I remember the last time I drove a car. I had to pick up my husband from the airport. To
change lanes on an almost empty road, I looked back several times, wavering until
the driver behind me started desperately gesticulating to encourage me to make
the move already. I remember every time I’ve driven – there were so few of them
and they were always terrifying. Every
time was like my first time. I always
had to think which was the gas, and which was the brake.
I only got my license at 36.
I thought it would finally make me feel like a competent adult, like I
wasn’t just impersonating one.
When I was growing up my mother never drove. She had a license, but after a near-accident she
never tried again. She would always
overreact at my father’s driving. I can see her hand reaching for the dashboard
as she yelped for caution. I was never scared then. I thought nothing bad could happen to
us. Once when we were driving through a mountain
pass my father had a gallbladder attack.
Fortunately, my mother was a doctor and travelled with all essential
medicines. She gave him something and we
had to stop and wait for his spasms to pass.
That’s the first time I questioned her not driving. I decided I wouldn’t be like her – this ultra-competent
woman who could save a life, but couldn’t operate an automobile to save her
life.
When I turned 18 I promptly signed up for driving lessons. I wanted to go with a friend, but I got
wait-listed as the class was full and so I dropped it. At 19 I got pregnant. That summer I went to the beach with my brother
and my new husband. My round belly covered
in hot pink spandex did not stop me from swimming and diving, to the horror of
mothers with small children around me. The vacation ended abruptly when my
husband was called back for work. My
brother drove us back at night on another perilous mountain road. I sat alone in the back seat in the dark not
seeing where the road would swerve and for the first time I felt a paralyzing fear
for the life growing inside of me.
When my son was a baby we were constantly shuttling between
our parents’ homes as we didn’t have one of our own. He would always promptly fall asleep in the
car as I held him on my lap in the back seat.
When we finally got our own place I was alone there with him a lot,
since my husband traveled for work. One
time my son got the stomach flu. He was
two or three years old and the vomiting and diarrhea had left him limp. I had never seen him so sick that he wouldn’t
speak or play. He smelled like nail
polish from the dehydration. We didn’t
have a phone line installed yet. I had
to leave him alone and run to the payphone outside to call a friend with a
car. I felt so scared and helpless that I
barely got the words out to explain what the problem was. Later she told me she had thought ‘the worst
had happened.’ No, that would only happen
years later.
Throughout his childhood I would have recurrent dreams that
my son was in danger and I had to drive him somewhere, but I couldn’t. Often in the dream I would have to take control
of the car while I was in the back seat.
When I finally achieved some financial stability, after
having moved to another country and struggled to support my family while going
to graduate school, I bought a car so I could learn to drive. It took me three tries to pass the driving
test, and I was shocked when I did. I
felt like a fraud.
I forced myself to drive the car for practice, once getting
stuck in traffic for five hours, my ass turning numb. But at last I was able to drive my son, like
a proper mother should. He had, meanwhile,
turned 18 and gone away to college.
When it was time to bring him home after his first year, I started
out early to beat the traffic. When I got there he hadn’t gotten up or
packed. That took us a couple of hours. By the time we finally started back, I was already exhausted and
missed a turn without noticing, heading in the wrong direction. I was also hearing a strange noise coming
from the car and I realized, turning cold inside, that when I’d parked on a
slope in front of the college I had halfheartedly tried to pull the manual
brake and then forgot to release it. The
brake had been scraping against the wheels all this time. I kept that to myself as my son was already apprehensive
about my navigation and driving skills.
Instead of saving his life with my driving, I was putting it in
peril. I was a fraud.
Once I found our way back, though, he promptly fell asleep,
sitting shotgun with his guitar between his knees, the small car stuffed with
his clothes and furniture. I got us
home, but not before once nearly fatally forgetting to look back into my blind
spot before changing lanes. The car next
to us moved over to avoid collision, while my son stayed asleep.
Years later he would laud me for that trip, saying what a
trooper I was. My son never got his
license. He was scheduled to take a
driving test the morning he died. He had
the same aversion to driving that I do, that my mother did. I must have passed
it on to him in the womb that night when I first felt fear for him, for us. Now I have no fear. And I have no reason to drive.
