There are many advantages to living in this new pedestrian way. Picking up the younger child at school is not on the list.
I used to feel awkward around other parents because I was young (and looked even younger). It was difficult to communicate with people who waited until their thirties or forties to have kids. We simply did not have much in common.
Even when I had some kind of organizational status this was a problem. During the Co-Op years I participated in governance (and was drafted to be a co-President). But I hung out with Polly and Julia and their collective dozens of children in part because we had the fundamental connection of being teen parents. They were vastly more socially skilled than me and capable of ignoring the things that made me uncomfortable.
Eventually I found Gabriel and we sat in the halls with our heads down, scrawling in our journals. It was like having all the good parts of an adolescent friendship again, and I started to think about my own education. I realized that one of the things I did not enjoy about waiting in the halls was the fact that it was a school.
I’ve now tested this hypothesis and it appears to be true that if people had a bad time at school they do not enjoy visiting schools. Kind of a simple idea.
Now I am by no means the youngest parent in any given group. I am something like average in terms of age, and in this town the strangest thing about my appearance is my spectacles.
It’s not even a problem that we have the wrong accent; there is a steady turnover of people from all around the world and the kids go to schools that are dramatically more diverse than anything they encountered back home.
Yet I still feel just as awkward as I did a decade ago. The problem is apparently me. I do wish that I had the ability to chat.
I also wish that Gabriel could be here.