Traffic Lights

One of the things I was most scared of when I first faced the reality of becoming a single mum was the logistics of solo-parenting. Truthfully I was terrified. This thought amuses me now because in reality, as most women in my position will tell you… the less people you’re taking care of, the easier life is.

I love my new little family. We’re lighter and quieter and gentler. We cuddle up in one bed and share bags of popcorn on weeknights, I get to be the naughty one sometimes and when I break my own rules I like that I’m teaching them to be flexible and open to enjoying life intensely when the opportunity is there. We are a team. A team that is admittedly made up of a really overwhelmed manager and two very junior and mostly incompetent staff members. But if I could just get them to learn how to go from one room to the next without forgetting what they were going in there to do, I really think we might thrive.

Like all new teams, we have our strengths (K-pop demon hunter singalongs, speed tidying for treats, morning cuddles in ‘the big bed’ the destruction of a Hawaiian pizza on a Friday night) and we have some pretty significant weaknesses. And our biggest area for improvement is mornings. Much like mornings hit hard for colds and heartbreaks, mornings really show the cracks in my team. We have systems, we are prepped, we are ready. Except we’re not, because no matter how much we think we’ve got it under control when we go to bed, the window in which we leave the house to get to school ranges from inconveniently early to undeniably more than a few minutes past the chance to make it on time, and there is really no way to tell on any given day which one it’s going to be.

The ‘thing with the traffic lights’ started on one of the latter. Alarm was snoozed, only one tiny floral shoe could be found, breakfast was eaten at a snails pace, jumpers were forgotten and gone back for and before we knew it we had 7 minutes to drive the 10 minute drive to school. 

“Please, Please just turn green” I yelled at the lights, desperate to avoid the late shame text which arrives at 9.05 reminding me I am a very very bad no good mother.  My son, always my biggest supporter, joined me “please, please – go green – we’re late!” and from the back my giggling daughter enjoying the added chaos of our commute yelled “green green green”, and with that (or likely with the pre-determined integrated timer) the lights went green and we zoomed off with cheers of triumph and delight and in a morning miracle – arrived at 8.59 on the dot.

And thus began our new morning ritual. We were no longer passive road users. We were an energetic and vocal team with a toxic one sided relationship with 7 sets of traffic lights.

A few days later after some particularly bad light luck the begging started to take on a rather aggressive tone, “turn green now” screamed a tiny floral shoed princess and I realised that I had maybe started something slightly unhinged. “Hey, this doesn’t seem to be working so well anymore” I said, “what else could we try? How about just explaining our situation and asking for some help? So, we did. And over the last couple of months we’ve used our morning commute practicing persuasion techniques with increasing complexity.

Team studies have concluded that;

• Traffic lights do not like being yelled at (“TURN GREEN OR I WILL NOT BE YOUR BESTFRIEND! 
• Traffic lights respond quite well to loaded compliments (“gosh you look great in green, not sure red is your colour”)
• Traffic lights are sympathetic (“we did everything right and it’s not our fault there was a roadworks diversion”) 
• Traffic lights respond well to a reasonable bargain (“we understand that you have to let those cars go and we accept this, but could you tell the next lights to hook us up ?”)
• Generally, children under 8 will believe almost anything.

This practice has been a fun team building exercise and there is usually much disappointment on the rare occasion we happen to be running on time and the need for negotiation isn’t present. But for me it has also been something I’ve tried to actively consider as I negotiate my way from the life I had to the life I need to create. I have tried being kinder even when I’m stressed, being honest when I’m struggling, offering flexibility in a hopeful exchange for goodwill and finding nice things to say in an attempt to build warmth back into a relationship where there is currently only ice. But the truth my patient adult ‘colleague’ has been trying to get me to understand for months now, is finally hitting home. The only things I can control are my own actions and my own reactions. I have about as much control of my past as I do of traffic lights… none.

And this morning after a longer than usual morning giggle session in the big bed, when the kids asked how we would be convincing the lights today and the clock read 8.57 I took a deep breath, smiled and shrugged. ‘None’ I said honestly, ‘sometimes we just have to accept the way things are and deal with the consequences.’ And instead of racing and begging and negotiating and blaming, we just drove peacefully to school singing k-pop demon hunters. And we were late. And I got the text. And it’s ok.

Because it was never about the traffic lights.