I’m not tracking her on Life360.
I’m going to do better with my second, my youngest, my last.
She turned sixteen on Saturday, truly the best day of the week to celebrate a birthday. Except, she was turning sixteen. She thought the driver’s license office would be open, just like the jail.
“No,” I told her. “Offices are closed on weekends. We will go Monday.”
“Really, Mom?” she said disgustedly, cutting her dark eyes at me as if I were a doofus, as if I didn’t know any better. So she looked up the hours of operation on her phone, just like she did for planning her birthday gathering at the trampoline fun zone. Bought her ticket online. Sent out the word to friends and family. Be there at this time, on this day, and then we will go eat at this restaurant. A planner’s planner.
And in her plan, the offices of the county courthouse should be open on Saturday, just like the jail.
So she waited. What’s a few more days when you have a lifetime of the road in front of you?
Two days later, just this morning, we ended up at the driver’s license office with a page full of people ahead of us. The hallway was packed out, mostly with shiny, adolescent inexperience accompanied by their beleaguered adult keepers. Youngest daughter signed in, on what appeared to be the next spot on the list, and we sat down and waited.
And we waited.
And we waited some more.
Very few folks in the hallway had moved.
After an hour, she got up to check the list.
“Mom,” she reported, with the same look of disgust as she had on Saturday, “I signed in for this afternoon.” I looked, and sure enough, she was second on the list for 1:00.
“Oh well, we will just come back another day. Scratch out your name.”
With a huff and a sigh and a line through her name, my living, breathing, embodied disappointment accompanied me to my appointment now, all the way on the far south side of Birmingham. I reassured her that we would come back another day, and in my mind I’m counting my blessings. A few more days until I have to turn her loose. A few more days of peace before she starts asking to drive here, to drive there, in her inherited battle-ax Chevy Traverse with the cracked windshield.
But my appointment went quickly, so hope glimmered like the sunshine peeking out of a gray sky after a spring rain, just as it was doing on our almost hour-long drive back up the road to the courthouse.
After all, hadn’t she been driving plenty? She’s got the desire for her license, for sure. Lots of kids now don’t, not right out of the 16th birthday gate, not like most of my generation used to be. It would have been unimaginable to me and my peers to celebrate the sweet sixteen and come out on the other side without a license and a set of borrowed parents’ car keys.
My family is fortunate in that we live in a place where driver’s education is offered during the school day. Students don’t have to sign up for it on the weekends or during the summer. Most of the students who take driver’s ed are awarded a certificate that verifies that they are road-worthy and ready for the real thing, their license, upon their 16th birthday. The ones who don’t earn the certificate after the designated trips can get extra practice time with the instructor, along with plenty of advice to get more road hours with family members.
The driver’s ed license experience is a kinder, gentler introduction to the world of the open road. It’s much different from the white-knuckle-gripped steering wheels of the old driving tests, of the three-point turns, and parallel parking, and keeping that eye always on the speedometer. The possibilities of failure lurk around every curve and instruction, while the poker-faced examiner, riding shotgun, scratches notes and checks the boxes on her clipboard.
And still, kids don’t want to take driver’s ed. And their families don’t make them take it.
“Not even for the insurance discount, one day?” I would ask students and their family members.
“No,” most would say. “He’s just not wanting to drive right now. I can get him where he needs to go.”
I don’t know what’s caused this shift over the last couple of decades. I do know from my work in education that there are plenty of parents and grandparents who would rather pay someone else to teach their kiddos how to drive.
Here’s the thing. If all us middle aged people learned how to drive with our parents mashing that imaginary brake pedal, grabbing the dash, and occasionally cussing our decision-making skills, then our kids can handle it too.
Which means we should be able to handle it.
What has happened to us? The softening of our younger generations didn’t begin with them.
It started with us.
Maybe we need to get back to being a little more like our own parents. I know they loved me, and still do, but they’re not up my butt 24/7.
We use location trackers like the CIA. We wire up our houses and their bedrooms and nurseries with microphones and cameras and smart socks – SMART SOCKS! – to make sure that they are safe and sound. But we also turn them loose with cell phones, tablets, and whatever other digital devices that will keep them occupied inside four safe walls, and we don’t realize that the contagion of social media and the internet can be far more damaging than climbing a tree or riding a bike could ever be.
Speaking of riding a bike, youngest daughter had an amazing crash when she was around eight years old. She careened into a flower bed, breaking a glass walkway light in the process. The cut could have been horrible, but the long scratch up her shin was not deep and required no stitches. When I checked out the bike, I found that the chain had come off. The brakes did not work. She had on her helmet.
Life360 wouldn’t have helped a bit.
I hope that daily prayer for the good Lord’s protection did work, just maybe.
The officer at the driver’s license office was most accommodating and efficient. The earlier sign-in was honored, and after five minutes of paperwork, as well as agreeing to abide by the guidelines of the graduated driver’s license, youngest daughter is now a licensed driver.
I did watch her drive away, on ber first solo trip, back up the road to the school for a softball game, but I didn’t obsess over her little Life360 icon traveling down the road in the same way I did with my oldest daughter when she took her first cruise.
Instead, I sat down to write about it all. Solo. Free of the burden of tracking apps.
The notification message came through a little while ago, but I’ve just now checked it: “Completed a 3 mi drive safely. Ended near Co Rd 41. Top speed: 44 mph.”
Three miles. The first of hundreds of thousands, maybe into the millions.
I’m not fooling myself. I’ll do some tracking. Just not today.
We need more writing, more screen-free hobbies, more bike riding, more tree climbing, more quality time within and of ourselves and with our kids.
And please, let’s add in a little healthy risk-taking to build both our own and our kids’ confidence.
Say some more prayers.
Trust and not track.
And maybe we can start to turn this whole thing around.
Parents and guardians and their kiddos need to be familiar with their state’s requirements and abide by the law. It will save lives!
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