I am teaching my 17 year old how to drive and I behave with a mix of super patience and sudden outbursts of terror when she looks to the left to change lanes while drifting dangerously into the right lane. I just don’t want to crash and pay for it, which is a logical fear. I paid for six driving classes for her before I got into the car as a defecto instructor, knowing my limitations, and I have taken her out seven times since. I have seen progress but it’s a real crap shoot whether she will pass the driver’s test. Apparently when she drives her dad’s car, he pumps phantom brakes; a kind of hysterical image. The point is, like many parents of my generation, I am acutely involved in all aspects of my daughters’ development.
Not so much the case with my parents.
I don’t recall being taught to drive at all by any adult of authority. What I do recall is my friend Wendy Tripp letting me drive her Jeep down Main Street in Warren, RI and grinding the gears so bad, we were almost peeing our pants. I decided right then and there stick shift wasn’t for me, but after that excursion, automatic driving never seemed easier. I just started driving. I would steal my mom’s car when she was out of town, a Buick Skylark, and drive it to my boyfriend’s house when I was 15. Driving wasn’t an issue. Not seeing my boyfriend longer than a day in new love was. I assume I had a permit but it’s spotty to know the transactional events. I drove myself to school for my junior and senior year in high school because my parents couldn’t be bothered to drive me. I recall very sleepy silent drives over the Braga Bridge in Fall River, Mass. I also recall an acute loneliness at a young age, a maturity that felt preemptively put on me. I was old and young all at the same time.
Since few of my friends had a car in high school (mine was a red Nissan Pulsar with pop up lights), most of the after school pot was smoked in my backseat. Windows rolled up, we would “hot box” it in the parking lot, and then go our separate ways in the misty murk of weed delirium. By graduation, the seat cloth was dotted with circular burn marks, each one a funnier memory than the last. In the 80’s, it was taboo to drive stoned, and while now, it’s not legal… I can count the numerous times I have pulled up to a red light in LA and watched someone fire up a bowl of weed.
I ditched my car after a year of never finding parking spots in Boston, but in a gap six months back home between colleges, I procured a Plymouth Fury, a massive boat of a car that impressed gear heads with its V8 engine. To me it was a death trap, slipping and sliding on the unplowed snow in Buffalo, NY. I learned to change my own oil and replace the spark plugs, a real victory one summer day, but a skill I would never replicate. Then that car died, and with little to no guidance, I bought what seemed like a fancy car, some Ford model, and that transmission dropped in NYC rendering it for the trash heap and leaving me with a car payment. I gave up on cars after that for a long time until my dad gave me his tan Honda Accord with 150,000 miles on it and a backseat covered in pink hair dye from the time my sister drove it in high school. That car went from NY to Seattle to Los Angeles. That car carried secrets, and was reliable (albeit some taped hoses), until the day it blew three lanes of 101 highway traffic back with black smoke. I knew it had met its end.
Why do I go through a car chronology? In between the cars, in the cars, around the cars, are a vast trove of memories and emotions. We made decisions in those cars, I almost died sliding in an ice storm, drove miles to see friends and to mend broken hearts. My cars were always mildly unsafe, cheap and barely got me where I needed to go, but around their metal and wires, I survived and kept moving forward.
My car ownership was a lot like how I was raised. Not told much, but given the keys to just drive. I was left flummoxed and unequipped at break downs and parts needing changing. I wandered through car ownership like I did through family dynamics. Why does Uncle Bob never come into the family parties? How come the bar in Auntie Deb’s house always leads to some kind of explosive argument? I would retreat in my youth from family gatherings in nature but as time went on, the cars were the freedom. A tank of gas and some good prayers would get me where I wanted to go.
Later in my twenties, when I had no money for gas, friends would pool our limited resources to get to the Jersey Shore; an act of relief from the teeming city of New York in August. We banded around our cars, sat in silences in our cars, slept in our cars.
I learned over time to handle calling AAA without panic, and to deal with a nail in my tire. I stopped driving drunk, and got sober, finally feeling like I wasn’t living in a world with emotions dictated by mandates put upon me by my upbringing. Fast forward three decades, and for a few years, my kids and I lived in a home 45 minutes from my kids’ school. I can’t say that I enjoyed driving my kids to school - an arduous hour and back each day - but we talked, we sang and even if they were too teen-grumpy to chat, I was a presence. I got you, driving them said. Now I am teaching my daughter to pump gas and drive but she won’t ever look at a car in the same way I did - driving from the pain of my emotions, looking for home, sobbing the tears that are lodged in my heart. I think she will see it as a means to the end. A cost. A vessel for transportation.
I am grateful for that.
Shameless Plug:
On Tuesday,
May 16th at 9 AM PST on Zoom, I will be continuing to host my 21 week series No Longer Abused. This series is free to anyone who would like to and needs to explore recovery from any kind of abuse or assault. I will be co-facilitating with Author and MFT Elizabeth Earnshaw from her book I Want This To Work and my book No Longer Denying Sexual Abuse: Making The Choices That Can Change Your Life. Please spread the word.
Learning to drive and eventually owning one's own car are rights of passage into adulthood and added responsibility for most people, especially if one earned the $$s to pay for the vehicle and its insurance. The freedom and mobility earned in the process are the gateway to new adventures in a young life that hopefully enhance it.
Happy Mother's Day for all the mothers that are enduring the trials and tribulations of teaching their teenagers the rules of the road as they learn first hand! :)