Because I am a certifiable lunatic, I drive six girls to school every morning. Imagine the Spice Girls off their tits on coke, participating in The Great British Shriek Off. Then add a sixth Spice Girl (Shouty Spice) because my ears aren’t quite bleeding enough, and that’s my car.
Two of them are my own, and the other four are from four other families. This has been going on since the start of term (although by the end of some journeys it feels like it’s been going on since the start of time).
It’s a 25 minute journey. Rolling fields, cow-strewn pastures and an incessant mega-decibel babble of absolute nonsense.
I do this purely out of love (and cos the school bus costs more than Christmas in a Center Parcs treehouse).
But the issue on the table is not my battered eardrums. It’s how they all come to join my Big Noise School Time Fun Wagon.
One of the other four lives about 4 mins drive away. Another lives a further couple of minutes away. The other two live about 3 mins drive away in the other direction (in different houses about 30 secs apart). None of them live in the direction of school.
Picking them all up would turn a 25 minute journey into a 45 minute one. This would mean everyone in my house getting up 20 mins earlier, and I don’t fancy fighting that battle every morning when my two are at their most unspeakably terrifying.
There would also be some potential additional faffing if the people I’d pick up aren’t kerbside when I arrive and I have to go from passive aggressively looking at their house whilst tapping my steering wheel to actually getting out of the car, knocking, and pretending that I’m not boiling with volcanic fury about them not being ready.
And I’d have to do three point turns with people watching me. Which makes my head hot.
So the deal is that people assemble at my house. Roll call is at 8am.
There is some disquiet amongst the mums about the fact that despite me in theory giving everyone a lift, I have asked them to come to mine as opposed to me picking them all up.
When we set the arrangement up on the WhatsApp group one mum seemed surprised (I’ve never been good at reading signals, but I could deduce this because she said ‘Oh, i’m surprised’). Subsequent messages set my Tone-o-Meter tingling. I could sense eyes being rolled.
But we’ve been like this for a month now. One mum occasionally drives her DD over whilst still in her pyjamas, and there has been some very pointed yawning, but other than that nobody’s cried or died.
I feel though that they are conveying the message that they should not be driving round to my house. Because after all, what’s the point of someone giving your kid a lift if you have to drive them the first bit yourself? Your morning has already joined the gigantic pile of historic mornings marked ‘spoiled by children’.
But on the other hand, I am doing everyone a favour so should I do even more of a favour (or the complete favour, depending on how you look at it)?
The other mums take it in turns to do after school pick-up, and my girls are returned directly to me, flung out at my front door. This is obviously unequal but a) It’s much less of a detour for them because we are within 30 seconds of the road to and from school, b) It’s not first thing in the morning so there’s less rushing around and c) I do every morning and they do one or two afternoons a week each.
We said that we’d review how things were going at half term. If they say that the situation needs to change, who’s being unreasonable? Me or them?