I’m going out on a limb here, but I would venture to say that if you polled any random number of parents and asked them what issue do you hate the most about the school your children attend, most of them would say the parking. The ones that wouldn’t say parking would be the ones whose children are bussed to school and who do not have to endure the daily clusterfuck of school drop-offs and pick-ups.

We have 600 students at our school, and many of them come via bus. A few walk, and a lot are driven. We do a mixture of walking and driving, depending on weather conditions and what I’m doing after I drop off the kids. When I drive, I park about a block away, and we walk. It works well because I avoid the insanity that is parking close to the school: people will make u-turns in the middle of the very busy street, in front of oncoming traffic, just to get a spot near the school. They park across the street and then jaywalk into busy traffic, rather than walking the extra thirty seconds – literally, thirty seconds – to the crosswalks on either side of the front of the school. This month’s school newsletter had a whole section on “please do not park in the school bus zones” because that is actually something that needs to be told to people. Don’t drop your precious snowflake off in the bus zone because BUSES ARE USING THAT ZONE. We all have precious snowflakes, let’s model good behaviour by not a) parking like an asshole, b) turning u-turns in the middle of a busy road like an asshole, c) jaywalking across the busy street while also holding babies and small children like an asshole.

And then the alley, my god, the alley. The alley beside the school is filled, constantly, with people parked on either side, creating a narrow one-lane passage. People park on blind corners and in no-stopping zones, because they are too damn lazy to park elsewhere. I feel sorry for the people who live there because people are always parking in front of garage doors and on garbage days, the garbage trucks get stuck in the melee.

Since the kids come home at lunch, I usually drive through the alley. I park in a legal zone, wait for them to come out, and drive them home. Always, always, there are people parked in insanely illegal ways further down the alley. These are kindergarten parents who are letting their kids have a little playtime on the playground before taking them home. Every single day, I fume a little as I slowly drive past the cars parked on either side of the corner, which makes a terrible blind spot in which I cannot see oncoming traffic. Kids pop in and out of the playground, which makes me nervously drive about 3 km/ hr. Yes, I could change my own behaviour, but the kids come out of their respective doors, run to the car, and we go home. In a perfect world, I would be able to drive through the alley normally. And until this year, I did. This year, every day I think that if there were bylaw officers around the school, they’d make their fiscal year in about two days.

Then yesterday, I saw a man parked on the wrong side of the road, on a corner, in the no-stopping zone. It was like the trifecta of illegal parking. He was in his car, on his phone, while – I assume – his kindergartener played on the playground equipment. And I don’t know if it was the full moon or the fact that the guy was too lazy to get out of his damn car and do his internet-surfing on the playground bench in the sunshine, or if I had just been pushed too far, but I thought, goddammit, I am the Chair of the School Council and this is unsafe and I AM GOING TO CONFRONT THIS MAN. Those of you who know me know how very unlikely it is for me to actually confront someone, rather than ujjayi breathing and thinking he had a good reason to do what he did.

I drove over there – with kids in the car, on the way home for lunch – and gestured to him to roll down his window. He did so, and I said, politely and perkily, that he wasn’t allowed to park there. “Well, where am I supposed to park then?” he asked me, and I just looked at him for a moment. Blink. Blink. I said he could park anywhere that wasn’t illegal, and pointed out the no-stopping sign that he was RIGHT BESIDE. “Oh, so none of these cars are supposed to park here?” he said a tad bit belligerently. Well, I said, not the ones that are parked between the signs that indicate NO STOPPING. Reading comprehension: it’s a skill we can all work on. We stared at each other for a moment, and then I felt an impasse had been reached. I shrugged, said that I thought I should let him know, and drove away.

Last night I was waiting for the kids at karate and got an email from the school. It outlined, in detail, alley parking bylaws! I didn’t even complain to the school; I didn’t bring it up, I didn’t make any phone calls, IT JUST HAPPENED THIS WAY. I guess I’m not the only one who broke.