26 oct 2005
The Morning Drive Game
by Linda Breitag
Our daughter doesn't ride the school bus. We are out of the zone for her
school, which we knew when we chose to send her there. I still can't
believe you have to have a car seat for a child in your own car, but whole
cans full of loose, unbelted kids go hurtling around the city every weekday
at rush hour. Then there's the pollution—I keep hearing the air quality in
a bus is roughly that of a lead paint factory.
One of the best things about the drive is I get to spend these 12 minute
chunks of time with her. Still, I often want to turn the radio on, maybe
listen to a call-in show about the coming bird-flu pandemic, or how somebody
accidently wrote a best-selling novel, or some other meaningful program that
just might change my life forever if I don't miss it. Deep inside I know I'm
avoiding being right here, right now, with my daughter. She never wants to
hear those programs, but instead wants me to tell her a story, sing with
her, or just talk.
"Will you talk to me?" she'll ask. I know the right answer: "Sure!" My
right hand inches away from the radio dial. "What do you want to talk
about?" This is inevitably answered with "You decide." Aargh. I always
want her to tell me about her life at school, her life without me. But I
was not graced, or possibly burdened, with a child who will deliver a
blow-by-blow account of every event of the day, a la: "So Sierra goes 'can
we have a play date sometime?' and I'm like 'okay'. But then, Hayden leaned
over and knocked his juice onto my pyramid drawing, and Miss Jessica thought
it was ME, so then..." Instead, my daughter groans: "Mooommmm!" and then
snaps "I can't remember!" Another reason to consider homeschooling.
For a couple of days, I got her into counting cell phones on the way to
school. I'm of divided mind on the whole cell-phone issue; if everyone on
earth has one, kids will grow up thinking it's unnatural to be alone with
your own body and your thoughts or, God forbid, be forced to interact with
the actual human beings around them. Let alone the landfill issue, possible
brain cancer, and idiotic tunes interrupting every meeting. And yet, okay,
sometimes it would be great to call a friend when stuck in a waiting room,
or not be at the mercy of passing cars when my own vehicle dies (although
that strategy seems to have worked fine for most of a century). So this
game for me has a decided element of moral superiority. "Look at that guy
making a U-turn with one hand while talking on his phone! Look at those
three people walking together, all on their phones!" I may just as well
have said "Look at those disgusting people who aren't as good as we are."
Though this game delights me on some perverse level, she tired of it right
away. I guess kids just don't understand the pleasure of a good snap
judgment.
But now, thanks to a desperate flash of inspiration, reminiscent of when she
was tiny and hated her car seat and a foam bath-puppet saved my butt and
many car trips, I've come up with a new game. I thought it might be good
for at least one morning, but Sophia is hooked.
The game goes like this: we see a person, walking or biking to the
university near her school, or sometimes in another car at a red light.
Then whoever's turn it is tells the other player something about the chosen
person. It could be about where they just came from or are going, and often
includes some clairvoyant prediction of where they'll end up in life. To
wit: I point out a young Asian woman jogging by in a pink sweatsuit,
ponytail flipping, face lost in concentration. I say, off the top of my
head, "She's taking a quick jog before she has to go to class. She's
training to run a marathon with her father. He's getting older and this
will be his last big race, and she wants to do it with him." Or, about a
paunchy balding man waiting at the bus stop, "He's going to see a friend at
the hospital. The friend fell off a ladder when he was cleaning leaves out
of his gutter, but he's going to be okay."
Sophia will take a turn if reminded, and she says increasingly interesting
things. Today it was something about a woman who had just come here from
another country: "and she's a little lonely, but today in class, she's going
to meet another woman, and they're going to make friends and study together.
And then! They're going to fall in love and get married! Two women!" She
is delighted with this story and its unconventional turn. Often, though,
she makes me tell two in a row to her one. For her, this stream of
mini-stories is like popping chocolate-covered peanuts into her mouth one by
one.
But the game does something a bit weird to me. While blithely ripping off
conjectural tidbit after tidbit, I notice all sorts of thoughts. For one
thing, I make everyone sound rather earnest and full of purpose, like Eagle
Scouts or future Olympians. I never say "He has a wicked hangover and is
thinking about where he can buy a paper to hand in to his econ professor,"
even if the guy in question looks exactly like that to me. Instead I'll say
"He's tired because he stayed up writing a paper all night for his class
today, but he's a little excited anyway, because he thinks it's a pretty
good paper and he learned quite a bit writing it." Or "he's really tired
because he stayed up all night talking to his girlfriend and at the end of
the night, they decided to get married and she went back to her dorm to go
to sleep and now he's going to class." As you may have already noticed, she
loves that kind of story. It fits right into her favorite "how about I'm a
princess and this is my wedding day" dress-up scenario.
