Day 514: The wheels on the bus

I ride the bus to work a few days a week, which is always interesting to say the least. Yesterday, for instance, I got to witness an argument between two middle aged travelers about which of them was most deserving of the last remaining courtesy seat. “I’m a diabetic!” “I’m legally blind!” “I think I might pass out!” “I survived the Titanic!” I almost offered to carry one of them on my back if they’d just be quiet. But I digress, as always.

Every morning on the way into work a woman gets on the bus with her two young kids. Well, I assume they’re hers. I’ve never talked to her – my head is usually either in my book or bouncing off the window as I try to catch a few extra moments of sleep. But she always seems in a big hurry to get these kids somewhere. The story I’ve created in my mind is that she’s a single mom, rushing the kids to daycare on the bus each morning before heading off to work to earn the bacon (which, to complete the analogy, she then brings home and cooks).

I like her – as much as you can like a total stranger for whom you’ve invented a make believe life that very likely has no basis at all in reality. She seems nice enough, and she just has the look of a loving mother about her somehow. But the thing is, she often seems pretty frustrated with the kids. They doddle (my spellchecker tells me that’s not a word, but I’m going with it anyways), they poke at each other, they press their little faces up against the dirty windows, all the usual kid stuff. And more often than not she’ll snap at them and end up basically dragging them off the bus. This is starting to sound like I’m passing judgment, isn’t it? I really don’t mean to. For all I know she’s the best mother in the tri-city area, baking homemade bread and crocheting her kids’ likeness into doilies in her spare time. I’ve no doubt she’d blow me out of the water in a mother-of-the-year competition. And maybe by the time our paths cross on the bus each morning she’s already been pushed to super-human limits: maybe she got up at 5am to make breakfast, maybe the kids drew a lipstick mural on the living room wall, maybe they threw her hairdryer out the window and poured orange juice all over the cat. In all likelihood she has good reason to be frustrated.

So where am I going with all of this? I guess the point is just that I recognize a bit of myself in her because I know that I am often the same way: caught up in where I have to be and what I have to do, worried about being late and stressed about whatever is going wrong. Sometimes I look at this mom I don’t even know and think that her life might be easier if she just stopped to smell the roses a bit more. And then I realize that maybe I should take my own good advice.