Backseat Driver

I started this post several weeks ago. As you’ll see, though, I’ve been … busy.

There’s a line from a TobyMac song, “Backseat Driver,” that goes, “Thought I had it all right 'til the road went left….”

Boy, does that describe life. Three months ago, I thought I knew what the fall and winter would hold. I would continue to homeschool. I would blog, and experiment with homesteady things like making cheese and fermenting vegetables. I would…well, I would pretty much continue to do what I had been doing.

Oh, there were uncertainties, but I thought I even had a handle on them. These, not those, were the uncertainties I was facing. Would we find a new house and move? Would we stay in the general area or move across state lines? Would my children like soccer, and would public school teens accept my home-schooled daughter in their high school drama club?

In a parody of a cliche, that was soooo three month ago.

So many changes. In some ways, I hardly recognize my life any more. As of a month ago, I’m now a school bus driver. No, the irony doesn’t escape me. (Or is that irony? That word confuses me.) Anyway, I hired on with a local bus company at the end of August. I jumped through a whole lot of twirling, spinning hoops to make it into the driver’s seat four weeks ago.

Life as a small-town bus driver is full of stories. I'll share some later.

I knew going in that I would need a CDL (Commercial Driver’s License). I did not realize that the DMV and Oregon Department of Education team up together to torture, I mean train, prospective drivers. They make sure drivers know not only how to drive a bus, but also details like how to inspect the slack adjuster and how much tread depth is required on the tires. (No less than 4/32 of an inch on the front and 2/32 of an inch on the back, if you’re interested. You’re probably not.)

If you don’t know what a slack adjuster is, I’m going to let you look that one up.

I wasn’t surprised that I needed a drug test. The young woman who administered it, though, could either tell that I’d never taken one before or thought I was actually on drugs. (Wait. I have to put all my belongings in that locker and you don’t want me to flush?)

I didn’t realize I would need a special Department of Transportation physical, or that my left eye would fail the eyesight portion and I would need a special note from my optometrist.

I didn’t realize my driver’s test would take three hours, or how many more hours I would spend waiting in the DMV.

I now get up at 5 a.m. four or five days a week to be at my bus by 5:45, to be on the road by 6:15. I return in the afternoon to be at the elementary school by 3:15. I finish my route by 5 p.m.-ish, depending on how many students are on the bus and how badly behaved they are after having to sit still most of the day. Believe me, stories from those drives are a whole post on their own.

In the midst of all this, my son's soccer team placed third in the league playoffs.

It’s a huge change, but only the tip of the iceberg. My husband has gone from a daily commute of nearly 150 miles to no commute at all. That changed the day before I passed my CDL test. Since then, he’s been busy applying for substitute teach jobs while looking for something more long-term. The need for house hunting has been removed, at least for the moment. (He also had to take a drug test. I warned him about the whole not flushing thing.)

That will also partly explain my apparent fit of insanity when I walked into the newspaper where I used to work and requested my old job back. So, yes, I now work two part-time jobs, one as a school bus driver and the other as a news editor.

Homeschooling has been turned on its head, with my hubby picking up much of my slack for the moment.

And I’m tired. So, so tired.

If anyone had told me three months ago that my life would look like this at the end of October, I wouldn’t have believed it. It’s certainly not the direction I would have set my own life GPS. I’ve had to hang on to everything I believe and tell myself, “Don’t be a backseat driver.” God is certainly in the driver’s seat here. I certainly am not. Okay, well, I am, literally, but I’m not. I have no illusions now that I know what tomorrow or the next day will bring. I can only hang on and know that there is a lesson in here somewhere—for me, for my husband, for my children. There are experiences God wants us to have that are unlike any of our experiences before.

It goes back to a saying I’ve heard several times. “I’ve learned two things in life: There is a God, and I’m not Him.”

And I’m certainly not going to be a backseat driver.