My little goes to school each morning on a mini bus which comes directly to our house to pick her up. We have a responsible, dedicated and punctual driver who always tells me in advance if she knows that she will be absent on a following day. This one particular morning, she was more than 15 minutes late and when the bus did finally arrive, we saw that there was a substitute driver. My daughter was the first stop but since the bus matron was also there, I figured it was alright to put her on. The driver was holding the sheet with the addresses in his hand and he seemed like a decent fellow.
I have to stop at this point in the narrative and tell you that he WAS a decent fellow. He delivered my child to school along with the other children, and he did a fine job. He got them there at 9:15 rather than 9:00 but that probably had more to do with the last minute change in drivers and his unfamiliarity with the route than with anything else. The issue was not the driver.
The issue was that at 10:30, I got a call from the school asking me where my child was.
Ten thirty.
According to school policy, the kids who aren’t in class by the time the 9:00 bell rings are marked as absent. The attendance monitor makes calls, house by house, to inquire about the reasons for the absences. In our case, however, she sent me into a panic.
“Oh my GOSH! We had a substitute driver this morning!!! She’s not there?????” My head started spinning, my hands started shaking, my heart stared pounding out of my chest so hard that you could see it from the outside. I was trying to figure out in which direction I should drive to go find her.
“Wait a minute, hold on,” she said, “let me just call the teacher to find out if she’s in class. It’s possible the bus arrived late. Just hold on.”
One full minute passed. I begged like I’ve never begged before.
“I’m SO, SO sorry! Your daughter is here. Her bus was just late to arrive. I’m so sorry I got you all worried like that.”
Apologies are a nice thing. I appreciate them. I do. But think this through for a minute. Had something—heaven forbid—actually happened, then the driver would have had more than a full hour and a half to have driven in whichever direction he cared to before anybody would have been alerted to the crime. And on the other hand, had the office had a simple policy in place whereby they check their late busses before the attendance monitor places calls, then I would have been spared the seven hours that I spend with shaking hands and uncontrollable tears and panic attacks.
When my daughter got home from school that afternoon, I hugged her tighter than I’ve ever hugged her before. I picked her up off of the ground and held her there for a good few minutes. Lucky me, she LOVES to be hugged. She soaked it up. But then she felt my tears and she pulled her head away from me, gave me a funny smirky-kind of look and said: “Mommy? Are you ok?”
I’ll be ok.
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