The School Run

We leave the house at 8:32am. This is not negotiable. Everything before 8:32am is negotiation.

The negotiation begins at approximately 7:15, when I announce that it is time to get up, and ends at 8:32, when I close the front door. In between: breakfast, clothes, the locating of the reading folder, the locating of one specific hair bobble that is not any other hair bobble, the teeth, the shoes, the moment someone needs the toilet at 8:30, and Sam's contribution to proceedings, which is to exist loudly and require a separate parallel track of management while the main sequence is running.

The school run is, I have come to think, one of the most reliable windows into the actual operational state of our household. A good school run — where things are where they should be and everyone is ready at 8:32 without the kind of escalation that costs the rest of the morning — indicates that the underlying systems are working. A bad school run indicates that something is out of alignment. The run is the diagnostic.

The walk itself

We walk. The school is eleven minutes away on foot, fourteen minutes if Sam is with us and has spotted something interesting, which is most mornings. The walk is the part I protect.

There is no screen on the walk. This is a rule that applies to me as well as to Ellie. The phone goes in my pocket at the front door and does not come out until I have dropped her and am on my own. The walk is eleven minutes of unmediated contact with the morning — the weather, the route, whatever Ellie is currently thinking about.

What Ellie is currently thinking about, on the walk, is reliably interesting. She thinks out loud. She has apparently been saving things up since she woke and the walk is when they come out. Last Tuesday it was a question about whether fish know they are wet. Last Thursday it was the information that Priya has a dog called Brian and an extended analysis of whether Brian is a good name for a dog or whether dogs prefer different kinds of names. On Friday it was silence, which was also interesting in its own way — the particular silence of a child who is processing something that she has not yet decided to share.

I have been on this walk every school morning for most of a year. It is, reliably, eleven minutes that I would not trade for anything.

The return journey

The return is just me and Sam, who at this point in the morning is at peak social confidence and at minimum resistance to being pushed in the buggy. He narrates the return: the things he sees, the things he wants, Geoffrey the cat if we pass the right house, occasionally a piece of information about his interior life delivered with the non-sequitur timing of a two-year-old who has not yet learned that thoughts have context requirements.

Last Wednesday he told me, apropos of nothing, on the corner of our road: "Dad. I like you."

Not "I love you" — that comes later, with hugs, in the standard configuration. Just "I like you," which is a different and more considered thing.

I told him I liked him too. He nodded, satisfied that this had been established, and pointed at a lorry.

Why I'm writing about eleven minutes

Because the maths of time is always present for me, and the maths on the school run is specific: Ellie is five. She has thirteen more years of school. That is, at five runs a week for thirty-eight weeks a year, approximately 2,470 more school mornings.

Some of those mornings I will not be doing the run. Work travel, illness, the rearrangements of life. But most of them, probably, will be some version of this: the front door at 8:32, the eleven minutes, whatever she has been saving since she woke.

2,470 is a lot. 2,470 is also, from this vantage point, finite in a way I feel.

I am not sad about this. I am paying attention.

The hair bobble

It is kept in a small dish on the hall table now. This is a system that has been in place for three weeks and is currently holding.

I am not confident in its long-term stability. But for three weeks the 8:32 departure has been achieved without the bobble conversation, which represents a material improvement in the school run diagnostic.

Small victories. The school run runs on small victories.