Driving Me Crazy
Watching my son go through puberty was easy compared to watching him go through traffic.
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“Birth certificate?” said the weary clerk without looking up. I groaned audibly. Passing the buck and feigning ignorance, Drew turned to me and said, “Birth certificate, Mom?” This little adventure that had begun as a birthday treat had now eaten most of my morning. He had never mentioned needing a birth certificate. He turned quickly back to the clerk to avoid the killer laser I trained on him. “Uh, I brought my mom. She was there and can certify it,” he said in his jocular manner, which failed him for the first time ever.
We made four trips in all to the license bureau, two for the written test with and without proper documents and two for the driving portion. I was comforted on one of those subsequent visits by the mother of a daughter returning for her eighth try. Maybe raising daughters isn’t any easier, even if their insurance rates are lower. One woman told me that while riding with her newly licensed daughter, a parked car loomed in their lane. “I was sure that she saw it,” the mother said, “but less than a yard from the rear bumper of the parked car, I frantically grabbed the wheel to avoid the collision. ‘What were you thinking?’ I screamed at her. ‘You won’t believe this, Mom,’ she said, ‘but I just forgot that I was driving.’” While Drew was taking the driving test for the first time, I heard enough similar tales to make me think insurance companies should reassess their inequitable actuarial tables for male and female adolescents.
I did observe that females approached the licensing process with more humility than my son did. Cockiness does not go unpunished in government offices. Drew returned in record time from the driving test, having been disqualified within blocks for cutting a corner. His misery was compounded when the clerk told him the test could not be administered twice in one day. The birthday boy responded by kicking over one of the chrome standards that roped us in our ubiquitous lines. “Young man,” the clerk shouted after him, “before you control a car, you’d better learn to control that temper.”
Later that same day, abetted by his overaccommodating mother and a city street map, Drew located another license station. This one was bleaker than the first. It was Ellis Island with no chairs or benches for weary parents. Signs instructed us to line up to obtain a form that had been stacked by the door at the previous station. This line took twenty minutes. After filling out the form, we queued twice more, finally taking a number to await the inspecting officer. We had plenty of time to get chummy with the similarly oppressed. “I hate this shee-it,” said the pregnant woman in front of us with Whoopi Goldberg dreadlocks. “Issa pain in the rear end of my esophagus,” she added. We concurred, and in those endless lines Drew and I learned more than we wanted to know about her pregnancy, her boss, her two nervous breakdowns, and her intention to dump the baby on her mama because she had too much pressure in her life already. We shared a package of barbecue chips and sat on the curb of the hot sidewalk as we waited for the test. I watched sympathetically as a teenage girl ahead of us returned with eyes brimming, ‘The tag, Daddy, the license tag you put on the car this morning expired in March. They won’t even let me take the test!”
My son had drawn a young blond woman for his driving test this time. Although this day in purgatory had cowed him a little, he winked and gave me the thumbs-up sign as he slid into the driver’s seat beside the inspector. I cringed when I heard him call her by her first name and begin his joke about dreaming he had swallowed a tail pipe and then waking up exhausted. When they pulled up twenty minutes later, he kissed her on the cheek and gave me a triumphant high five.
Temporary license in hand, Drew turned on the wrong side of a median, ignored a stop sign, and, overruling my better judgment, drove us home by way of the treacherous LBJ Freeway. He dropped me off at the curb and headed to Burger King for a late lunch.
As I ate my tuna sandwich alone, a certain ambivalence about the day intruded. From now on, Drew will be able to go to the pet store he loves, to Eckerd’s for poster board and candy, to the video store to check out movies, and God only knows where else without me. He and I have a long history in the car together. In addition to preschool car pools, he had seven years of music lessons twice a week, so early in the morning that we could only talk about our dreams or giggle inappropriately at the blue jokes of drive-time disc jockeys Stevens and Pruitt. His elder brother had opted for a bicycle and independence, but this second-born was conveniently the victim of a series of bicycle thefts and got chauffeured through most of middle school. Drew’s banter with his back-seat buddies kept me from being totally illiterate about sports. I could flippantly toss off astute comments in the barbershop about Cowboys quarterbacks without having to read the sports pages or, worse, having to watch the games. No more. I will boogie alone to the golden oldies he had always located for me whenever he had made excessive demands on my chauffeuring services.
Ten years ago, when we lived near the middle school, students frequently discarded homework papers and notes in my yard on their way home. I remember retrieving a note in which an eighth-grade girl described her mother as being “absolutely clueless.” I later read it to my small boys. “Please, guys,” I entreated, “just don’t let me be clueless.”
Two of my sons are driving now. We play musical cars, since the old one they share is often in the shop. The last time I was stranded with their car, it had “Hot Body” and “Sexy Driver” written in shoe polish on the windshield. I make a list of grievances every time Drew uses my car. I have two radio stations that make my erratic days in the car bearable and even pleasurable, WRR-FM, the city-owned classical station, and KERA-FM, a public radio station. A noon errand is less irritating if I happen on the broadcast from the National Press Club. Late-afternoon runs are enhanced by All Things Considered from National Public Radio. When all else fails, I have French language tapes or a performance by Claudio Arrau of Chopin nocturnes that I am trying to master. They are four small things that make me happy. I find it inexcusably insensitive that for a quick trip to the drugstore, this child reprograms my radio so that it jumps only to head-banging music, and he tosses my tapes out of arm’s reach into the back seat.
The boys do leave exasperating clues. I piece together their now-unchaperoned lives from flotsam and jetsam on the floorboard: fast-food wrappers, sales slips, savings-account withdrawal receipts, cryptic directions to faraway football games that I thought were being played at the home stadium, a pair of girl’s shoes, an empty can of Skoal Bandits. I draw conclusions and occasionally confront them.
The response is usually “Chill out, Mom.”
Out? Out of it? I went into this mothering business to go out of it? Their lives were once so open to me that I filled two books. Now they control the steering wheel, directional lights, and the accelerator. I am an occasional passenger. If I’ve done my job, and their youngest brother quits tattling, my third volume should be a pamphlet.
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