Thursday, May 10, 2012

I Love You Ritual

I need more patience….or tolerance...
 
 Every day if the timing is just so, I get to stop for a school bus on a regular route.  This doesn’t bother me EXCEPT…..the one stop is a couple of girls and it looks like this:

Mom and Dad drive both their vehicles up the SHORT driveway and sit there with the girls in the vehicles, waiting for the bus to arrive.  They don’t get out until the bus is actually at their drive way stopped.  Then each girl gets out as the parents get out of their vehicles, and respectively they go through this ritual of hugging each parent before they slowly walk across the road to get on the bus, we wait for them to be seated as the bus will then move on.  The cars line up behind watching and waiting for this ritual on a daily basis.
A couple of things that burn my hide are, if the parents KNOW the bus is coming, why don’t they start their ritual sooner so we all don’t have to painfully watch this while waiting.  Or, do it BEFORE they get in the vehicles at the house…..one gal is in 6th grade, soon to be 7th….okay….old enough to walk up the drive, wait for the bus and just get on it when it arrives!  Seriously. Don’t the parents see us all watching and waiting to continue on our daily commutes?  No respect for that – I think they love the audience….”see how much we love our children!”  Yikes.  Drives me nuts as you can tell. 
I’m not opposed to “I Love You” rituals at all, but at the expense of others who are waiting on you every day I find this one annoying and over the top.  TIME magazine just featured a model breast feeding her 3 yr old who stands on a chair.  Yikes....disturbing photo of a ritual gone too long.  
We all have rituals we do with our children, they are healthy for children to have.  There comes a time we release some of those as our children outgrow them.  It is the journey of letting go of the apron strings…..it is hard, but we do it.  We move from blankies and bottles to cups and good night tucks. I'm talking to myself here too as Sophia still crawls into bed with me too often and it is a hard habit to break.  We all have habits.....a reminder to myself to review more of them.
I think God is working to teach me a lesson in patience that I clearly am rebelling against….because for many years now I’ve witnessed this same bus loading ritual over and over and it burns me every time.  I’m human and so are these parents who are driving me nuts.

2 comments:

Dee said...

I can see it all now...these girls one day themselves will be holding up check out lines at the store, make people wait in line for bathrooms, hold up the line at the drive through window at the bank while they adjust their wallets ETC because mom and dad taught them to be inconsiderate.

Becky said...

First thing I want to say is thank you dear friend for your words of comfort in mu blue mood.

I just want to say your blog made me laugh today. At first as I read it sounded like some cushy love story theme then you turned left and went into human mode and I had to laugh! Because yes we are all human! Jesus loves us and we are human! We get annoyed at silly parents who hold up the line of traffic; and some times we get down and need our friends to be there and laugh with us. Thank you again.

And o by the way that Time magazine cover is disturbing in so many ways and I think the school bus girls and the Time magazine kid will one day let their parent know it is time to cut the cord.

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