From the Passenger's Seat
A short essay on the experience of teaching sons how to drive
We are flying to England tomorrow! A big adventure after a long time without one. I will write about the trip here later, but I doubt I’ll get to it this month. I don’t want to leave May without something, though, so I offer you this essay, which the few lit mags I submitted it to rejected, so I quit. Maybe it’s just too fluffy. It is in sheer laziness that I post it here instead, a place where I accept and publish everything I want to possibly before it should be! Comments are open, so you can let me know how you judge it.
My younger son is taking the driving test today, for the second time, with his dad. My husband went with our oldest son, too, who passed his driving test— first try. I went with my younger son the first time when he didn’t pass. He blames the instructor, who seemed to expect the teenager to read his mind, but I wonder if it was me. I wear my heart on my sleeve, as they say. This time it’s better that I await the news at home because I’m nervous enough from a distance.
~*~
Theoretically, I looked forward to teaching my sons how to drive, until I actually slid into the passenger seat. When each son, in turn, took his place behind the wheel for the first time and cranked the key, it went from being a cool abstract thought to totally uncool and way more concrete— concrete like a cement wall that he was going to careen into, headlong, full speed. I realized I was placing my life into the hands of a relatively unpredictable, sometimes belligerent kid, who on occasion acts less mature than he did as a seven-year-old— ah, the charm of the teenage temperament. Other people’s lives and vehicles were placed into those sweaty hands, too, out there on the busy, unpredictable city streets. Everything in me rebelled against relinquishing this control to my kids.
~*~
Let’s shift gears, and look at this from a different perspective.
The most straightforward way to communicate in the English language is using the active voice. When we use the active voice, the subject of the sentence does the action. We know who’s in control.
I am driving.
When the passive voice is used, which I was taught to avoid at all cost by my highschool English teacher, who’s doing the action, who’s in control, is vague. As a teenager, I couldn’t comprehend that in the passive voice the subject receives the action, that passive voice is weak, lacking in power and agency. Decades later, I better understand the problem my teacher had with passive voice. When I slide into that passenger’s seat, I’m the passive object who receives the action.
I’m being driven by my son.
I’ve lost control. And, as a new driver, it’s questionable whether my son is truly in control instead. Does he realize it?
I don’t like being out of control, so in the passenger’s seat, I struggled to find a way to remain active.
I’m teaching my son to drive.
This is a murky area to inhabit, between the active and the passive.
I’m being driven by my son.
~*~
Now let’s circle back around.
Parents try to stay in control of things for as long as possible. Maybe we clutch that control and have to employ the help of a therapist to wrench our claw-like hands open in order to allow our children freedom— license, one might say— to become independent. Even in the passenger’s seat, we try to control the situation.
We came up with a rule when our oldest began learning to drive, and it remained intact for the youngest: Only the parent in the passenger seat gets to advise (yell at) the driver; the backseat parent needs to remain quiet, a twist on the no-backseat-drivers rule. It’s an impossible rule for me to follow no matter where I am. I can’t help but give the driver tips (commands). Even when I’m in the backseat in the car, my voice tries to maintain the action.
I’m teaching my son to drive.
For a time, the student driver needs directions on how to get places, to be taught all the steps that are involved in driving without creating mayhem, hitting other cars, and killing everyone. But then gradually, and certainly before the parents notice, the student understands what he needs to do and how to do it. He doesn’t want to hit anyone or anything. He knows where to go— these streets are mapped on his bones. If we don’t stop telling him when to use his blinkers and brakes, when to shift and when not to, how is he going to remember to think of it all on his own?
I know, Mommy! I’ve got this!
Did he just yell at me?
Wait, when did his voice get so low?
~*~
Or perhaps we can consider that getting one’s driver's license, which most teens still do, is a rite of passage. Simply put, a rite of passage is a celebration of a person’s movement from one stage of life and into another.
Becoming an adult is a confusing time and slow process. “Childhood fades gradually in some ways, never ends in others; adulthood arrives in small, irregular installments if it arrives; and every person is on her own schedule, or rather, there is none for the many transitions,” said Rebecca Solnit in a coming of age essay. The rite of passage gives us the opportunity to celebrate, imbuing this discombobulating stage with lightness. For parents, a rite helps us know where we stand, that our role is changing, and to settle into this new posture without freaking out. Or at least, it gives us a chance to get the freaking out over with ahead of time.
There is quite a bit of adult-like independence and maturity required to be considered a good driver, a hint of what it means to become a responsible adult. When learning to drive, a young person takes a step towards the threshold of living and surviving independently.
For me, this early rite of driving is a bright sign post in the fog alerting me that parenting is changing. I must start the slow, agonizing at times, process of morphing into a more passive mother, gradually retreating to watch my sons live their own lives. They need me to wear my heart on my sleeve less, and shut up when I’m in the backseat, for the love.
~*~
But doesn’t this new view from the passenger seat have its own rewards? From here, I observe how grown up my oldest son looks in his high school uniform— shirt and tie— and that he’s suddenly taller than me. How he likes to chatter when he drives, just like I do, and that he’ll talk about almost anything. How those irregular patches of whiskers have started sprouting on the tip of his chin and the creases of his smile. When did that happen? From here, I wonder, as the fruity aroma intrudes on my nasal passages, when did my younger son start using the Old Spice body wash that his older brother likes? Et tu, Brute? When did his hands get so big? And where did his soft baby cheeks and button nose go? From here, I allow myself to be schooled by my boys in the ways of current teenage culture, music, their separate lives, these my man-children with their deepening voices, who still call me Mommy.
~*~
While I was pondering these things in my heart, my husband texted me that my younger son passed the test and now waits in line to receive his for-real-legit photo driver’s license, an indication that we successfully taught him how to drive. Later today, he’s going to want to drive somewhere alone for the first time. When he drives around on his own, I won’t even be parenting in the passive voice anymore. I’m not going to be in the sentence at all really— except as the (nagging?) voice of reason in his head. Now, he’s the subject of the sentence, imposing the action of driving, using his one-step-closer-to-adult power, hopefully, in a reasonable, responsible, safe way in the world— the way we taught him.
My son is driving.
I like the way you combine your understanding of grammar in what you are writing. It’s a great way to provide clarity and maybe a little humor at the same time. Congratulations to son#2 and his mother in passing the driver’s test!
Yeah, I guess that's the goal, to be out of the sentence, but it's bittersweet.