Being a person acquainted with depression, I struggle with these stories. I
believe in seeing the world as it really is. I also happen to know research
shows that depressed people are more accurate at predicting what will
actually happen than are optimists. Not that it cheers them up any. So, on
a level just below each quick little vignette of hope and fun, I wonder what
I am doing. Occasionally, I will introduce a little spot of tension ("he's
tired because he had a big argument with his roommate last night") but it's
always resolved ("but they figured it out, and now they're working together
on a really cool project for their science class.") If someone's mother has
died, she was really old ("like 115!" says Sophie) and had a beautiful life.
In reality, I'm pretty freaked out by a lot of people these days.
Two weeks ago, I interrupted a mugging in my front yard, purely by accident. It was
dark and raining, and I just couldn't tell what was happening so I asked
what was going on, only to see three young men like shadows disappear,
leaving a shocked and bloody neighbor lying on the street in between two
parked cars. Last weekend, two armed men in ski masks robbed some college
students on the same street we drive to school, at the college where my
husband works. On the news last night he and I heard about a
carjacking/kidnapping including a woman being shot while locked in her car
trunk. Again, not too far from home.
I love my neighborhood. It's a community of kids and gardeners and peace
activists, artists and bike-riders and people who own hybrid cars and do
volunteer work. Immigrants, gays and lesbians, people in wheelchairs
leading pugdogs on leashes. People who want all children to feel safe. People who put campaign signs on their lawns and know the issues. And one
of the issues is racial inequity, and another is poverty, and who gets
rescued first during a natural disaster, or maybe who will get medicine and
a hospital bed if (when, they're saying now) the avian flu hits our country.
I just pray the flu can hold out until there's a regime change in
Washington. Then I hope a regime change will actually help.
But I'm not blind to my own knee-jerk racism. During the story game, I
sometimes need to give myself a little mental nudge, to tell my daughter
that the dark young man in falling-off pants, expensive sneakers, and a
swagger (talking into cellphone #11 of the morning) is calling his mom to
see if she needs something from the grocery store on his way home from
practicing with his band. Even though that may be exactly what he's doing.
Which leads me to the real point here. Why do I tell these encouraging,
gentle, human stories about people who are kind, who struggle but prevail
and learn and succeed in meaningful careers and relationships? Well,
obviously, because my daughter is seven, and my family is not in the camp
that believes "you can't shelter them from reality, you know" as an excuse
to plop their toddlers down in front of all kinds of oversexed or violent
video garbage. The hell I can't, while she's young, I say. Isn't it enough
that she knows about the tsunami? The hurricanes and earthquakes? For the
rest of her life, our bizarre attention-deficit culture will be in her face
at every turn. You bet I'm sheltering her.
But I also tell these little stories because, for all I know, they are the
truth, pure and simple. I want my daughter to think kindly of others, to
learn that life is very beautiful and very hard and we need to help each
other out, give each other the benefit of the doubt, encourage people to
step out of the stories other people want to cast them in. Heck, just being
out and about before nine in the morning is something. All these people are
going somewhere, talking to someone on those phones, maybe making plans to
volunteer at a shelter or meet someone for a birthday lunch.
"Mom, tell me about that man," Sophia says at a red light, interrupting the
hamster wheel of my mind. I look over and see him. The guy standing on the
corner, holding a ripped piece of cardboard which reads "Out of work, please
help, God bless you." Usually, if it's convenient for me, I'll dig out a
couple of bucks for these sign-holders, though I prefer to give them a good
apple or a bag of peanuts I might be carrying for an after-school snack.
The way I see it: sure, I have no idea what he'll do with the money, but
that isn't really my business. My business is to give him something so I
won't get hard myself, won't start thinking I know what's going on in his
skin and why he isn't in a car himself, driving a kid to school. But today,
I'm two cars away from him and the light's about to change, so I let it go.
"Mom," reminds my daughter. I think a moment. "Let's see—he was working
at his job, but then his daughter got whooping cough and he had to stay up
and sit with her every night, and sometimes he'd be late to work, and one
day his boss said he couldn't work there any more. But after rush hour is
over, he's going to keep looking for jobs while she's at school, and a week
from today he's going to get one. And he's going to pick her up from school
and take her to get ice cream to celebrate."
My daughter smiles.
Linda Breitag is a writer, musician and mom in Minneapolis, Minnesota. She's featured on the NOW
YOU MOMbo cd #2: Newborn Shock. |
