The Former Anne Spollen's Author Blog Is Being Retitled to "Notes from Living Upghetto": Driving

Saturday, October 24, 2009

Driving

My oldest son has just begun driving, and when I tell people this, I think this image forms:

For some reason, I am really relaxed about this, and I am not a relaxed mom. I still carry BandAids and Neosporin, and have since my oldest began crawling. I don't let them "chillax" at a house if I don't know the parents - and sometimes they can't go because I DO know the parenats. I still count their vegetable, fruit and calcium servings. But about driving, I am relaxed. Of course, that's probably because Christopher is a reasonable kid. (Come back when Philip starts and people will be sending me Xanax...)

His DAD grabbed the emergency brake the other day. His father is a wreck about this (pardon the pun). That's probably because his father has no history of driving with Christopher.

I remember when he was about five, we went out to the playground after he finally shook a bad cold. On the way home, he asked to sit in my lap and "drive" - we did this pretty often. Because he had been so sick, when he asked to drive in the seat by himself, I hesitated, but let him - only up our long, flat driveway. He was ecstatic. He was doing a great job. Only I had forgotten to teach him a really, really important aspect of driving. When you sit on mom's lap and steer, you don't get too much about the pedals below. So as he drove up and got close to the garage door, I said, "Brake, Christopher. It's time to brake."

He looked at me with his pre-kindergarten face. "What's that?"

I reached over and pulled the emergency brake literally one second before we would have crashed into the garage door.

I think that was the dumbest move I've made with kids in my life. Or at least with Christopher.

I think I'm relaxed about it because I learned to drive in New York City where stop signs are pauses and speed limits are viewed more as recommendations, not laws. Plus, he's the kind of kid who when I call him while I'm driving reminds me, "Mom, it's illegal to drive and talk on a cell phone."

It's such a strange rite of passage to see your kid driving past the house. And like a lot of milestones they pass, it's a rite of passage for the parents,too.

12 comments:

Elizabeth Bradley said...: I have two daughters, the oldest one is intense, a little wild, and a bit hysterical at times. The youngest is calm and measured.

Teaching the oldest to drive was a hair-raising experience, to put it mildly. The Husband had the brilliant idea to take her down to the deserted high school one Sunday morning to practice and she nearly drove through a plate glass window.
she failed her driver's test three times, despite having attended driver's education. Surprisingly, now she's in her twenties and not a bad driver at all.

The younger daughter took to driving as if she'd been doing it all her life. She passed all her tests with flying colors.; Monday, 26 October, 2009
Bish Denham said...: I've never taught anyone to drive. My own experience was exciting. My mother took me out for my first lessons in an old jeep that jumped out of second gear and barely had reverse. In mastering that hunk of junk, mastering the steep dirt roads of St. John was a snap.; Monday, 26 October, 2009
Deidra said...: It's certainly a good thing that you aren't scared of your son's driving! I'm guessing, because I would feel this way if it were me, that he takes your confidence in his abilities as support as well, which is invaluable. Much better to have an aware, confident youngster than a timid one when it comes to driving. We don't want him stopping nervously in the middle of the road, do we? :); Monday, 26 October, 2009
Hardygirl said...: I can't wait until my oldest gets her license. She's responsible and can actually help me with some of this carting around that I do all day.

But, her little sister . . . watch out!

sf; Tuesday, 27 October, 2009
Anne Spollen said...: Lol, Elizabeth, the plate glass. Kids personalities really emerge behind the wheel. Some are easy; others are gut wrenching.

Bish, I think that might be called trial by fire. Maybe it's better to learn on a jeep like that. Like you said, it makes the whole thing seem easier.

Welcome, Deidra! I just know Christopher is not a risk taker which makes me calm. Well, calmer.

Yeah, sf, it's that younger one that you always have to watch out for. They say it's because we "relax" more with subsequent children and our first ones are more anxious. I think it's a crap shoot of genetics, but what do I know?; Tuesday, 27 October, 2009
Mary Witzl said...: Oh God: the only reason I'm not completely stressed out about this myself is because our Eldest was starting to learn how to drive, then decided to put it off so she could go to Japan for the summer. In a way, I'm relieved. I just wish there was some way to tell when a kid has developed a fully formed sense of their own mortality. That's when they ought to start learning.; Wednesday, 28 October, 2009
Anne Spollen said...: I think 35 is probably a good age to start, Mary. I remember deciding to see if I could do figure 8's on a sheet of ice when I was about 17. (And no, my kids don't go near blogs. They're for "old people"); Wednesday, 28 October, 2009
Adrienne said...: It's great you can be calm about it. Here the age to get a license is sixteen - I think it's eighteen there? My daughter is in the driving around the parking lot stage, and it seems way too early to be dealing with this!; Wednesday, 28 October, 2009
Anne Spollen said...: They can drive without an adult at 17 here, but I've been really s-l-o-w about filling out paper work, submitting checks, that sort of thing. He could have been doing this about six months ago -- maybe that's why I'm calm.

