The view from the passenger seat

I am not fond of driving. Not at all. I’ve often said that the singular drawback to living in Carlisle is all the time we spend driving places. Whether it’s for work, school, socializing, recreation, dining, or culture, we seem to be forever taking up a position behind the wheel.

Still, I never expected I’d have my own driver. I don’t even have regular cleaning help; the idea of someone to drive me around on errands or appointments was well beyond my imagining.

And yet that’s just the situation I’m in right now. My son Tim is in that narrow six-month time frame between receiving his learner’s permit and earning his driver’s license, an interlude in which the rules stipulate both that he must gain as much driving experience as possible and that he must do so under the watchful eye of a licensed and experienced driver.

So these days, Tim drives. He drives me to the supermarket and the drugstore, the post office and the library. He drives when we visit my parents. He drives when we drop off or pick up his younger sister from school or playdates. After three full decades of driving myself around, I now have someone whose assignment, and indeed whose pleasure, it is to drive me places.

This is not a developmental phase of childhood that I foresaw. I assumed Tim would want to learn to drive eventually, but as that benchmark loomed, I saw it mostly as a source of anxiety. How would I teach him the rules of the road? How would I explain how much room to give a car when passing, or what the perfect angle was for parallel parking?

But rather than being anxious, as I expected, I’m enjoying Tim’s company along with his chauffeuring services. He stopped wanting to join me for grocery shopping or other random errands at least ten years ago; given the choice, he would always opt to stay home. It’s fun spending more time together again. Moreover, it’s fun merely to see his enthusiastic response when I ask if he wants to go somewhere with me, even if I know that in truth his enthusiasm is more about the driving practice than about my company.

It’s not a time for intense mother-son dialogue. I don’t bring up college choices, or current events, or the moral and ethical dilemmas that teenagers typically face. He’s supposed to be concentrating on the road. But in a way, that’s what makes it so peaceful. It’s just the two of us, spending time close together without an agenda to cover or decisions to contemplate. It reminds me a little bit of the hours I spent roaming the neighborhood with him in a jog stroller or baby backpack when he was an infant. I was never one of those mothers who chatters nonstop to her small children. On those long, quiet walks or runs, it was all about the proximity, not the discourse.

So many developmental phases with children and teens are about growing apart, letting them finding their independence, allowing them to forge their own way. This period of driving together is one milestone that brings us closer together, even if more by regulation than by Tim’s choice. It’s a brief, tightly circumscribed interlude: only six months altogether, if he earns his license on the first try, and half of that time is already gone.

So I’ll just enjoy my chauffeur until the day he turns sixteen and a half. It’s nice to be driven around, and knowing it won’t last much longer, I’ll savor it all the more. He’ll eventually get his license, and then he’ll drive on his own, just as someday he will probably live on his own and spend even less time with me. For now, I’ll take all the time together that I can get. To me, it’s quality time, even if as far is Tim is concerned, all we’re doing is following the rules of the road.

Learner's permit

My son Tim turned sixteen yesterday, and like at least two generations of suburban American kids before him, he celebrated the day with a trip to the Registry of Motor Vehicles for his learner's permit.

For the most part, I was pleased by his sense of urgency. Childhood, and even more so the teen years, have far too few rites of passage these days. With all the material goods and all the travel opportunities that so many privileged young people have access to, sometimes it's not clear to me what they have left to anticipate. I look at the teens I know locally who live in McMansions with swimming pools, billiards rooms, in-house movie theaters and vacation houses at the beach and wonder if they have any incentive at all to grow up and leave home. Do you yearn for your own little bachelor pad if your parents’ place has an in-house gym with a full basketball court?

So it feels right to me that there's something special and rare about turning sixteen, something cool and exciting that you get to do merely by reaching a birthday. But it’s not the de facto milestone that it once was. Articles I've read recently have supported what I've personally observed; when my generation were teens, we all wanted to drive, but now, with their overscheduled lives and their helicopter parents who are accustomed to driving them to every activity, some kids don't really care all that much about getting a license.

And it makes sense, in a way. Being able to drive yourself to SAT preparation class, math tutoring, or mandatory community service hours doesn't have quite the same allure as being able to take the wheel and go cruising with your friends on the strip. Moreover, new regulations that restrict whom teen drivers can take as passengers mean any possibility of cruising the strip -- wherever that strip may be, in our quiet semi-rural town -- still feels years away to a sixteen-year-old.

