In my ongoing campaign to scare my children into being safe drivers, I reported my insurance agent’s claim to my son that there is a 100 percent chance he will be involved in some sort of accident as a teenage driver.
Naturally, he responded by explaining how that statistic is mathematically meaningless. (Those stupid AP math courses make me look dimwitted. I do not do math anymore. I’m over it. I am above all that boorishness now.)
I explained to my son that I was indulging in a little hyperbole to make a point.
His comeback: “Only you would turn this into a conversation about a literary device, Mom.”
My response: “I’m pleased you recognize the term, son. I believe my work here is done.”
While it is true that I was trying to make a point about the perils of driving, I was happy to make a U-turn into a conversation about hyperbole. I hardly ever get to do that.
I have also been known to show my children gory accident-scene photographs, commercials, and PSAs. They certainly scare me to death, and I hope they scare my kids, too. I firmly believe that a healthy dose of fear is a good thing. It’s one of my parenting premises. Guilt and fear have been used by countless generations of mothers to successfully parent their children. I am under no illusion that I am any better than the mamas who came before me. Bottom line: my primary goal in life is to keep my children alive to adulthood. I’ll do almost anything to make that happen. Along the way, I want them to become educated, responsible adults, but ultimately those are just frills.
This reminds me of a conversation I had with an emergency-room physician at 2 A.M. when my son was having his first asthma attack.
“I’m worried about the side effects of that steroid,” I told the doctor.
“If he can’t breathe, he’s going to die,” the doctor responded.
I thought he made a darn good point.
I don’t go about things quite like the Tiger Mom you’ve heard about in the news, but we certainly have common goals. I am living proof that being a mean mom works. My kids are turning out well. They have plenty of friends, but I’m not one of them. I’m way too busy being the mom. I am the first to admit that it is not always a fun job. If fear of me (or death) makes my kids think twice about speeding through neighborhoods, following too closely behind other cars, or talking and texting on their cell phones while they are driving, it will have been worth it.
I know full well that my teenagers have to make their own choices and live with the consequences. What I tell them over and over is that they should not let thirty seconds and one poor choice lead to a lifetime of regret. Our prisons are full of people who wish they’d made different decisions in the heat of the moment. It’s so easy to do or say something that you can’t take back! Teenagers face consequences for their actions that are beyond anything that we parents can protect them from. The penalty for one bad choice is sometimes death. I say these things over and over, as my kids will be quick to tell you. They know the standard lectures by heart. They often finish my sentences with me in a singsong voice. The gist is, “Yeah, yeah, yeah. We hear you.” This is followed by bathroom doors slamming, earphones whipping over heads, and cars squealing away from the curb.
I once printed out the Alabama criminal statutes governing vehicular homicide and glued them to a poster. That’s right. I made a visual aid and taped it on the mirror in my boys’ bathroom.
That night, I overheard my middle son ask his older brother, “So, do you think she’s calling us murderers now, or what?”
I barged right in to set the record straight. “No, no, no!” I said. “It’s potential murder. This is what could happen to you, and your life would be ruined. And mine.”
“And the person who died, Mom. They’d be in pretty bad shape, too,” my older son pointed out wryly.
“Well, yes, of course. That, too,” I admitted.
My boys stared at me after this exchange. They were obviously perplexed. In that particular parenting moment, we had no meeting of the minds. Some conversations go better than others. I’ll be the first to admit that. The important thing is to never give up, no matter what. It’s like working on a permanent peace for the Middle East. You can’t give in. You have to continue searching for the most effective way to motivate your teens. I am constantly rooting around for carrots and sticks in my Mary Poppins bag of tricks. Occasionally, I’d like to reach for a baseball bat or a two-by-four. What can I say? I’m human.
I taught one teenager to drive. He’s still breathing. So far, so good. I’m in the process of teaching another son to drive now. Like everything else I have experienced with my sons, teaching each of them to drive is a markedly different adventure.
My older son is overconfident, convinced he needs little supervision. “I got this,” he often says to me. “You need to relax. You make me nervous when you cling to the dashboard with your fingernails like that.”
My middle child is more cautious, as is his nature. He once woke us up in the middle of the night to confess, “I’m worried about something.”
“What?” we asked, bleary-eyed with fatigue.
“I don’t think I’m going to be a very good driver.”
“Well, we’ve got some time to work on it, since you’re only ten years old. But what makes you think that?”
“In my racecar video game, I crash all the time.”
“It will be different with a real car,” we promised him.
He wasn’t totally convinced. I could tell.
When it came time for him to drive a real car, he was more cautious than his brother. When he tucked his six-foot-one frame behind the wheel, he hunkered down like he was afraid of being crushed by a meteor at any moment.
