Walk a Mile in their Shoes

My kids have been being really naughty on the school bus.  Oh, I hear you say, tut tut, cheeky kids!  Surely they cannot be that bad.  Well, one of them spat on a little kindergardener a week ago- that's how bad we are talking!  The context is that they were playing 'spit tag' which I guess makes it slightly less disgusting and feral but only slightly.  They have been loud and shouting, smacking each other with their hats, changing seats and generally making the bus driver crazy. 

Last year we had two separate complaints from the bus driver about them.  This year, after the spitting we had one child's bus pass confiscated for the day.  We tried explaining to the kids how valuable and important the transportation was to them, but it was apparently ineffective.  I know this because on Friday I was asked onto the bus by the bus driver and had to nod apologetically while he explained that he had had enough of my children.

Sheez!  What are we to do?  We have warned, threatened, grounded... What to do?  It was obvious to both of us.  The only thing we could do was make them walk to school once.  It's a full 10kms from our house to their school.  Far!  The walk would be difficult, tiring, uncomfortable and most of all MEMORABLE!

So today I got on my runners, we woke the kids at 6:30am and were walking as the sun was coming up. They began the trek positively.  Oh, isn't that lovely?  We wouldn't have seen that if we hadn't walked.  Oh I'm not tired!  This is great, actually... In an hour's time they were puffed, sweaty, over it and HALFWAY!  I showed them on my phone gps that they had only just gotten halfway to the school and it was 10 minutes to class time.  Our support vehicle arrived in time to whisk us to school with some (hopefully) changed opinions about the value and importance of their bus driver in their lives!  Mean?? Possibly.  Effective?? Let's hope so!

You can pick your friends...

My mother always used to say to us, "You can pick your friends, and you can pick your nose but you can't pick your friend's nose."  Upon reflection I must question why she says this.  To my recollection we didn't have any sort of chronic nose picking habits, let alone any desire to explore our friends' nasal passages.  Of course my sister did sport a cruel rhyming slang nick name that will NOT be making an appearance on this blog, thank you very much.

No, I think maybe my mother said this (besides the fact that she thought it was funny) to remind herself of the inarguable fact I have been contemplating lately: you cannot make friends for your kids.  That simple.  You can't.

It's really quite a difficult fact to come to terms with, and one which accompanies the void in your sphere of parental influence called the school day, which stretches out like an empty space where your guidance and instruction should and used to be.

My kids have struggled with the friendship thing.  Each in their own way.  Of course my older two children were far more deeply affected by their early years and this has demonstrated itself in a variety of ways not acceptable in the school yard: picking up and eating food off the ground, taking jokes seriously and having a tantrum or cry, stealing food from others, trying to garner sympathy and get kids to do everything for you... the list is very long.  There are (LOTS) of times when this journey feels hopeless and endless.

However, we did have a birthday party for one of our kids recently.  She has really struggled with gaining and keeping friends.  She had a lazy eye, no social skills and an allergy to wheat that left her speaking like that Miss Teen America contestant who kept saying "The Iraq" in that infamous YouTube video.  Her party last year went so badly that a bitchy mother actually sat at my back porch table and told me she had no idea why her kid was invited because they weren't friends.  Shameless, really.  Why did they come if they didn't care about her?

So this year's party was a relative success in comparison.  Only three of the seven children she invited attended, but they were genuinely interested in being a part of her special day.  They wanted to play with her, they wanted to be her partner in games.  They LIKE her.  A small victory on the long, long road to gaining social acceptance, but hey, we'll take it.  Because at the end of the day we can't actually pick our kids friends or their friends noses.  We just have to hope that we can somehow steer the spaceship called our children toward that dream-galaxy called acceptance, love and friendship or at least toward self-acceptance.  (And no nose-picking!)