So, I'm a Working Mom now.
Part-time. Part-time is not all it's cracked up to be, though, time-wise. Last week, I found out what my weekend schedule is going to be.
Apparently, I work every other weekend. So I'll go in at 7 am for five weekdays, then go in at 8 am on Saturday and work until noon, then go back Saturday night and do kennels for the boarding dogs, then go in both Sunday morning and Sunday night and do kennels again. Then I go in at 7 am five mornings in a row again the next week.
Then I finally get a weekend off.
This is going to kill me. It's not all that many hours, but all the back and forth and scheduling and arranging with the kids' schedules and Fred's schedule (being a minister, he of course works Sunday mornings, as well as some time on Saturdays)--well, it's a mess.
A friend's teenager was surprised to learn, last week, that our college-age daughter doesn't have a car. She shares ours, if she needs a car. Luckily, her dorm is only two miles from our house. So, we have eight people and their transportation needs, all sharing one car. People seem to think this is, well, kind of unusual. (We don't live in a place with public transportation, by the way. Well, there are some buses, but you could probably walk faster than sitting through the bus routes.)
Fred had (and has) five sisters. Having a kid in college has led him to think about himself at that age.
The other day he was remembering that, right after high school graduation, he had to go take some placement tests or something at the college he would be attending. He got in the car that he and his sister shared, drove himself to a city four hours away, and took the tests. Period.
Now he’s thinking, we would never let our daughter just take off like that. I don’t even allow her to drive on the highway yet, much less to another city. My husband said, reminiscing about this experience, “Where WAS everybody?” Two parents and five sisters and he doesn’t remember anyone else being involved in this at all.
As a kid, about age twelve I think, he used to ride a bike half an hour to get his allergy shots. Alone. Without his mom. She just sent him. I can’t imagine what our kids would do at that age if I ordered them to ride to the doctor's office and get shots, alone, but somehow I doubt any of them would actually show up there.
Fred walked to school with his big sisters, from kindergarten on. Lots of people our age walked or rode bikes to school, of course. I was looking around our kids' elementary school parking lot the other day, thinking that, when the school was new, back in the 1950's, the scene after school would have been totally different. It would have been kids rushing out the doors and running down the streets, calling to their friends. Now, it's a car line and a principal with a headset, signaling to someone in the gym which kid to send out to the mini-van next.
Fred doesn’t remember his parents attending any sporting events at school, either.
Fred's parents were normal people, not neglectful people. But they had six kids, some younger than my husband, and they just weren’t free to do everything with everybody. I understand, because we have six kids too, ages ranging from college to kindergarten. But our society has drifted toward the soccer-mom, car-line, sports-attending parent, geared for families with one to three children, so sometimes we look kind of neglectful. I'm sure of it.
When Fred was a kid, milk was delivered. (And mail came twice a day, isn’t that amazing? One of those details that you forget over the years until someone reminds you.) Having two cars was a luxury, not a necessity. If Fred's mother wanted the car during the day, she had to drive her husband to work and drop him off. So most days she was just, well, At Home, not driving all over Kingdom Come dropping kids off here, there, and everywhere.
I probably had a point when I started this, but I'm not sure what it was, now. I'm kind of tired from my Sunday morning kennel cleaning.
