Light and Momentary

Driving Adventures, Part 2

One more tip about teaching teens to drive: in my experience, the first hour is not too hairy since you're in a parking lot. But hours two through eight, give or take, are a Big Drag. I think it's really important to be calm and patient, to let them know that you don't expect them to execute a new motor skill flawlessly and that you have confidence in their ability to learn. I think I've done a reasonable job of staying calm and encouraging this time around, but OH MY GOODNESS in those early weeks I get out of the car all weak in the knees. 

Maybe this will not be true for you. Maybe you are a less nervous passenger than I am; maybe you live in a smaller town than I do; maybe your teen is a whiz at picking up new motor skills. But if you feel the prickings of despair in those hours, remember that it will get better quickly.

Soon you will be able to have delightful conversations in the car WHILE your teen is driving a route that he used to decline, to your secret relief, as "too scary."

We were leaving the gas station this evening when I realized I'd forgotten about the median at the intersection. "Zoop backwards," I told him, demonstrating the zooping with my hand, "and we'll go out the other side. He backed up and said, "I have zooped." "Huh," I thought to myself, "zoop has a regular perfect participle." I didn't say it out loud, because I am accustomed to keeping my geeky moments quiet, but as he pulled forward he said, "Zoop conjugates regularly." 

My work here is done.

We chatted as we drove, talking about other -oop verbs. All the examples we could think of are regular: scoop, loop, swoop, whoop. We talked about what the participle might look like if it were irregular. We talked more about linguistics (when is it appropriate to accost innocent bystanders about irregular plurals?), and then about math, and then about his project for the geography fair. "I need a striking way to make the Zimbabwean flag," he said. "Frosting," I suggested, thinking that cake might be a hit at the geography fair. "Not frosting," he said, and explained why. We turned into the driveway and I said again, loudly, "Frosting!" 

"Mom," he said with mock sternness as he put the car in park, "if you can't be quiet in the car you'll have to walk home." And as I laughed out loud I thought about the pleasures of family life: shared trials that turn into shared jokes, shared interests that bubble quietly in all of our minds, and shared drives that pass by in a blink, full of pleasant conversation and free of menacing mailboxes.

A tip from me to you

I do not like teaching my children to drive. After the first boy got his license, I resolved that I would be more diligent about getting the second boy started. And I tried-- but I really really hate teaching my children to drive. My husband declines to assist until they have mastered the basics, despite my argument that since I did all the toilet-training, he should do all of the driver's ed.

I didn't love getting them out of diapers, but nobody ever died of toilet training.

Anyway. Boy #2 is reasonably competent. He starts the school's behind-the-wheel class this week, and I expect that he'll get his license in the late fall or early winter.

This summer when I was feeling stressed and alone while teaching him to drive, I googled "teach my teen to drive" and found only a bunch of unhelpful stuff I already knew. Kids should not use their phones while driving! [thanks for that] Neither should you! [you think?] Those mailboxes are not as close as they seem! [no, actually, they are every bit as close as they seem]

The tidbit I am sharing with you came from an offhand comment by an acquaintance. When she mentioned that they had done multiple parking lot excursions, after they'd spent time out on the roads, a little light bulb went off in my head. When I was learning to drive myself, and when I was teaching my own son to drive, I viewed the parking lot as something to graduate from-- a place to figure out the gas and the brake. Parking lot driving was for the rankest of beginners, I thought. But once my second son had some slow and easy practice on residential streets, we went back to a giant empty parking lot. 

Empty parking lots are perfect for figuring out the position of the car in space. "Pull into any space," I told him again and again during one 30-minute practice period. "Now, without craning your neck or opening the door, tell me where the wheels are in relation to the yellow lines. What about the front end? Now hop out and see if your prediction was right." On our next excursion to a residential neighborhood I could say to him, "You're too close to the mailboxes -- can you move closer to the center line?" He could correct his position without overcompensating and he could hold the corrected position-- a skill that took a hair-raisingly long time for my oldest to figure out.

Empty parking lots are also the perfect place to practice turning right and turning through acute angles. It's easy for a novice driver to get a right turn wrong, but in a parking lot you can stop immediately after you return the wheel to neutral and you can put the car in park. You can hop out and talk about where the wheels are in relation to the yellow lines, and how that would translate to a real-road driving situation. It's much easier not to clip the curb or swerve into oncoming traffic with 30 minutes of parking lot right-turn practice under your belt. And making a hard right turn (or left, I guess) is even trickier, but an empty lot with lines painted for angled spaces makes it a much more manageable task.

Now that I have typed this all up it seems so un-rocket-science-y that I'm wondering if I should even post it. But maybe I'm not the only nervous parent who thought it was important to get out of the parking lot and onto the road. And it is, I suppose. But an extra hour of parking lot time, interspersed with on-the-road practice and focused on lane position and clean turns, made me a lot more comfortable this time around. 

The Heron

I always look for ducks in the creek near our house. There are almost never ducks, but I look anyway. 

On the first day of school I walked Stella across the bridge. It had rained heavily the day before, and the creek was high. "Maybe we'll see a duck!" I said. 

Instead there was a heron: blue-gray with implausibly slender legs, taller than Stella. It waded gracefully toward us, unruffled by our gasps of surprise. We'd never seen anything like it.

