It’s only five or six minutes in the car at a time, but I didn’t realize how much I’d missed it.
To my children, it’s probably just a ride home. To me, it’s a window into their world.
As we’ve learned how to coexist with this coronavirus pandemic, my children have resumed their busy schedule of after-school activities. I’ll do my share of pickups and drop-offs along the way.
There was a time when they were much younger that these kinds of quick trips across town frustrated me. They interrupted the night. They kept me from doing too much at one time, and you were constantly checking your watch to make sure you didn’t miss a pickup time from the sport in season, a dance class, 4-H, a karate class, whatever tickled their fancy at that time.
As they got older, I learned to love these short trips more and more. Especially as our four girls grow older and become more independent, there are seldom times I’m locked inside a vehicle with just one of them.
It’s where I get to hear how their friendships and schoolwork are going. It’s where I’ll hear their versions of world events and be able to clarify things that maybe they hadn’t considered. Beyond being the chauffeur for the ride, I can be their friend and dad at the same time, if only in five-minute increments.
I really look forward to those short trips back and forth. They’re long enough we can giggle about something silly, exchange something personal from when I was a kid or hear their big ideas about how the world should work.
Then the virus hit back in March, ruining everything. All of a sudden everything was done by remote. There wasn’t a reason to hop in the car and make a short trek from here to there. Gone, too, were those one-on-one conversations I’d learned to love.
Sure, we were all living together in the same house all the time, but we were there together. There weren’t opportunities to chitter chat on a one-to-one level. We may have been captive in our home, but each of my children never had a captive audience with their dad.
The routine is starting to pick back up now. At first, I was frustrated when my two daughters in middle school had their volleyball practices starting and ending at different times, as it meant a lot of trips to the gym. I’d forgot how much fun each is individually, and my grumpiness soon passed.
Now things are really in full swing, with the return of dance classes and other assorted appointments in the evenings. It keeps us busy, but it keeps me in the loop of their lives. I’ll never pass on the chance to ferry them to different events as long as I get to treasure these conversations we can only have inside the car.
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