Nothing in life prepares you for the school run. In theory, on paper, it ought to be idyllic. What could be better than feeding a nutritious breakfast to your nine- and five-year-old, before scrubbing their cherubic upturned faces and combing down their buoyant hair, and then helping them get dressed and out to the car for the short drive to school, whereupon they can skip through the gates happily to education-land?
Instead, it’s a Thursday morning – by which point the week has taken its toll – and you find yourself shouting ‘GET YOUR SHOES ON’ for the 30th time at the sort of level that would be a serious breach of health and safety regulations were the noise emanating from a hairdryer or lawnmower.
But your children aren’t wearing ear protection. And all you really want to do is to repeat the exhortation, even more loudly – until their little angelic ears bleed and the neighbour’s windows shake. Because you’ve been trying to get them dressed for half an hour already. And you have to be out of the door in five minutes, otherwise they’ll be late for school and go on the list. And then you’ll suffer the indignity of having to state – typed on the computer – the reason for their lateness, which is in fact your lateness, not theirs at all, as you are the parent and meant to be capable of arriving somewhere on time.
But it is not only the pending shame that weighs on your mind and makes this – perhaps of all routine tasks associated with parenthood – the one most likely to shred the sanity of even the most level-headed individual. It runs deeper. Because this moment of frustration is underscored by long-buried, subconscious pains and angsts of your own which rise up from the recesses of the mind and get to the brain’s top floor just in time for you to be assailed by the shame and guilt that comes with the realisation of your own rank failure, once again, to have your children dressed at 8.25 in the morning. You also realise that despite years of trying, you have so far failed to teach them anything except for how to be late, of course.
So your only recourse is to seize them and forcefully push their protesting limbs into sleeves, trouser legs, socks and shoes while repeating the mantra: ‘GET DRESSED!’ But before you get there, as they leap on the parental bed with joyful abandon, you still hope that a stern instruction or some other encouragements might do the trick. You try bribing them with the promise of their own body weight in sugar at the end of the day or another £7 magazine that will be disregarded the moment they have assembled the small plastic toy torn from its cover. All to no avail.
Of course, you remind yourself, being late doesn’t matter. It’s just school. But it does matter. Because if you teach your children to be late for school, you are teaching them to be late for life – for every meeting or working day henceforth. And that won’t do. So getting them into school before the shutters come down at 8.50 really matters.
Then you suffer the indignity of having to state the reason for their lateness, which is in fact your lateness, not theirs at all, as you are the parent and meant to be capable of arriving somewhere on time
But by 8.29, with no progress in sight – and the school gates opening in 11 minutes – the pain in your temples becomes acute. You visualise the headmistress shaking her head as she surveys the list of late children, and then perhaps nodding because she knew it all along. They are late people, she will be thinking; that father, especially.
Then the bouncing youngest rockets towards the ceiling and gleefully swats at the light fitting, while the eldest roars ‘I’m not going to school today!’ and kicks his tie high across the bedroom. The sight of the tie is enough to give me an aneurysm. And I see the clock, It’s 8.32! There isn’t time for an aneurysm. ‘GET DRESSED!’
This time I shout loudly enough to pop my youngest’s grommets. Which is when the tie-kicker starts crying. ‘I don’t want to go to school,’ he wails, tears erupting from eyes. Oh God… not now. Surely not real emotions, ones that require steadying and love and understanding – not when we have 17 minutes to get dressed, teeth brushed, faces cleaned, shoes found, water bottles filled (schools no longer having cups and running water, seemingly) and actually there on time.
So I take a deep breath and cuddle him. It won’t be as bad as all that, chum. I kiss his tears, pick up his tie and do it up for him… it’s then that the youngest slips off the bed and lands headfirst on the dog which is currently on heat again and madly bonking a heap of washing.
Never let a disaster go to waste. In the 85 seconds that follow – with the youngest dazed from pain and shock and the dog beside herself – the final pyjamas are removed and school clothes affixed. A minute later their teeth have seen the brush, breakfast and toothpaste remnants have been smeared across their faces with a flannel and hair has been patted with a comb. They are downstairs and now the search for the shoes begins. Followed by the car keys.
Eventually, as the clock ticks down, the last shoe is unearthed – usually knotted so ferociously only Alexander’s solution will do. With relish you slash the knot free with a kitchen knife – hah! – then shove the shoe on the child’s foot and gaffer tape it so tightly it won’t come off for a week. Then you lift, carry and drag the whole caboodle of children, bags and coats to the car.
It’s at this point, finally seated and panting at the wheel, that the youngest chirps: ‘Daddy, I need a poo…’
The Volvo races from the drive at precisely 8.44. We have fewer than 360 seconds to get to the school gate and somehow, out of breath, running, faces like Sally Gunnell at Barcelona in 1992, we make it. Just.
Be under no illusion, the school run will break even the strongest spirit. Ant and Dec don’t need to fly micro celebrities around world to ingest elaborately plumaged wildlife to entertain the masses. They should instead just follow their Z-listers for a week on the school run. Whichever parent breaks last wins. Ant and Dec’s Celebrity School Run would be a television sensation. It would be quite a leveller, too, because as another father said to me the other day: ‘I’m always rather suspicious of those parents who look too together at drop off.’ One day, I dare say, I’ll look back and laugh. But not yet.
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