Slow Down!

The other day I was complaining to a coworker that I was never able to make this particular monthly work meeting because it starts at eight o'clock and I am on the hook to deliver a Kindergartener to her classroom between 8:25 and 8:40 every day. I can't remember if I was expressing frustration about missing the meeting (doesn't sound like me), or frustration about the inflexibility of Kindergarten start times, but whatever I complained about, my coworker came back with some wise, soothing words about how the important thing was to focus on enjoying dropping my kid off at school.

At the time, it felt like an Aha! moment, a gift from this wiser parent to me. Of course it should be a delight to drop my child off at school. Why focus on it as one more thing that I have to do that gets in the way of the other seventy-five things I have to do? And I thought about it that way for a few days. In fact, I put my whole morning focus off the constant hectoring to move and get socks on and brush hair and onto just hanging around and having pleasant conversation (which Naomi and I do, after Jim leaves with Muriel, quite often, and with sometimes funny results). The outcome, that week, was that we were very nearly late to school four out of five days.

The takeaway, I guess, is that simply being more mellow and less frantic doesn't make things run more smoothly, it just makes them less frantic. Which I KNOW is better for the kids. I know it stresses them out when I herd them from breakfast to clothes to socks to grooming to lunch bags, and so forth. They talk about it all the time. And just because I feel better being eight minutes early to school instead of 30 seconds early, it doesn't make it actually better. But how do I get those seven and a half minutes back while still leaving behind the frantic? And, to go back to the sage advice from my coworker, how do I make something like the daily drop-off into a meaningful thing that we do together instead of a to-do item we tick off every day?