November 6, 2003
What a crappy drive home.
Most of the time, I don't mind my commute. I listen to music, I make phone calls, and I write lists and notes in a little scratch pad. But once in a while there comes a night that makes me daydream about chucking working life altogether and playing house mommy full time.
To get from work to home, I take the Mass Pike to 128 South. If you listen to Boston radio during rush hour, both of those roads are sure to be mentioned accompanied by any of the following words and phrases:
- On fire
- Upside-down
- Multi-car
- Hazmat
- Don't bother leaving work
Some days, there isn't even a reason for the stop-and-go traffic. It's just the Traffic Fairy sprinkling her magic fairy dust and deciding that the 20 minute ride will take two hours tonight.
So I got smart and started leaving my office at 4:30 to beat the crowd. I absolutely must get to my son's school by 6:00 or they start doing weird passive aggressive stuff like putting him in a classroom all alone and telling him to get his coat on and sit at a table and for god's sake don't play with anything because we just cleaned up. And he freaks out. When someone says, "Gee, your mom's running late today," he hears, "Today's the day mom finally ditched you for a kid who can tie his own shoes."
Today I sat in traffic and watched the minutes tick by. I calculated and recalculated what time I would have to hit Exit 16B in order to make it to school by six. By 5:40 and you're golden. If it's 5:45, better hope you hit all green lights. Any later, you're screwed.
At 5:51 I got off 128 and hit another wall of traffic on Rt. 1. I screamed in my car, but Nick Carter didn't miss a beat. I had to change the station from hostile rock music to classical because I was getting caught up in an anger feedback loop that threatened to culminate in me beating the crap out of the van driver behind me who thought that because the heat of his headlights was melting -- but not touching! -- my back bumper, he was at a safe distance.
By the grace of god who answered my prayers for all green lights in town (and no patrol cars on the off-ramp where they usually sit) I made it into school at 6:01. And everyone knows that one minute isn't really late at all. It's like a free minute. I am so relieved that I sprint into the school - and I NEVER run. Except that the school has their front desk clock set six minutes faster than the rest of the world in some sort of sick, sadistic mommy-hating game. So to them, I'm seven minutes late and the worst mother on the continent. Only I'm not, because I'm really only one minute late.
I get in and start to head toward the cubbies and two teachers scream at me that he's in the first grade class and his stuff is with him. I sheepishly backtrack and find my kid in his coat with a book bag, but no lunchbox. So I have to go back to the cubbies and you know what? You don't care where his lunchbox was. What I'm trying to get at here is that my evening started with 1 & 1/2 hours of stomach-churning traffic, followed by public humiliation provided by a group of teachers, which I'm sure will be topped off like a cherry with a note in our cubbies tomorrow morning about the inconvenience that late pickups are for the teachers. As if they're somehow fun for me.
It's four hours later and I'm still tense. The high points of my evening were watching the automatic pickup window at Zoots retrieve my dry cleaning and beating someone twenty-three years younger than me at Uno. None of this is relevant to any of you, and I apologize. But I typed up 700 words, so I have to do something with them.
Comments
Tara, take the back roads, they are quicker and much more enjoyable.