Field trips are my thing.
I say this knowing full well that I have a plethora of “things” at my kids’ schools. It’s not exactly like I have to go on field trips to feel like I’ve contributed something. But they’re what I do.
And on Friday’s jaunt with 35 pre-K kids on a city bus, I had the opportunity to look myself squarely in the eye and ask just why it is that I persist in loudly declaring that field trips are my thing.
I’ve ridden the city bus with preschool kids before. I’ve attended several performances of children’s theater downtown with them as well. So I didn’t think twice about being one of the parents on this particular trip to see a lovely performance of The Very Hungry Caterpillar.
Lily and her friend Amanda met me with grins when I arrived at the classroom and latched on, one to each hand. “I’m the crossing guard!” Lily announced proudly.
“Where’s your teacher?” I asked as I looked around not spotting her.
“She’s sick today,” the preschool director’s assistant informed me.
Since Lily’s other teacher doesn’t work on Fridays, this left us with two floaters, one director’s assistant, and a couple of parents to wrangle 18 four-year-olds downtown and back. Seemed like a fair fight to me, especially since the other pre-K class, with both of its teachers not only scheduled to work but reasonably healthy, would be coming too.
So with high spirits we headed in a line of hand-holding field-trip buddies across the grassy field next to the pre-K building and toward the city bus stop.
At the corner, Lily assumed her crossing guard duties. With great seriousness at her awesome responsibilities, she took the stop sign from one of the floaters, led me into the middle of the well traveled street the kids would be crossing, and held the sign above her head with both hands.
Since I was pretty sure I was more visible than a small stop sign held four feet above the ground, I stood next to her, Amanda clinging to my leg. The three of us quite effectively stopped traffic as Lily’s class crossed behind us.
Just as the last of them passed, the other pre-K class arrived at the corner. Lily looked at me in confusion—was she responsible for the safe crossing of these kids as well? The teachers on the opposite corner seemed equally unfamiliar with protocol. Not to mention the two drivers waiting with more patience than I would have shown for the woman with two little girls and a stop sign to get out of the middle of the road.
Finally, one of the teachers yelled, “There’s only one stop sign!” as if this would properly describe the scope of Lily’s duties.
So, as her class disappeared from view, she heroically continued to hold the stop sign high over her head to allow the other class to cross.
About three-quarters of them, at any rate. Because now a car pulled up with a member of the other class and his rather confused and not nearly apologetic enough grandmother, who proceeded to have a lengthy discussion with the remaining adult—one of the floaters, plainly not trained to handle such a situation—as she stood on the corner and we continued to stand in the middle of the street.
“I didn’t know what time to be here,” Grandma said unnecessarily as the driver of the first car in line, going on five minutes of waiting, glared at me.
“You need to take his morning snack out of the backpack,” the floater instructed. I understood her concern about the boy not getting hungry on the trip, but I didn’t understand why she couldn’t express it safely on the other side of the street so half of Asheville didn’t have to wait in their cars for this to be sorted out.
“My arms hurt,” said stoic Lily, still holding the stop sign above her head as the two women went through the contents of the tardy backpack.
“Her arms hurt!” I yelled.
This was not a helpful bit of information, and it elicited only an apology as more discussion between floater and Grandma ensued. Still, I felt it accurately conveyed my sense of frustration, both for the three of us trapped in the middle of the street and for the drivers piling up in front of us.
Negotiations finally completed, the floater led the remaining children across the street. One of the teachers returned—rather belatedly, in my opinion—to collect the stop sign that I feel certain Lily was happy to relinquish never to be designated crossing guard again, and I nearly tripped over her pulling Lily and Amanda toward the beckoning bus stop. There was no way I was going to miss this bus.
So I’ll admit that I was feeling a tad disgruntled, perhaps even inclined toward criticism, when we boarded the bus and pandemonium commenced.
Children squealed and yelled at each other at the tops of their lungs. They gave me hard stares of noncompliance when I told them to “scoot your bottom back” as I’d learned on the lovely, peaceful city bus field trips with Lily’s prior class of 12 well-prepared four-year-olds who had been instructed in city bus safety before boarding. In the end, defeated, I hunched over the three girls with whom I shared two rows of seats, kept them safe, and prayed that we had drawn a particularly skilled driver.
