Meditations on a Life of Organized Chaos: A Little Blogging Therapy for the Day

I hate confrontation. I mean, I REALLY, REALLY HATE confrontation! I think I am slowly dying inside because I just hold my anger inside sometimes rather than have to confront someone when I feel wronged. It just slowly festers and festers away until one day I'm sure that I'm going to eventually just wither away or explode with unresolved issues. Luckily I usually just find a way to work through things in my head so that I can move on. No confrontation, but no lasting issues either, so I guess it all works out in the end. It helps to be married to a man who doesn't get bent out of shape about ANYTHING. It is remarkable to me. Sometimes I feel like people have treated Herman horribly, and yet he is able to meet them regularly with a smile on his face and a kind word to greet them. It is amazing to watch. I wish I could do that. I really do. But I am basically a coward at heart, so my plan is usually to sit by myself and craft a totally EXCELLENT response that I would love to give to someone when I feel wronged (if I had enough courage to actually do it, of course -- which I don't). If I am really, really feeling overwhelmed with feeling I might make the mistake of crafting a well worded email and shooting it off. But Herman always has given this advice: Bad news in person, good news by email. He is right when he explains that the written word is always subject to a person's interpretation, and we just run too much risk of being completely misunderstood in an email. Spoken communication gives us the opportunity to hash through things -- but it also requires a good amount of courage, which I sadly lack.

So anyway, that brings us to this morning. I have been loving my new calling as an early morning seminary teacher. It is more rewarding than I could have ever imagined. I absolutely love my students. I felt very intimidated at first. After all, high school kids can quickly turn against me if I don't approach them in the right way. It seems that we are really gelling as a class, and I have really enjoyed teaching. I still have a ton to learn, and I don't hit it out of the ballpark every day, but I'm improving little by little. Well, today we had a great lesson. I felt like it ended really well, giving all of us a great start to the end of the week and the beginning of the weekend. However, there has been a bit of an issue with the bus that picks the students up after class each morning to take them to the high school. The bus had been coming into the church parking lot and turning around before picking up the students and heading to the school. On Wednesday one of my students came in to tell me that the bus driver wanted to start picking the kids up on the back side of the church because there were too many cars in the way. That is a problem for us because it causes us to have students in two different spots of the church, making it impossible for me to supervise everyone to make sure everyone gets on the bus okay or gets out of the parking lot okay. Herman was teaching the younger class of students on Wednesday, so he just walked up to the bus when it came by and asked the driver if she could still use the parking lot as long as we parked our cars along the periphery of the parking lot so that we weren't in her way. She seemed to agree, so all was well again.

Until today. At the beginning of class I was told that the bus driver once again would not use the parking lot because of the cars. I went outside to look, and there were no cars in the way. The students complained tht the bus driver was really mean and hateful to them each day. All of the students agreed, so it didn't appear to be something that was just a personality issue with some of the students. I had to cut off that discussion pretty quickly so that the hour didn't turn into a gripe-about-the-bus-driver fest. I just decided that I would go out when the bus arrived and ask the driver if she would just pick up the students on the street outside the front of our church. It would be no different than her picking them up from the street at the back side, but it would give me the opportunity to supervise things better.

So I had class. Things went really well, I think. I was feeling pretty good about the day. When the bus arrived I walked out with the students to talk to the bus driver.

I left the building feeling like this!

As I stood in the back of the line waiting to speak to the driver I could see her watching me, and I could tell that she was gearing herself up for something. The line slowly approached the open door, and I stepped up on the bottom step of the bus to make my suggestion to the driver. Before I could even get my "Hi!" out of my mouth she pointed at me and said, "Ma'am, get out of my bus!"

"What?" I asked, totally surprised at her less than friendly greeting.

"Federal law. You may not enter this bus. Get off this bus."

"Oh, really?" I replied. Now I was totally thrown off balance. I wasn't expecting a rude greeting. I thought that we could approach this issue like adults with a friendly suggestion that she would either agree with or not agree with, but apparently she had her battle hat on today. I stepped down a step, but the stubborn rebel that quietly exists inside of me led me to keep on foot in the bus, just to tick her off, I'm sure. I explained to her that we really needed her to pick the kids up from the front of the building. I started to explain my compromise solution of using the street instead of the parking lot when she freaked out about having to drive in the parking lot with teenage drivers driving their cars. I'm not exactly sure where her concern is because our drivers are leaving at least five minutes before she arrives almost all the time. Once in a while she arrives early when we dismiss late where she might encounter this problem, but I would say in the three weeks that I have been teaching this probably has only happened once. And she was pretty ticked off for it being a once a month sort of issue.

Well, now her snarky rudeness had completely erased any good thoughts that had been in my head. I could feel the steam leaving my ears. And me, little me, who DOES NOT confront people, could feel myself getting ready to unload on this lady. But I stopped myself. I had just watched an entire group of my students enter that bus. They were all watching what was going down here, and I just couldn't let them have the last picture of me that they saw at the end of their week of seminary be me freaking out at their bus driver. I just took a really, really deep breath and then pointed my finger in this lady's face. I told her, "This is unacceptable." I told her that I was going to call Tom, the transportation supervisor for the district. She smirked at me and said, "You just go ahead and do that lady." Sweet Madam Bus Driver thought that she had some sort of upper hand in this situation. She didn't know about the Ace I was holding in my back pocket.

I walked away -- well, more like high stepped away because I was FURIOUS.

I walked back into the building looking like this!

I immediately played my ace, and called Herman. I NEVER, ever do this, but I asked Herman to play his school board member card. I never do this when dealing with the school because I don't want to ever give any sort of impression that we are abusing power, whatever sort of power a school board member might have, if any. But, to be honest, we have never had any real issues at all with the district that would even tempt me to pull that card. But today I felt like a line had been crossed. From the time that he was a high school Spanish teacher, to the time he was an assistant elementary principal, to now as he serves on the school board, Herman has always felt very strongly that all school employees are public servants, and so they should always do their best to treat the public kindly, even when it is difficult and we are dealing with disagreements. It is one of his big issues that he works with as he deals with teachers and administrators in his workshops. He feels strongly about this, so he listened patiently as I ranted about what had just occurred. Right as I was framing my "strongly worded email" Herman told me that he would just call the transportation department and get Tom on the line. Of course, I forgot, Herman likes to actually deal with problems directly. Drat! I was going to have to resolve this issue like a grownup. Erg!

Well, Tom hadn't arrived yet, and neither was his second-in-command, but we did talk with the head dispatcher lady. She was VERY nice. She had driven that route before, so she knew exactly what we were talking about, and she understood exactly what our problem was and agreed with our compromise solution. Herman, like always, was calm and complimentary as he talked about the problem and how much he appreciated the hard work of the bus drivers. I was able to explain my feelings and feel like something was going to get resolved that would be of a good benefit to my students. It was a good call. I hope this ends the bus pickup debacle that has been an issue for too long this year for our seminary students.

I just hate that I had to begin my morning this way. It was getting ready to be a really good start to my morning, and one lady who woke up on the wrong side of the bed ruined it for me. I guess I should take ownership of my feelings and say that I'm allowing her to ruin the beginning of my day by getting all worked up about her rudeness. But still. I just don't really enjoy the whole confrontation thing -- especially when it is over something that is so ridiculous. So, anyway, I don't really like using blogs to rant about things, but this little post did help me to get rid of some of the irky thoughts running through my head. Maybe I just bought myself a few extra months later in life by not holding all of this inside.

How fitting that this week in seminary I was using my non-existent artistic skills to draw stick figure drawings to explain some Old Testament history, and with the help of my class I was finally able to figure out how to draw an angry face.