“BRAKE BRAKE BRAKE BRAKE BRAKE BRAKE!”
Simone slammed on the brakes a mere inches from a small sedan parked on the side of the road. If she’d stopped any later, she would have taken a layer of paint and the side mirror off the other car. I caught my breath and had her get out and physically look just how close she had come to her first accident.
“Let’s switch for a second,” I said, “so I can get you out of this.”
I slowly backed the car out of danger and pulled to the side of the road so she could get behind the wheel again and drive us the rest of the way home. I had her drive around the block, just to give me time to stop shaking.
Simone has not been in any hurry to get her driver’s license. Like many teens of her generation, she’s not fussy about having a parent drive her around, or just gathering with her friends via apps on her phone. As much as she swoons over American muscle cars (she really wants a “Bitchin' Camero”), she’s just not motivated to put in the time and effort necessary to drive independently.
At 15, we enrolled her in the state-required 10-hour online course that she needed to take in order to test for her learner’s permit. It took her a full year to get around to completing it, and the only reason she did by that time was that the course was about to expire and it hadn’t come cheap. I took her to the DMV when she was 16 and change, and she aced the written exam, which meant she’d need to have her learner’s permit for a full year and drive a minimum of 50 logged hours before she could test for a license.
It was another couple of weeks before she felt ready for her first lesson, and even then she was nervous.
After a hearty breakfast at a nearby restaurant, I drove us to the end of a long, fairly untraveled street, and pulled to the side of the road. I took the keys out of the ignition, and traded places with the girl. I helped her adjust the front seat waaaaaaay up and move the mirrors around, made sure she was belted in and her foot was on the brake, and explained to her how to start the car. Because we were on a slight incline when she moved the stick into drive and lifted her foot off the pedal, the car slowly began to move forward down the road. After a series of the usual jerks and starts, she started to smooth out just as we got to the stop sign about a quarter mile down the way. A few more drives like that, and she was starting to feel confident, so I let her cross the intersection and take a shallow curve before telling her to turn right into a nearby parking lot. The car shuddered as she bounced over the curb, but I reassured her that driver proprioception —knowing where the car starts and ends — takes time.
It wasn’t a bad first foray, and subsequent drives through parking lots all over the city built on her confidence. Of course, because she wasn’t enthusiastic, our lessons happened sporadically through last summer, into fall, and over winter, and she didn’t have more than five hours total by the time we hit April of this year.
The thing about driving is that you have to master three layers of cognition just to be barely proficient. The first layer is the pure mechanics of operating a car — starting the ignition, gas and brake, signaling and turning, speeding up and slowing down. The second layer is operating the car in the world — avoiding obstacles, staying in your lane, being aware of other traffic, driving under different weather conditions, handling hazards as they arise.
And then, on top of ALL that, you have to learn the rules of the road — street signs, lane demarkations, how to handle a four-way stop or merge onto the highway, staying within a speed limit or turning left against traffic. If you’ve been driving for any length of time, you’re operating on all three of those levels more or less intuitively. Unless the weather is really awful, traffic is crazy heavy, or an armadillo attempts to cross the road in front of you, you’re not in a constant state of immediate presence.
Several misspent hours on Super Mario Kart might give a teenager a sense of what it’s like to drive, but until you put that kid behind the wheel of a 4,000 pound machine, and tell her to press the gas, she’s not going to have any idea of how much mental activity goes into just driving a car down the block.
A couple weekends ago, in an attempt to pile on some serious drive time, I had Simone take us all the way from our house to Boulder using only surface streets. What would normally be a 40-minute trek took us closer to an hour and fifteen minutes. But it was so worth it.
We left the house on a sunny Sunday afternoon, Simone immediately negotiating a multi-spoked intersection and a right turn merge, followed by heavy stop-and-go traffic for several miles. The further we went, the more comfortable she felt, and we were actually able to chat about other things, with the occasional punctation of me saying, “Red light coming up,” or “You’re drifting into the other lane.” Moments of white knuckle terror on my part were more rare than in the past, and I could see Simone’s confidence grow with every double-left-turn and sudden onset of brake lights. If she still turned too sharply and popped a curb, well, that’s just part of the learning process.
But it occurred to me, as we were finally nearing Boulder, that I’d rarely spent time in the passenger seat of my own car. I’m nearly always the driver, and the perspective from the side was a new one for me.
Simone finished her junior year, and I’m starting to realize that I’m becoming less and less of a driver in her life, and more and more of a passenger, watching her grow and make decisions from one seat over. I watch how she interacts with her significant other, I see on her anonymous Twitter account how she mines esoteric pop culture—stuff I can’t even begin to connect with, and I listen in awe as she guides me through the deep waters of her outlook and perspectives on life.
I’m often asked what I’ll do with myself after Simone leaves for school next year, and it’s easy to blithely answer that I’ll travel more, buy that beach house, and hopefully pass enough of the day-to-day management of my company to my leadership team, sharing equity with them, so that I can dedicate more time to writing.
But rarely does anyone ask what I’ll feel after she leaves for school, and I’ve become fairly skilled in thinking around that question rather than digging into it too deeply. I don’t want Simone to stay in Colorado for college, and she is already ready to be off on her own. It’s easy for me to feel excited for her foray into independence, finding her tribe out there in the big world, and blossoming into a young adult. It’s easy for me to be excited about how my own life will open up without a child in the house.
What I work really hard NOT to think about is how it’ll be to miss Simone when she’s so far away. Even when it’s just my weekend off, in the midst of enjoying a late night of cocktails and bad behavior, something will trigger a reminder, and I’ll feel a twinge of sadness and a deep rush of love for my little girl. The compressed conflict of emotions (not a new thing) won’t stop just because she’s not in the house anymore.
And when she’s thousands of miles away, I won’t be able to switch places with her to get her out of a jam like I did when she got too close to that parked car during an early driving lesson. It’ll be up to her to extricate herself from difficult situations.
When we’re babies, the first thing we learn is how to operate our bodies — we look in wonder at our own toes, and are surprised when we bite our own fingers, which somehow managed to get in our own mouths. As we grow, we begin to perambulate, interacting with our surroundings, learning the physical and emotional effects of the world around us. But unlike in driving, where the top overlay is probably the simplest to understand, the third layer in human experience, that fraught social layer, is the one that we never quite learn completely. It’s always changing depending on our surroundings. The best we can do is to keep a strong compass with us, which mostly points us to the true north of being a good person and helping make the world a better place.
Hopefully, just like with our driving lessons, where I’ve been sitting next to Simone and actively helping her learn how to recognize hazards before they become problems, my parenting, and that of her mother, and the engagement by her larger family, teachers, and other adults, have been enough to give her a strong compass of character that’ll help her make smart decisions and creatively find her way out of the bad ones that she’ll doubtless make as she becomes the primary driver of her life.
We’re actually doing a college visit road trip this summer.
We’ll trade off driving along the way.
I remember those first few parking lot drives with Jacob and Max; my thoughts were pretty similar, that I was suddenly more of a passenger in their lives, and that it is becoming more and more their choice when to let me ride along with them. Such a bittersweet feeling, as I see them into their young adulthood, full of confidence and competence, and missing their needs for hugs and guidance.
Posted by: Sarah | June 01, 2017 at 01:08 PM