My daughter is learning how to drive; it most definitely causes gray hair. Any parent of a teen driver will be able to relate.
I can remember when I was sixteen. I could hardly wait to get my permit, sign up for drivers education so that I could finally drive. Raised on a farm, I’d been driving for quite some time. While haying, as soon as I could reach the pedals, I was driving our truck in the field while my siblings loaded hay in the back. Learning to drive the tractor was mandatory on the farm, and I had already put many hours into baling, raking, hauling loads of hay, plowing and disking before I had a license. In addition, I drove an old mail jeep (you know, the kind with the steering wheel and pedals on the “passenger” side) to haul our cans of milk down our long driveway every morning to be picked up by the milk man. After receiving my license, I was soon driving a little hatchback Mustang.
My daughter has never had much interest in driving. She barely knows how to operate our little lawn mowing tractor; and on trips her nose is firmly planted into a gameboy rather than paying attention to anything related to driving. When she turned 16, I expected her to be gungho about getting her permit. I signed her up and paid for a drivers ed class and picked her up a DMV booklet. She completed the class, but still didn’t seem that interested in learning to drive. We took her for her permit test and to my surprise, she failed.
I had her read the DMV book again, we took her back in… she failed again. I couldn’t believe it, in fact I was a bit annoyed. She is an intelligent girl; so I assumed she just wasn’t trying. A few months went by and she failed a couple more times… I was done. I couldn’t understand why she would want to have to be dependent upon others to haul her around, especially with college just around the corner.
We sold the car we’d been planning on letting her drive – just sitting there wasn’t doing it any good.
A couple months before her 17th birthday, I realized that her doctor’s release was going to expire. I informed her that if she wanted another, she was going to have to pay for it, because I wasn’t going to waste any more money on it. She decided to take the test again. I didn’t have high hopes, due to her previous record of failures, but took her in anyhow. She finally passed the test, and she was pretty pleased with herself.
As we left the town, I pulled into a driveway and let her take the wheel for the first time, and that’s when I got my first gray hair.
After a few minutes going over the controls, we started down the road, she immediately began over-steering and the vehicle veered sharply from side-to-side. Shocked but trying to remaining calm so as not to scare the crap out of her (like she was me), I firmly told her, “little movements”. Still over-steering a little, but much better than the violent swings we were doing before, she creeped up to about 35 mph. As traffic started piling up behind us, I informed her to ignore anything behind her and I turned on the 4-way flashers. My thoughts to the cars as they passed was, “Be afraid… be very afraid…”. We managed to creep our way home and made the 12 mile drive in about 35 minutes. When we got home, it was all I could do not to leap out of the vehicle and kiss the ground. I told her that she had done well and gave her a critique, including both good and bad points. I realized this was going to take some time…
To be continued…
