The story below is from our September/October 2021 issue. For more stories like it, Subscribe Today. Thank you!
The moment many parents dread: their teen’s acquirement of a new driver’s license.
Christy Rippel
"Can I drive us home?” Liam asked, as he emerged from the DMV with his newly minted learner’s permit.
I admit, I hadn’t considered this part. “We haven’t practiced at all yet, let’s not start with the highway, ok?” I countered. I wasn’t ready, he wasn’t ready. “Let’s find a parking lot. You can practice there first.”
We claimed a section of empty blacktop at Wal-Mart, near the DMV. I went over the basics of signaling, mirrors, braking, driving with one foot, and all the things I could think to tell him. He’d already heard them in driver’s ed, but it made me feel better to say them anyway. He humored me for a while, buoyed by the excitement, before finally cutting in on my speech about how other people don’t drive defensively with an eye roll, and “I know, mom. I know.”
He does not know.
We drove around the parking lot, practicing accelerating and braking. It was enough for the first day, but the problem with learning how to do anything is that you have to do it badly first, lots of times, before you get good at it. Driving is no exception, to the distress of parents of 15-year-olds everywhere.
The next day we got on the road, and I admit, it was one of the most terrifying rides of my life. There I was, strapped into the passenger seat which I discovered had no brake, despite pressing on one repeatedly. It reminded me of another terrifying drive home, when my husband Chris piloted our Toyota Corolla through the streets of Pittsburgh with me and a two-day-old Liam in the backseat. I wanted to drape my body over the carseat, I wanted to trade the Corolla for a military tank. Everyone seemed to be driving too fast. I noted every reckless lack of signal before a turn, every driver fiddling with his radio. Chris drove slowly, hands at ten and two. The world was not safe, and we had a baby to protect.
We got used to driving Liam in his carseat, gradually relaxing the grip on the steering wheel. It’s amazing how you can get used to almost anything. But if you’d told me that the tiny, helpless squidge of a person in the backseat would ever be allowed to operate a vehicle, I’d have laughed you into the next county. Someone slap me if I tell a woman in Target with a baby and dark rings under her eyes to enjoy every minute. It goes so fast! It does. It did.
What no one told me about this parenting thing is that the whole deal is letting go, and it’s continually letting go before you are ready. You leave them—at daycare, at school, at their first sleepover. But suddenly they are ready to leave you, and that feels entirely different. Right now I’m in the passenger seat, but in just a few short months, that seat will be empty, and he’ll be venturing out on his own. The world is still not safe. I still have a baby to protect.
He’s getting better every day, from that rough start in May. At first he was slow and fast at the wrong times, inching too close to mailboxes on my side, jerky with the accelerator, too early with the brakes at a red light. I run play-by-play from the cockpit, his navigator, the Goose to his Maverick. “Watch that truck, he’s weaving through traffic,” I say. “Do you see that cyclist?” I know he does. I’m not hitting the imaginary brake anymore. You can get used to almost anything.
What wisdom can I dispense about 25 years of driving? What have I learned? I’m trying to remember what it’s like to be new, when everything is a first. I can teach him what to do and how to follow the rules of the road, but it will be up to him to do it. And I know the hardest part of driving is making well thought out decisions, like, should I be getting behind the wheel right now? And making split-second ones when things don’t go according to plan, and you have to swerve to avoid an accident or get yourself out of a skid.
I won’t be there to steer him to safety. I will have already let go of the wheel.
The story above is from our September/October 2021. For more stories, subscribe today or view our FREE digital edition. Thank you for supporting local journalism!