November 11, 2002
DOWN HOME:
Forget 'sweet'; let the girl drive
___Molly celebrates one of the best birthdays this week.
___Some people will say our youngest daughter is turning "Sweet 16." If you were to ask her, I think she'd call it "Driver's License 16."
___This day has been a long time coming.
___Just the other night, Molly reminded me she thought she knew how to drive years ago, when she was just a little bitty kid.
___I remembered exactly. What always struck me was not that she insisted she knew how to drive, but how ca
sual she was about it.
___"Yeah, I know how to drive," she'd say, as if she were talking about nothing more significant than riding a tricycle or putting Legos together. "Why don't you let me drive? It's easy."
___"Molly," I asked the other morning at breakfast, "when you were little, why were you so confident you knew how to drive?"
___"Well, in preschool, we made these stop lights," she answered. "I knew that 'green' means go and 'red' means stop. So, I figured I knew how to drive."
___In the past year, Molly's discovered driving isn't that easy. She's learned how to stay in her lane, come to a smooth and complete stop, merge with moving traffic, pull cleanly into perpendicular-parking spaces and back out of the garage without ripping off the side-view mirror or scraping the other car.
___Her progress has been steady, sequential and gratifying to both of us. I've ridden miles and miles in the front "shotgun" seat, coaching her about changing lanes, making clean right turns, trailing other cars at a safe distance. We've ridden down country roads and through neighborhoods I hadn't seen since her big sister, Lindsay, learned to drive.
___Molly recently inherited the old family sedan Lindsay has driven for three years. It was used when we bought it, and Joanna, her mom, drove it for years before Lindsay got it. It's the perfect teenager's car--reliable and steady, but heavy, slow and un-cool. It's working wheels, and it's safe, but it also gives her ample opportunity to appreciate a better car someday.
___She really wanted an El Camino, painted hot pink, and she offered to save up money for the paint job if I'd buy the car. Well, I probably could've afforded the car. But since I've got all the mechanical ability of a Basset hound, I figured I couldn't afford to keep an old, old car on the road.
___This week sometime, probably on her birthday, Molly will back out of our driveway and make her first trip in a car alone. I don't know how parents who don't pray survive their children's teen years.
___And yet watching your child get that driver's license is a metaphor for parenthood. You train her as best you can. You pray. And eventually, you stay behind and trust your child--and God--to travel through life safely and well.
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