How do I know anything about the person I entrust my child’s life with twice a day? I find driving difficult enough with four children strapped in to car seats and seat belts, never mind driving a vehicle large enough to call home full of sixty recently paroled prisoners, I mean passengers.. I know a lot of people and no one I know drives a bus. I don’t socialize with any doctors either but doctors are board certified, display university degrees in their office, and have receptionists. Even a partially blind and slightly demented eighty-year-old woman who walks with a limp can obtain a driver’s license. Who’s driving the buses?

In a perfect world that I sometimes dream about, each bus would be staffed by two adults; one to monitor the road and drive, another to monitor student behavior. We have all driven behind a bus where the children in the back few seats make gestures at us. They think they’re funny and cool, we think they’re acting like little jerks. At one school where I taught, a mother did the unthinkable. After driving behind the bus for a few miles and being subjected to various implied insults, she actually boarded the bus at one of its stops, walked to the back seats, and slapped the student making rude hand signals at her. She did it so fast the driver couldn’t respond. Who ever expects to be the victim of a hostile bus takeover? I am willing to bet the children on that bus will never, I mean ever, look cross-eyed out the window of a vehicle. Yes, the mom had charges pressed against her.

Thus I had a bit of anxiety before sending my Andrew on the bus. I had been a kindergarten teacher for eight years by then and had heard and been involved in plenty of bus horror stories. I will never forget the anxious mother who followed the bus to school after placing her first born on the big yellow monster. Kindergarten teachers traditionally make fun of mothers like her who have difficulty "cutting the cord."

That mom did the right thing to send the child on the bus. It’s hard, but it must be done. That Mom was also right to be concerned because her daughter hid in the back of the bus and ended up in an empty bus at the bus barn. The dispatcher called the school just as our secretary was calling him.

my first child was afflicted with first child shyness blues, that is, he had no older sibling to run after and watch board the bus for years before getting a chance to catch a ride on the most exciting vehicle imaginable to a five year old. By the time matt was able to hop aboard the school train, he was about ready to fly up the three large stairs into the green plastic world of unsupervised peers. Busses are for learning swear words, sitting with the boy in the other class you never get to play with, trading pokemon cards on the black market, and learning the true meaning of Santa Claus.

The bus ride, my husband and I realized at dinner one night, was also the first time we would be entirely excluded from our sons lives. Shortly after school started one October night, we were engaging in the typical "try to get info out of the children" discussion. Did you have art or gym today? Who did you play with at recess? Did anyone get in trouble in your class? These questions sometimes spark conversation too good to miss!

When we got to the "Who did you sit with on the bus?" question, there was discrepancy between who Matt said he sat with and who Andrew claimed Matt had sat with. Before long, the two of them begin talking about the children on the bus, trying to come to a decision about who indeed Matt had sat with on the bus that morning. We had no idea who these children were that they were describing so colorfully.

I called a neighbor to settle the dispute. Neither boy believed I would call a fifth grade girl in the middle of the dinner hour to settle such a petty detail. As Andrew gloated in his win and the sneaky kindergartner considered that even the littlest untruth is not safe from Mom’s reach, Brian and I simultaneously experienced a parenting epiphany. We realized that no matter how involved we are in our children’s lives there will always be a part of their day we know nothing about. The bus ride, which serves as the literal link between school and home, becomes the thirty by seven mobile classroom for children.

When the little ones are six and seven, these events are as important as when they are sixteen and seventeen. The little untruth told about whom sat with whom on the bus could be grown into the huge lie about where someone was or who was driving the car. I felt a little strange calling a neighbor to settle a silly argument, but it had to be done!

The bus drives on. The riders grow up. As kindergartners, mom holds their hand and dad takes their picture getting on the bus the first day of school. At the end of the ride, the student gets off alone, ready to face the day, knowing that six hours later the journey home will connect the worlds of parent and child.