Tim returned from the RMV triumphant, permit in hand. It's definitely a rite of passage, and one he was delighted to undergo. I greeted his news with a little bit of ambivalence. First and foremost, there are the obvious worries about safety -- his own and those of other people with he could potentially collide -- but there's also the subtler sense that if he can drive, he's taking his first steps into not only the excitement and independence of adulthood but ultimately the drudgery as well. Welcome to errands. And having to be places on time. And dealing with car maintenance. And paying for gas.

But he's looking forward to it. He’s had plenty of opportunities to pilot various vehicles while working on his grandparents' farm; during the summer months he drove cars, trucks and tractors all over the fields and private byways on the farm. He knows the excitement of powering a large piece of machinery. Moreover, he's been driving a motorboat since he was about ten, and like a lot of kids, he just likes engines and speed and what happens when you get the chance to combine the two.

So I wish him all the best as he ventures behind the wheel. And I wish my husband all the best as well, because that's who will be overseeing Tim's driving instruction in these early days. I'll wait until he's a little more capable. Then I'll give him some errands to do. Because with freedom comes responsibility, and I'll be more than happy to pass on a few of my weekly trips to the town dump. Maybe that can be considered a rite of passage as well.

Lessons to be learned from a terrible sense of direction

I have a terrible sense of direction. If ever there was a driver who should use GPS technology, it is me, but I don’t have a GPS and that’s probably just as well: it forces me to work consistently on improving this deficiency. Still, it’s been a struggle for as long as I can remember.

The past couple of weeks have been particularly egregious. Along with the notorious drive to the Manchester airport with my sister Sarah, there was the event last Friday night when an exit closure in Portland forced us to take a different route off the highway than we normally do, dumping me in an unfamiliar part of the city after dark. Tim not only recognized a street name miles from our destination but also somehow intuited which way the ocean was; taking what felt like a leap of faith, I followed my 12-year-old’s instructions and found myself right where I wanted to be. And there was a very brief (three-mile) wrong-way foray when we were leaving Portland to head home that hardly even merits mention. Then a few days later, my mother and I got a little confused driving to a town north of us for apple picking (and, if I am to be completely honest, driving home from that excursion as well).

The point is not to belabor my horrible sense of direction; I’m well aware of that, and I do what I can to compensate for it. I keep a vigilant eye on landmarks I’m passing when I know I’ll need to retrace my steps, and I pay close attention to the position of the sun when I’m driving in daylight so that at the very least I know whether I’m headed toward the right compass point. Rather, what I’ve come to realize from this recent spate of poor directional decisions is what can be learned, literally and metaphorically, from taking so many wrong turns.

For example, during the Manchester airport debacle, Sarah and I took the wrong exit off a toll road. On toll roads, the exits are far apart, and we realized milliseconds after failing to make the necessary turn what we had done, so we had plenty of time – twelve miles’ or so worth of time – to belabor our error. But the fact is that when you’re on a highway after missing your exit, there is absolutely not a single option other than to proceed forward. Pulling over would be dangerous and pointless; turning around is obviously not possible. Realizing you’ve made a terrible mistake, you simply forge ahead until the opportunity arises to correct it, in the form of the next exit appearing. You can’t sit in your car stewing over your mistake; you have no other viable choice than to stick with the bad decision you’ve made and see it through until the opportunity comes to make a different choice. That’s a good lesson.

Another one is that speed is not necessarily the way to right a wrong. When I used to commute by Peter Pan bus, the driver once commented to me, “I don’t know what’s wrong with all these other drivers. Don’t they realize you can go only as fast as the car in front of you?” Now, I remind myself of that when I’m caught in traffic and getting frustrated. It doesn’t matter if you want to go faster or get there sooner; you’re at the mercy of the car in front of you. Take a deep breath and accept that.

Also this: Many mistakes can be fixed. Not all of them, of course. If you cause an accident, that can’t be fixed. But if you miss your flight, you can catch another flight. If you keep a friend waiting inordinately long, you can apologize profusely and make sure it doesn’t happen again. Changing plans might be inconvenient or even, as in the case of rescheduling a flight, costly. But as the anxiety rises, remind yourself to distinguish between those mistakes that have irreversible consequences and those that do not.

And, finally, perhaps the most important lesson to be learned from getting lost: nothing about arriving matters as much as arriving safely. Ultimately, it doesn’t matter if you’re late or if you wasted some gas with wrong turns. It doesn’t matter if you made some bad decisions along the way. It matters only that you eventually reached your destination without an accident.

I don’t take my errors in direction lightly. It’s a personal flaw over which I need to continue to exercise more control. But I do appreciate the learning opportunity that this spate of wrong turns over the past few weeks provided me. I’ll try to learn what I can, and make more correct turns in the future.