In a few years, I’ll have to teach my daughter to drive, too. It’s in the parenting contract. You have to teach all your kids to drive unless you can come up with a convincing reason not to. I haven’t been able to think of anything to merit my excused absence. I’ve tried. The older I get, the more I dread this particular parenting job. I am more fearful with age. I want to warn my kids about tornadoes and credit card debt and cheating spouses and pyramid schemes. I feel like they are growing up at warp speed now, and I need to cram in every useful life lesson I’ve ever learned. I know it’s not possible to do that. I just can’t seem to help myself. I admit that it’s not a pleasing dimension to my personality. I find myself taking every opportunity to teach my kids something, rather than simply enjoying experiences with them. The real problem is that I’m afraid I’m going to forget to teach them something they need to know to navigate the world without me.
I once told my husband that I thought I would be better at teaching the kids to drive if I could just have a quick toddy first. He thought that might not set the right tone for our lessons. I love the man, but sometimes he is such an Eagle Scout. It gets on my nerves.
One of the first things I do when teaching my kids to drive is to point out the differences in the general driving population. Teenage drivers assume everyone has twenty-twenty vision and quick reflexes simply because they themselves do. Of course, this isn’t the case, not by a long shot. One simply must drive defensively. It takes time to develop those instincts, to just “know” when a car is about to pull out in front of you.
“How did you know he was going to pull out, Mom?” my son asked me one day.
“I’m not sure,” I told him. “I just felt like he was going to do that, so I slowed down and left him some room.”
“This is part of that witchy thing you have going on, isn’t it?” he asked, staring at me with that speculative look in his eyes, like he was secretly wondering how I found out about the party he had gone to a few weeks before at a friend’s house when the parents were out of town. What can I say? I had a feeling. I decided to do a drive-by and check out the party. He got busted.
“Probably. God gives moms a third eye to keep people like you in line,” I said.
“Hilarious, Mom,” he replied.
I know it is pop
ular these days to tell kids that everyone can do everything equally well, but that is just a lie, and you and I both know it. Some of us are going to grow up to be astrophysicists. Others are going to work at the Jiffy-Mart. The good news is that we need all kinds to make our society work, so there’s a place at the table for everyone, as far as I’m concerned. Some people are going to be better drivers than others. That’s just the way it is. My husband is a better driver than I am. I hate to admit that because it’s such a gender stereotype, but it happens to be true in our case. Teens realize quickly which of their friends are good drivers and which are not. I secretly use this information when working out carpools. It’s very helpful.
Teenage drivers are on the steep side of the learning curve. They’re going to bump into trash cans, mailboxes, and, unfortunately, other cars. It happens with frightening regularity. One of the smartest kids I know left his car in drive rather than putting it in reverse and plowed right smack into the back of his mother’s car in his very own driveway while she was sitting in her car. I’m sure she wanted to beat him with the front bumper (which had fallen off during impact and was therefore quite handy), but the point is that she didn’t. Every parent’s hope is that any wrecks will be merely matters of property expense, rather than something worse. I promise you that every mother of a teenage driver checks her cell phone on a regular basis. We’re all afraid. It comes with the territory.
I tell my children all the time, “Everyone can learn to drive defensively. It’s simply a matter of education and experience.” We are big on both of those virtues at our house. I also tell them honestly that some success in life is a matter of genetics. You play the hand you’re dealt at birth. If you’re five feet tall, there’s no point in planning an NBA career. Pick another dream. That one is not going to happen. Driving isn’t like that. With practice and a modicum of natural intelligence, anyone can learn to be a good driver. Well … almost everyone. There are exceptions to every generalization, of course.
You know what scares me most of all? Almost everyone has a driver’s license. I am astonished by the variety of humanity that successfully passes the state driver’s examination. How low can that bar possibly be? The next time you get your driver’s license renewed, take a look around the DMV. Judging from the sea of humanity standing in line to get a new or renewed license, there is no requirement that a driver must be able to see through his or her hair. When my older son got his license, we stood in line behind a teenage girl who appeared to have only one eye. I suspect she had another one under those long bangs of hers, but I never actually saw it, so I can’t say for sure. In my opinion, all that hair in the face would be a serious distraction. It was all I could do as a mother not to offer her a ponytail elastic from my purse. You need to be able to see to drive a car safely. That seems fairly bottom-line to me.
Most states do not have upper age limits for driving. That is a good news/bad news kind of thing. This means that it is up to each individual citizen to decide voluntarily when it is time to hang up the car keys. I was a little bit disappointed to find out about that when I was writing this chapter. Personally, I can’t wait to tell my kids, “I’m too old to drive! One of you will have to come and get me!” Lord knows, I have schlepped them around for enough years. Even now, it is not uncommon for me to spend three hours a day in the car transporting my kids to and from their activities. I’d like a personal driver. I think that would be delightful. I don’t know why Miss Daisy got so worked up. I’d volunteer to be driven around by Hoke right this very minute.
From my church pew on Sundays, I point out the wide variety of legal drivers in the general population to my kids: “See Mrs. So-and-so? She’s still driving. She’s ninety-two and has four cataracts. She’s shrinking, too. There is no way she can see over the steering wheel. I know for a fact that she sits on a 1979 telephone directory for the city of Chicago. She’s taken out every trash can on her street at least once. Watch out for her. And just so you know, you’re taking your life in your hands if you park in front of the beauty shop where all the old ladies get their hair done every week.”
