Scene from the Rearview

I asked for it and I got it. My oldest child got her driver’s license this week. 17 long years of minivan-facilitated conveyance has come to an end. I should be celebrating—bring on the Mini Cooper convertible! But I am conflicted. What I first viewed as a freeing of the shackles, I am now seeing as an opportunity for the further graying of my hair. Nonetheless, I celebrated this milestone the other day on my Facebook page:

Marcy is excited that her daughter, Lauren, just passed the test for her driver’s license!

One of my friends helpfully responded:

Excited? Are you crazy? It’s January!

Thanks for putting the best possible spin on that one, homey.

But I can’t deny the benefits. All of a sudden, no task it too menial. Out of dog food? I might as well have offered to take my daughter for a mani/pedi, such was the zeal expressed at embarking on this errand. Little sister needs to be picked up at school? No problem for the novice driver. And why not throw in a detour to Starbucks on the way home? These little opportunities continue presenting themselves. I did have to dash her spirits a bit earlier this week. The night before the inauguration, she bounced in at dinnertime, all youthful confidence and spirit and laid out her “Obama Inauguration Day Concept”. I didn’t really get too far into the “Concept” once I heard that it involved her packing one of our cars with friends and navigating to Washington from our home near Philadelphia. Parking nightmares aside, I had a premonition of car keys being inadvertently flung from unsecured pockets in the celebratory melee, the humanity of the SOS phone call from tearful, stranded teenagers and the extreme grumpiness of my husband pressed into service as my daughter’s personal AAA. No, these are not the kind of liberties you take 1 week A.D.L (After Driver’s License, our new way of measuring the passing of days). Nor am I naïve enough to think her newfound freedom will only be spent on benign excursions to get coffee or dog food or pick up siblings.

For this reason, I have to confess I have been eyeballing those ads for tracking devices that you can attach to your car, so that if your car is stolen (or simply wayward!) you can track it down. If my daughter knew I was even considering this possibility, I’m sure she would never speak to me again. (Until she needed the car keys…or money.) And I have to admit I feel a little conflicted about this technology, although I can rationalize it based on my concern for her safety. And I know whereof I speak. When I was in high school, my friends and I made some pretty questionable road trips unbeknownst to any of our parents. The most obvious destination for those of us growing up in northern New Jersey was the big City, New York, of course. And I can remember some pretty harrowing drives in and out, music blaring, windows down, seat belts extremely optional. And of course, cell phones were only dreamy figments best conceptualized by watching reruns of the Jetsons. At any given time, no adult had any concept of our whereabouts beyond the sketchy “check-in” call that could as easily have been made from a payphone at the local mall as from the Blarney Stone Restaurant and Bar in Times Square. How we made it out of high school in one piece, I can only credit a higher power. Thinking back, it’s best our parents didn’t know. I’m sure that with improved driver education and the sage parental advice and counsel I have offered through the years, my daughter’s driving excursions will be much more sober and considered.(?!)

The truth is my daughter has just passed one of those great milestones in life that, for a time, fill the field of vision to the exclusion of everything else, and then in an instant are like specks in the rearview. And can’t we all string our lives along on these events, like telephone wires hung from post to post? Driver’s license, graduation from high school, then college, our first job, our wedding, our first child, first baby steps, child goes to kindergarten, then high school, then gets driver’s license. The circle is complete. (Of course, I left out a few more like grandchildren, retirement and death, but work with me here). There’s always something on the horizon--to look forward to, to dread—that looms large and passes us by. Would we want it any other way? Imagine if our lives were a desert of sameness? How tragic and sad. And the teenage to young adult years seem to have a high concentration of these moments. That’s why I often look back on that time of my life with such longing and pleasure. The quality and quantity of life-altering and affirming moments condensed into such a brief time could not possibly be sustained in the ensuing years. And so, we become accustomed to a slower pace, and try to savor more fully each opportunity to embrace what is in front of us. And we live vicariously through our children’s experiences, living their joys and pain.

So I’m sharing my daughter’s excitement but I’m waiting for her rearview moment on this driving thing, which I’m sure won’t come for a few more months. The lure of independence provided by access to the open road is too powerful. It’s one more step toward adulthood and the fracture of parental shackles. And certainly, the days that she will do my bidding and run my errands will quickly come to pass. The next milestone will soon fill the void—college and what lies beyond. Her days of being under my thumb are few and far between. But I’m not worried—there are more milestones in my future. My next recruit gets her driver’s permit in June--another post ready for stringing.