It is worth noting that I am a bit of a freak about car safety for my kids. If a five-point harness is available for my six-year-old, I figure, why on earth would I not take advantage of it? Why put my kids in boosters when they hit 40 pounds when I can keep them in five-point harnesses until they are old enough to drive a car themselves? While this does not prevent me from allowing them to ride the city bus on a field trip, it does mean that I am a stickler for the scoot-your-bottom-back-and-don’t-bother-the-driver method.
Having failed to see it implemented, I was a bit bedraggled when I stumbled out of the bus in front of the theater.
Another parent gave me a cheerful smile. “They did really well!” she exclaimed.
“You haven’t been on a city bus with Lily’s old teacher,” I said darkly, thus designating myself Cranky Field Trip Mommy.
Still, we’d made it, hadn’t we? I felt my spirits rise as we found ourselves, unhurt, in the theater lobby.
The teachers sat the children down for their morning snack, which we had planned for them to have there. When Lily’s teacher had told me about this plan, I had imagined sitting in the immense lobby area just past the end of the theater where there was room to run without getting in anyone’s way. I had not imagined we would be sitting in a corner a few yards from the doors to the theater and right at the hall to the bathrooms, which we blocked rather handily.
“We need to keep that clear,” an usher yelled to me and another mother above the din of our kids eating snack. She was shortly introduced to the director’s assistant as being new to this job, and I can only hope we didn’t convince her to quit before she gets a chance to be old at it.
The other mother and I complied as best we could, which maybe wasn’t all that well, since we had frequent escapees running down the bathroom hallway and then back past us to melt into crowds of similarly tow-headed kids.
At last, snacks were finished and children began to get restless. “I need to go to the bathroom!” said one to the director’s assistant.
“We should take all of them before the performance,” I said to her, visions of last year’s field trips of orderly children sitting quietly against the wall awaiting their turn in the bathroom as the parents ran an efficient assembly-line of stall-selecting and hand-washing dancing in my head.
“We will right before it begins,” the director’s assistant assured me, promptly forgetting because we never did.
At some point, the looks we were getting from the parents of well behaved children trying to thread their way through unruly four-year-olds registered on the adults in charge and they led the kids through a few rousing Shabbat songs. Which, though a bit embarrassing, was probably a good, educational thing to share with the assembled Asheville families.
The Hokey Pokey, on the other hand, I felt was a bit of a risk, what with all the limbs going in all those directions in a confined space. But no one was hurt and energy was burned, and we made our way into the theater with some lack of organization but, thus far, no lost children.
I’m happy to say that, once Lily and Amanda and I found seats in the chaos, we enjoyed the show tremendously. My pleasure was surely heightened by the fact that we ended up in the back of the rows of pre-K kids rather than in the fray, so I didn’t have to take any responsibility for shushing voices or stilling kicking feet and instead could cuddle my girl in my lap as ballast against the theater’s aggressive air conditioning.
After the show, there was another long wait in our accustomed corner of the lobby as individual bathroom requests were met and then we made our way out into the chilly fall day.
“The bus doesn’t come for twenty minutes,” someone informed me as we trudged along a busy downtown street, children weaving their way among other children in a fungible stream of small people that I could only hope would sort itself out properly.
Someone found a nice area to sit in front of the theater in a circle around a large planter, just far enough from the busy intersection to feel reasonable. Mostly, it was in the sun, so I was placated.
Until boys started jumping from the bench where we were sitting into bushes close to the street. And gleefully pulling leaves off tender saplings. And looking at me like I was some kind of a stranger when I told them to stop. And trampling through the circular planter like it was designed for this purpose. It was not.
Minutes passed. Lily chatted with her friends, as oblivious to me as the kids I was telling to leave the plants alone. Slowly, the idea that the field trip was more or less over and I could easily walk home dawned on me.
I leaned over and put my arm around Lily. “I’m going to leave now,” I said.
“No!”
“Honey, you don’t need me. You’re just going to ride the bus back to school and eat lunch,” I explained reasonably.
“I want you! I want to put the sticker up.”
I discussed with Lily how we could put the sticker denoting my volunteer time on the chart outside her classroom that afternoon when I picked her up and that there was no reason for me to be with her downtown killing time until the bus arrived. But she was having none of it. Having already missed my favorite Friday yoga class, I let myself be suckered.
At long last, we started moving toward the bus stop. And here’s the part where I started texting four-letter words to my husband.