Come back when Philip starts -- I'll be putting cones up all around town.; Thursday, 29 October, 2009
K.C. Shaw said...: I didn't get my license until I was 21, mostly thanks to my brother (and partly because I just wasn't all that interested in learning). My brother is younger than me but learned to drive at 16, when I was still not quite 18. By the time he was safely licensed, my mom was too shaken to teach me. I don't blame her, in retrospect.

Good luck! Sounds like he's doing great.; Thursday, 29 October, 2009
Glynis Peters said...: All 3 of mine are good drivers, our son is a city zipper, my eldest girl drives all over the country (UK) and our youngest girl is a country plodder.
It was great when my boy learnt as he wanted to take the girls to ballet etc. I got some 'me' time.; Monday, 02 November, 2009
Nora MacFarlane said...: My son will be 20 in December. I still haven't ridden in the car with him...; Monday, 02 November, 2009

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Light Beneath Ferns

"I have this strange sense that my silence is preparing me for something I can't name . ."

Elizah Rayne is nothing like other fourteen-year-old girls. More interested in bird bones than people, she wraps herself in silence. Trying to escape the shadow of her gambler father, Elizah and her mother move into an old house that borders a cemetery. All her mother wants is for them to have "normal" lives. But that becomes impossible for Elizah when she finds a human jawbone by the river and meets Nathaniel, a strangely hypnotic boy who draws Elizah into his dreamlike and mysterious world.

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Excerpt from THE SHAPE OF WATER

CHAPTER ONE
I discovered windows one afternoon and after that, nothing was ever the same. They had always been there, of course, glass panes shimmering in the color of rain, but that spring for the first time, I was able to open the windows in my room. For years, the locks had been painted stuck, and during the winter, heat from the radiator beneath my windows finally steamed off enough paint off the metal wings of the locks could be twirled open. Knowing that I could open the windows attracted me to them, and I began sitting under the windows, staring through the glass at the sky. From that position, on a chair in my room, the sky did not seem real; it seemed a place I was making up, so I watched it.
The white wood of the window panes acted as frames so the sky came to me slowly, and the huge openness of its space did not touch me. All the window glass in our old house had wavers and bubbles inside it, so at times the clouds moved like water, melting and blurring until they passed outside of the warp. After a few afternoons of sitting, the heavens seemed too quiet to keep watching so I began watching a small patch of woods next to our yard that housed little more than trees and a scatter of bony, mean-looking rabbits.
I started gazing at the sky and the woods in March when the branches were still wet and it was then, with nothing outside my window but trees and rain, that I noticed a shine inside darkness, I noticed colors glimmering within the darkness of the wood. I watched birds come and go, I watched rain nipple down from buds to the grass. The water dripping from branch edges and leaves created optical tricks; I could see that as I watched leaves melt.
Then one day I ventured into the space outside. I did not think about doing this much beforehand. I simply opened the window and dropped to the ground below, uncertain as to why this should be such a more satisfying exit than simply using the door; my father worked until seven o’clock and I could do whatever I wanted until then. But I liked the solid sound my legs made when I landed. Leaving via a five foot drop seemed so much more a decision than just using a door. The sense of escape made my heart pound, though all I escaped was the soundless spread of moss-colored light inside my house and the silence.
I had come to know silence well during those months after my mother died. When you sit in silence long enough, you learn that silence has a motion. It glides over you without shape or form, but with weight, exactly like water. Its color is silver. And silence has a sound you hear only after hours of wading inside it. The sound is soft, flute notes rising up like the words of glass speaking. There comes a point when you must shatter the silence, when you must shatter the blindness of its words, the blindness of its light. I did this by going into the yard. Once I stood there, in the grass next to the trees I had been watching, I found silence outside as well. But I was happier outside than I had been in the house, so I stayed for a bit. I stood beneath my bedroom window for a few minutes, looking up at the branches and the crooked pieces of sky colliding between the branches. I believed I could identify the scent of the sky as I stood there, a blue menthol fragrance similar to the scent of seawater that sprayed into my face when I first dove into the ocean. That initial scent smelled much more subtle than the ocean’s heavy, fishy aroma, a whiff of salt and mint that warned a more powerful scent would enter my nose just as I approached the water on a dive. It was the scent I dreamed in. And it was the scent of that spring sky as I stood in my yard.

***