I was brimful of wistfulness that morning. Pete is in fifth grade this year, and so he takes the junior high bus instead of walking with Stella. But you guys, I was JUST blogging about Pete starting kindergarten. That post is from, like, two weeks ago. The older boy who talked all summer about switching schools had headed out with his chin up, leaving me proud and worried and...wistful. And Alex-- I miss him every day. If I think too much about it my eyes well up: he's gone. Gone.

It sounds a little wacky to say that my son's successful transition to college feels like a loss. So I will say it quietly, just between you and me and the internet: it feels like a loss. This is my job here at the end of my second decade of motherhood, to welcome the losses as my children head out into the world.

Recently Calah Alexander posted about the adjustment to life after her first baby's arrival. I found her post very evocative, because it was a tough adjustment for me as well. That new little person took up about 80% of the available real estate in my brain. I would remember something from five years earlier and catch myself thinking, "But what did I do with Alex while I was backpacking / singing in the choir / taking that final exam?" My mom pals had all seemed to make the adjustment more smoothly, but my mental gears clunked audibly as they tried to process these enormous truths: here is a little boy who did not exist a year ago. My world is different forever because he is here, and he needs me.

Now my world is different because he is not here, and he only needs me occasionally.

When you're in the thick of little-kid needs, you can't imagine that it will ever be different, really. You know people whose children have grown up and moved out, but it's hard to envision your particular children outgrowing Frog and Toad or goldfish crackers or peeing on the floor or eventually your home. (I do not actually miss the peeing on the floor part. I'm wistful, but I'm not that wistful.) You get occasional glimpses of where they're heading, like those elusive ducks in the creek nearby. But the reality, I think, is almost certain to be surprising-- like the enormous heron.

That morning I walked Stella to the school and kissed her goodbye. I ambled back toward home. When I stopped on the bridge the heron was still there. But as I stood there, he spread his great wings. And as I watched with an ache in my heart, he flew away.

Tap tap

Oh, you guys, it's hard to believe it's the 21st of September already. 

Elwood was on a retreat team this weekend. While I'm glad he had a good experience, it was a rough weekend on the home front. 

Stella has impetigo. Joe is overwhelmed with online classes. Pete's teacher makes him sad with some regularity. My 15yo is working on his driver's license. And my oldest is a third of the way into his first semester at college. I miss him a lot.

It's been on my to-do list for almost three weeks now: blog about the start of school.

I think I'll throw this up quickly and see if it tugs me back into the blogging groove.

Hitting my quota

I always said I'd never be a salesman. I dreaded rejection as a kid: selling Girl Scout cookies, wincing through school fundraisers, navigating new friendships -- all of it stressed me out. Lately, though, I have been thinking that salesmanship is a significant part of job; it's just that I'm selling ideas. 

I sell my students, mostly successfully, on the idea that the material in my classes is interesting and useful and manageable. I sell editors, somewhat less successfully, on the ideas in my papers. I just submitted my second sales pitch of the year to a grant funding committee, after the first proposal was rejected.

Rejection is part of sales, whether you're selling vacuum cleaners or ideas. But nobody in my world talks about it.

I could tell you a story in which I sound like a successful pre-tenure faculty member: I had two papers published in the spring semester, and I'm optimistic about getting two more published before the end of the year. I could tell you a different story, too: I had two other papers rejected in the spring semester, and I spent the summer afraid to write a third paper because I know it's likely to get rejected on its first airing. It's my first qualitative paper; it's in a subfield where I have more training as a clinician than an academic. It's probably going to take a couple of iterations to get it in shape.

People tend to treat that iterative process as a badge of shame. I resolved, when I got the letter from the grant funding committee, to be more transparent about it. 

Maybe the worst part of impostor syndrome is the certainty that everybody else has it together except you. Nobody else is so nervous pushing "submit"; nobody else ever flinches, remembering the joke that fell utterly flat. 

I know, on the one hand, that this is preposterous. At the same time, that sneering inner voice is persistent. 

This afternoon I was invited to the dean's office as part of a panel, to talk to a group of first-year faculty about the first-year experience. I said, "If I could give one piece of advice to my first-year self, I would tell her to be more patient with herself as a learner. To remember that there's a reason nobody goes up for tenure in her second year, just like nobody gets a PhD in a year." I talked about the anxiety that consumed me during my first year in the classroom-- how much it had gnawed at me initially, how completely it had receded. And then I felt like a DORK for the next three hours. It's all well and good to talk about being transparent, but maybe IN FRONT OF THE DEAN isn't the place, said my regretful self. I tried to tell myself to settle down, that they hadn't wanted panelists to talk about how effortlessly they'd sailed through the first year, but this attempt met with mixed success.

Two weeks ago my grant rejection letter came in the mail, just an hour before my friend K and I had our monthly meeting for coffee and goal-setting. "Do you ever feel like a rejection is a referendum?" I asked her.

"Like it means everything I'm doing is worthless and stupid and I should just resign before they deny me tenure? Oh, no," she said sarcastically, "I have no idea what you're talking about."

So. I think it's valuable to be transparent, to say, "I am going to hit my quota, but I am hearing a fair amount of NOPE along the way." But it's a lot easier to pretend otherwise.