I warn my kids that accidents often happen when people are in a hurry. Once when I was fifteen months pregnant with my youngest child and could no longer see my feet, which slowed me down considerably, I was loading groceries in my trunk in the parking lot of the Piggly Wiggly when a man leaned on his horn after deciding I was taking a little bit too long with my business. When the bag boy and I stared at him in open-mouthed astonishment, he went to town, hammering on his horn some more. He wanted my parking space, and he expected me to hop to it. I wondered what on earth he was in such a hurry for. I could only assume he was a brain surgeon and some poor soul was lying in mortal danger on the operating table unless he snagged my parking space and got what he needed at the Piggly Wiggly in one big hurry.
“There is no reason in the world to fight over a parking space,” I tell my kids. “You’re healthy. You can walk. People who fight over parking spaces to avoid walking an extra twenty yards are often the same people who have pricey gym memberships. And never allow yourself to be drawn into an argument with another driver, which can lead to road rage.” My teenagers seem skeptical about that one. I can tell they think I made it up. “Happens all the time,” I assure them smugly.
Teenagers and old people share the highways. If that doesn’t put the fear of God in you, then nothing will. I can’t think about it too much or I’ll break out in hives. In addition, some people think nothing of sliding behind the wheel when they’re exhausted, angry, depressed, or just plain drunk or high. Every single day, those drivers sail along the freeways alongside my teenagers and yours. It’s enough to make me tell them to take the bus.
Distracted drivers are dangerous, too. For example, mothers often look back to minister to their children strapped into safety seats in the rear. I’ve certainly been there and done that. You’ve seen drivers engaged in heated arguments with passengers or someone at the other end of a cell phone call. You can easily recognize distracted drivers if you know what to look for. Anyone trying to eat a hamburger, smoke a cigarette, talk on a phone, and apply mascara simultaneously while driving a motorized vehicle falls into the unsafe driver category. You cannot expect those people to signal when they are turning or changing lanes because their hands are otherwise occupied.
As Professor Mad-Eye Moody urges Harry Potter and his friends, “Constant vigilance!” It’s the only way to share the road with imbeciles and death-eaters, I suppose. Darwin was right, you know. I tell my teenagers that I do not want them to be involved in an accident caused by a human being weeded out during the process of natural selection.
No matter how many scary stories you cut out of the newspaper, forward from the Internet, share from your own youth, or make up on the spot, nothing will convince teenagers that driving is dangerous for them personally. That’s because they can’t imagine a world without them in it. I can’t imagine that either. My mind goes totally blank at the thought of losing one of my children. It is my deepest fear. We grownups know too many real-life stories about teenagers losing their lives in car wrecks—the most likely way for them to die.
In young people’s minds, the world really does revolve around them, so they can’t foresee that making one bad choice while driving—failing to wear a seatbelt, texting, drinking—could cost their lives or someone else’s. This is the reason that perfectly sane parents become hysterical when their kids are late for curfew or fail to check in when they arrive somewhere.
When a teenager cruises in at the last minute, oblivious to the agonizing hours his parents have been wondering whether he is dead or alive, he is also likely to say the one thing that will further inflame an already tense moment: “Chill, Mom. It’s no big deal.”
I have been known to say—and mean—“Lord, when that boy gets home, if he’s okay, I may kill him myself.”
You really must have lived through one of those long nights to appreciate that sentiment.
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br /> STRAIGHT FROM THE MOUTHS OF TEENAGE DRIVERS
1.“I’m not speeding! I’m going exactly the speed limit.”
2.“That dent was already there.”
3.“I’m not too close.”
4.“That car needs to stay out of my lane.”
5.“I know what to do. You told me that a hundred times already.”
6.“I did come to a complete stop.”
7.“This is harder than it looks.”
8.“That was close!”
9.“Merging is hard.”
10.“I forgot about crosswalks.”
11.“I’m never going to parallel-park, so I don’t need to practice that.”
12.“You don’t have to yell at me!”
13.“Sorry. Is that expensive to fix?”
14.“I drove well this time, didn’t I, Mom? You didn’t throw up once.”
Who are You
Talking To?
The first time I realized that my kids’ world really is different from the one I grew up in started out like any other day. I began my morning by wading through debris in the basement in an attempt to get to my washing machine. My kids were out of school for the summer, and my basement looked like homeless people had been living in it for a couple of weeks. It smelled like it, too. I made a mental note to track down the odor of rotting meat and do something about it. I picked my way carefully through computer game disks (which cost fifty bucks each and were left scattered on the floor like chicken feed for kids to step on and crunch with their big teenage feet), candy wrappers, dirty socks, sofa pillows, wet swimsuits, headphones, magazines, empty water bottles, beach towels, and other trash. It looked like the day after a fraternity party or something you’d see on CNN after a tornado roared through.
I've Had It Up to Here with Teenagers Page 11