It seems fitting that the Rosa Parks of the fight to drive in Saudi Arabia was a single mother trying to get home to her 5-year-old son. In America, after all, the car is all but synonymous with parenting. And as Saudi women continue to risk jail for getting behind the wheel, I find myself thinking of all the complaining I have done about carpool arranging, and activity shuttling, and babysitter dropping and grocery hauling. It has me looking at my all too messy, somewhat rattly wagon with new affection — and more than a little anger that all these have become a political act for some women.
It was through this lens that I read the author Karin Kasdin’s ode to her car on the Faster Times Web site last week. You can read the entire post here, but she’s given me the go-ahead to quote a part of it. She writes:
For two and a half decades I chauffeured three sons to soccer games. On misty, muddy days their cleats left gritty polka-dots on the back of my seats. In late November my car became a refuge from the brisk gusts of autumn wind. I would leave the heat on and dash to its warm embrace between quarters. After the games, chilled to our bones, our family would huddle in the car, sip hot chocolate I had brought in a thermos, and offer up commentary on the teams’ performance.
There were nights when my car became a diner. Scholarly studies reveal that the happiest families are those who eat dinner together nightly. I wish I could say we sat down to nutritious dinners together every night like the Cleavers, but we didn’t. Wally and “The Beav” didn’t attend religious school two nights a week and tennis on a third. Wally and “The Beav” did stupid stuff like playing outside instead of important stuff like art lessons or karate. Truthfully, I never believed in over-programming my kids, but when you have three kids, and they are each allotted one self-selected activity in addition to religious school and the orthodontist, you wind up driving to nine activities. Nine activities squeezed into a five-day work week means sometimes you have to eat cheesesteaks and fries in the car. My kids love cheesesteaks and fries and love me for allowing them to chow down in the car. Put that in your study!
On seven-hour treks to visit grandparents the car became Las Vegas. We would bet on what time we’d arrive, how often the youngest would have to stop for the bathroom, whether or not the turnpike stop would have peanut M&Ms, how many desserts Grandma made for Thanksgiving dinner. When all bets had been tallied, it was showtime. We listened to tapes of Disney movies and sang along. I recall begging for mercy on one jaunt, when my two oldest boys croaked out the Robin Williams song from Aladdin for three hours nonstop. Prince Aliiiiiiiiiii … Over the years we’ve taken down and passed around approximately four million bottles of beer on the wall.
My car periodically moonlighted as a reading room. I learned to love Don DeLillo while waiting for my youngest to emerge from his hour-long saxophone and guitar lessons. I read the collected works of Philip Roth to the music of Big Bad Voodoo Daddies, and Jimi Hendrix provided a somewhat inappropriate soundtrack to “The Lovely Bones.”
My cars have been ambulances, speeding through red lights when we thought my oldest inadvertently ingested record-cleaning fluid, when the baby had his first several asthma attacks, and when the middle son sprouted a kidney stone. Each car has proven itself a trustworthy partner in parenting.
A mother’s car is a counseling office on wheels, particularly when she is the mother of sons. In my experience young sons don’t talk much, especially about feelings. They’re always “okay” or ‘It’s no big deal, they can handle it,” or they’re “too busy right now.” But most mothers learn that once their boys are captive in the car, they will talk. My mothering skills were honed in my car. Behind the wheel I didn’t have to play second fiddle to the television set. I came to know my boys best there, stuck in traffic on the way to the tennis lesson or waiting for a brother to return from a pit stop. I learned how fragile boys are despite their heroic efforts to hide from that reality. I learned about their hurts and their insecurities and their crushes, and I always kept my eyes on the road. They rarely had to see the tears they brought to my eyes.
In later years our car was a moving van. We stuffed it to the brim twice this year… when we drove the youngest to college and when we moved the middle son to a new city to begin a new job. I am a totally emancipated woman now, and happy to be starting life as such, with new horizons beckoning me and a car that is finally just a car.
Karin is looking at her car differently because of changes close to home. I’m looking at mine differently because of changes far away.
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