this,” someone said.
“There is! But, I don’t know, it seems too complicated.”
That got a laugh, if a rueful one. With so many children, there simply had to be some efficiencies, some beautiful economies of scale. Alas, for the moment, they were impossible to see through the logistical thicket.
Meghan Cox Gurdon’s column appears on Sunday and Thursday. She can be contacted at [email protected].
