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I Hate to Admit It, But My Kids’ Carpool Is the Highlight of My Life
Get in, kids. According to the spreadsheet, your ride to swim practice starts now.
Once upon a time, I had a life. Then I had children. They got ridiculously busy. I got frantic. I took one look around and decided there was only one solution: assimilate more children.
My dear swim-team carpool probably doesn’t remember how it happened. One day, they were just parents, sweating inside a chlorine-filled natatorium, wearing heavy down jackets and winter boots while grimly collecting soggy belongings from a moldy lost-and-found pile. The next, I was force-feeding them a shared Google scheduling doc and absconding with their children.
I could see they were like me—fully functional adults with demanding careers who were desperate to shed their involuntary side-hustle as unpaid Uber drivers for their overprogrammed brood. And I knew their kids, at least from a distance. They were fresh-faced and pleasant. More importantly, they looked like the kind who followed instructions and wouldn’t rat me out when I swore at traffic.
“You complete me,” I cooed, stalking these exhausted parents into submission. “I’ll take yours. You take mine. We can make parenting great again.”
