I’ve mentioned that I’m a mom. I’ve told you that kids…ALL kids…are assholes. Yours, mine, that guy over there with the facial hair that speaks of a difficult divorce in his 40’s – all of us have crappy offspring. I’m going to have to add parents to the oozing stream of ass-holery now, but I’d like to form my essay in the style of the ever popular, agonizingly over-done “open letter” format.
Dear parent picking up your child,
I see you. Sitting in your Audi at 3:15 scrolling through Facebook on your iPhone while you wait to pick up your child. We are all here for the same reason – we have raised kids who can’t imagine taking the bus or walking further than about 50 feet. I get it. My own children are full of hives and histamine at the thought of public transportation. I’m not going to say I’m better than you in that regard, but I’m going to need to look up from your juice cleanse recipe app for a quick second and see that you have simply stopped driving, forcing the rest of us to revise our own driving and parking plans. Your offence is now my outrage. Not just mine though…the cars behind you are forced to obey your new rules and go no further than the approach, creating a jagged train of Grand Caravans and Sedona’s down the street. When you stop, we all stop.
I see you. Dropping your Audi into park like Beyonce dropping the mic at the Super Bowl and returning your attention to your phone, lest you look up and be forced to acknowledge the chorus of “What the fuck?” hands the rest of us are throwing up like gang signs in our cars. There is pathos in the masses though. We, as a group, do not feel competent or confident enough to get out of our cars to ask you to make little room for the rest of us because we’re not dicks. Rather, we sit and death stare the back of your car, trying to catch your eyes in the side view mirror to pass along our disgust on behalf of the group through eye rolls or scrunched eyebrow anger. If group pyrokinesis were a thing, I assure you, your car would be a fireball visible from the perimeter. Yet, our feckless group does nothing, and we swallow our bitter pill of injustice.
I see you. Your child runs to your car with his bag slung over his shoulder. He climbs into the front seat and you start looking for a place to turn around to get out of the lot. Our passive aggressive hive mentality wants you to fail, but a kindly school bus driver sees you and motions for you to take your place among the exodus. By proxy, we now must hate the bus driver, even though his only crime is being the human we all strive to be.
So, yes. I see you. We all see you.
