I am a mother of 4. I am a mother of 4 by chance and by choice. I care for them the best I know how. I fail a lot! I do all the motherly things like cooking, cleaning, sweeping, mopping, toilet scrubbing, boo boo kissing, and the list goes on. I am also in partnership with my Spaz to home school them and release them into the wild when they are ready. So, I correct math, teach reduction, discuss condensation, define prepositions, discuss the nuances of the English language, and this list goes on as well.
With four children comes the activities, the birthday parties, the doctor's appointments, and any other event that will force me into the car and about town. At this point my trusty Dodge Grand Caravan has just shy of 140K miles on it. It was purchased new in 2005. I would say that 85% of those miles have been traveled in Snohomish County. Of course, there are situations where my lack of desire to climb behind the wheel is exceeded by the need to be somewhere. When my son broke his arm, there was no second thought as the miles I was going to drive and the amount of time I was going to invest in this event. When my daughter was hospitalized with her diabetes diagnosis, there was not internal dialogue about how much it was going to cost for my Spaz and I to travel back and forth to Seattle to trade shifts so one of us would be with our daughter the entire time she was there. As a parent we don't give this a second thought.
I do, however, question any time my children want to engage in a social activity, a menial trip to spend the $1.44 they have burning a hole in their pocket, or when a friend wants them to come over and play. All of this driving around adds up, and in my case, to about in a conservative estimate this past year about 10K miles.
These are the times where my quick calculations and recall of historical events comes into play as I participate in what I like to call 'The Fair Game'. I start to think of all the times I've done the dropping off AND picking up because I don't have anything better to do than accommodate another parent and their inability to plant their butt in the car and take on some of the burden. This gets under my skin and riles me up quicker than my kid hiding food under the bathroom sink!
Don't get me wrong, I have no problem pitching in and help out with the whole 'carpool' thing, and doing what I can in an emergency situation, but on the day to day stuff that is just fluff, I get incredibly angry at the fact that the responsibility falls on me to get my children and their friends together. As the mom with the highest number of kids in most of my children's friends social circles, who, in their right mind would think that I have the most time to drive around the countryside picking up and dropping off children?
Maybe it's selfish of me to think what I'm about to say, but I find it very selfish of other parents to rely upon me to get our kids together. If you want your child to socialize with my child, grab your keys, make a phone call, and make a frickin' effort. You drop off, I pick up - or the other way around, I don't care, but the responsibility does NOT rest squarely on my shoulders.
Yeah, I'm angry. There's more to this, and I could go on about favoring one of my children over others in regards to this scenario, but I fear that I would say too much and a public apology would be in order.