For the bus stop was on possibly the most congested intersection in Asheville. This congestion was heightened by the fact that some kind of utility work was being performed that necessitated the closing of one lane of traffic—the lane in which the bus stop stood, in fact, but no matter, we would get those kids on that bus if it killed me—and the closing of the entire sidewalk along that lane. Consequently, we were standing with 35 small children on a corner through which traipsed loads of people in a hurry to get to lunch just feet away from impatient drivers trying to navigate their cars through a snarl of traffic.
Children darted this way and that. The floater tried, with limited success, to get them to sit down on the dirty sidewalk where they might pick up a disease or two but at least would remain immediately safe. Over-stimulation reared its frantic head, and small beings tripped larger, unamused ones. Three buses went by and still we waited, undulating like a crazy living thing, for ours.
I held the hand of one little girl who had declared her intention to sit next to me on the bus before falling into a glazed silence borne of hunger and exhaustion and decided we had missed our bus and cried inside.
Just as Mike was offering to come pick me and Lily up in his car, the bus arrived. We dragged a wall of noise on board with us and filled whatever seats were available, cramming three children onto the two molded plastic seats in each row. As the bus lurched through traffic, I did my best to keep the kids in the row perched high above the floor from falling off. I repeatedly warned overly excited boys not to push on the emergency window. I fruitlessly placed my finger over my lips in the universally understood and universally ignored-by-four-year-olds sign for “SHUT UP!” And I kept an eye on the ones who were falling asleep, sagging dangerously in their seats on the verge of sliding to the ground.
I am grateful that Asheville is not a big city for many reasons. Perhaps the biggest, since last Friday, is that when a bus traverses most of downtown before heading north toward the JCC and then continues on—as preschoolers apparently may stand for 20 minutes on a busy street corner downtown but may not get off a bus on the far side of the street where the JCC is located because it’s too dangerous for them to cross—traveling up to the Grove Park Inn and then finally, blessedly, looping its way back to deposit you gently on the lawn of your destination, it does not take nearly as long as it would if Asheville were, indeed, a big city.
With a final burst of something I could not quite call energy, I helped herd the kids back to pre-K, avoiding at all costs any sign of the crossing guard stop sign, and held Lily while she placed my volunteer sticker on the chart.
So at least I got that for my trouble.
I’ve since tried to fathom what yoga lesson I’ve learned from this episode. Issues of control and the lack of it have batted their way through my brain as I debate with other parents whether it is better not to know what goes on on a field trip like this or whether, now that I know, I feel compelled to continue going on them so I can at least assure myself that someone is paying attention to the safety items on which I am fixated.
Maybe, I have mused, the point is that I was actually considering giving up field trips. This is a big deal to me, since I have a hard time changing gears once I’ve made a decision. Maybe this field trip was a lesson in letting go.
But the more I thought about it, the less sure I was what the lesson was. Was I supposed to feel glad about remaining committed to field trips? Ashamed that I couldn’t take a clear sign to back off to heart?
And then I figured it out. The point isn’t whether I choose to continue in my rigid adherence to my children’s field trip schedules. It isn’t whether I am admittedly a bit of a neurotic for not being able to stop.
The lesson is that it doesn’t matter.
There are so many choices presented to us in life. When reading “The Road Less Traveled” senior year of high school marks us all forever, it’s tempting to believe that we have a responsibility to make the “right” choice. While I’ll concede that there’s something to be learned in not making the wrong choice—the selfish one, the hurtful or spiteful one, the choice made in anger—I feel quite certain there’s no such thing as the right one.
In Georg Feuerstein’s authoritative Encyclopedia of Yoga and Tantra, the entry for “path” reads:
Spiritual life is almost universally represented as a path that leads from a state of spiritual ignorance (avidya) to wisdom or enlightenment.
I doubt Robert Frost would disagree. The path isn’t literally this choice I’m making right now—what college to attend or whether to continue to be The Field Trip Lady. The path is the bigger picture, what I want to learn from the choices I make, what road I want to travel in life, how I choose to achieve wisdom and, if I’m lucky, enlightenment.
So I can choose to go on all my kids’ field trips or not because whatever choice I make, I’ll be making it for the right reasons. The lesson is in being content with whatever choice I’ve made, and being open to what it might bring me.
That lesson turned out to be a pretty easy one. Once I accepted that, crazy or not, I was going to continue with my quest to attend Every Single Field Trip, I spent Tuesday at the Nature Center with Jake’s first grade class and Wednesday at the corn maze with Lily’s pre-K.
What did it bring me? Hugs and hand-holding and those funny grins you get from kids who aren’t yours but who love you anyhow for coming on the field trip with them.
YogaMamaMe 