My Motherhood My Parking Lot

A short visit

I am visiting a friend of mine who has two children, 13 and 16.

The other day after a series of perfectly enjoyable or at least neutral errands, one of which was picking up her younger child (at a convenient cul-de-sac adjacent to the middle school which avoids the school parking lot) we were on our way back to the house. I was excited because I desperately needed to pee (as usual) and it was going to happen soon! 

But then my friend said, “Oh shit, I have to pick up my other kid too.” 

At first I was like, fine whatever. I had zero feelings about this. 

But then my friend said “This sucks, now we’re going to have to take such short naps before we go out,” and I said, “Why would we have to take such short naps, doesn’t this take like five minutes?” but no one answered me. Then the younger child said “Yeah, she should come out by 4:00, and we should be out of the parking lot by 4:15 or so.”

It was 3:40.

“What?” I said. “I don’t understand.” It was explained to me that this was a three-part journey. They did not phrase it this way or at any time divide it into three parts, but I now saw what we were dealing with. Part One. The cars line up. Part Two. The kids come out of the school and get into the cars. Part Three. We attempt to leave the parking lot with all these other assholes.

I always hear parents talking about picking their kids up at school and I myself have done it before four or five times, complaining all the while, “This is so stupid, has no one ever heard of a school bus?” But this was an unusually torturous school pick up situation. Luckily I would be able to observe it exactly once and then feel sorry for my friend about it forever.

“Well, I am just going to go into the high school and use the bathroom,” I said.

My friend and her daughter both laughed out loud. Apparently this perfectly normal idea was both hilarious and creepy. Apparently you can’t just go into a high school, even if your child goes there, or you are with someone whose child goes there, and use a bathroom. 

I cast my eyes longingly about to the various wooded areas surrounding the school. My friend said, “You can go pee out there but if you get caught don’t say you know me.”

My friend has a bladder the size of an aircraft carrier and was playing some game on her phone called “Wingspan” which is how she not only tolerates but revels in having to do this every day. She started to explain it to me. “The bird goes to the grassland and then it lays eggs and you can get a rat for it to eat,” she said. “But this bird needs to eat seeds and so you need to get…”

This went on for quite some time. I finally said, “I’ve never been so bored in my entire life.”

The daughter in the backseat agreed bird game sucked then mentioned that maybe there were porta potties somewhere and there was supposed to be a text to the daughter who was still trapped inside the building that probably had 200 toilets in it, none of which I could use, who was going to come out soon so that we could transition from the waiting for her portion of the errand to the waiting to leave the parking lot portion but somehow this little plan died. I was too embarrassed to bring it up again so I just sat there and watched teenagers gradually emerge from the school, which was brick and boring: a high school. I remember only one person. She was wearing plaid pajama pants and had a full face of expertly done makeup. Aside from the pants, she looked like she was going to her job as the assistant to the head of Capital Records in 1985.

One kid looked a lot like a kid I’d seen in a photograph earlier that day on my friend’s mother’s refrigerator. I was about to say, “That kid looks a lot like your nephew, weird,” and then I realized it was my friend’s nephew. 

The daughter got into the car. We sat there. There were like 50 cars ahead of us and they were all just sitting there. Every once in a while a car would move a foot. 

“This is truly unbelievable,” I said. 

“Yeah,” my friend said, “It’s like getting off an airplane every day.”

My friend had been complaining since I got here that people in this region didn’t know how to drive, that they seemed too essentially polite to take on the kind of personal agency that is required to move their vehicle forward in space. What was going on now was that we were about six cars away from our single lane splitting into two but a car in front of us was letting everyone trying to leave the parking lot to our left come out, and a Tesla behind them was blocking access to a shoulder that would have allowed us to sneak into that upcoming second lane and get the fuck out of here. “Look at these people,” my friend said. “Move over, stupid Tesla. Lady, stop letting everyone go. Unbelievable.” 

This went on for a long time. “This Tesla is insane,” my friend said. “No Tesla! No! Bad Tesla.”

Finally she said, “Fuck you Tesla,” and with the same energy and skill she has used to master the Wingspan app moved around the Tesla and out of the bewilderingly inefficient school driveway into the street. It seemed like she had done something possibly illegal and probably highly selfish but I didn’t care at all. 

A few weeks ago someone I barely know tried to tell me I was secretly sad about not having kids.

I said it was highly unlikely there was some undiscovered repository of childlessness-oriented sadness in my mind.

I should have said  “Have you ever picked up a child at a school with more than 2000 students where half of them live on the other side of a freeway which is crossed by a bridge with no sidewalk in a community that has no reliable school buses when you have to pee.”  

My friend Heather’s account of this is on her ASK MOLLY substack.

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