Letting Go of the Wheel

The terror of watching your kids drive off without you for the first time

A funny thing happened this morning: my car pulled out of the driveway with my kids in it, and neither my wife nor I was behind the wheel.

No, we didn’t get one of those fancy self-driving vehicles. My newly licensed daughter (aka Boogieface) was driving. And now that she’s fully insured, I let her drive herself and her brother to school for the first time ever.

I’m not known for making good decisions. Just ask my wife.

Unless you’ve experienced it yourself, there’s nothing more surreal (and terrifying) than watching your kids — the ones you’ve been protecting and raising for the last 17+ years — pull out of your driveway and then disappear down the road. My parental brain couldn’t make sense of it.

Brain: “Hey! Val! Your kids just stole the car! Hello?!? Why are you just standing there?!?”

Me: What? Oh, yeah. I guess I should do som… oh, well. They’re too far away now anyway.

Granted, their school is just a little over a mile away. But still…

The last time I felt like this was when we dropped Boogs off at kindergarten. I can remember thinking that, for the first time ever, she was going to be having experiences without us. She would be making memories without us. And I didn’t like it. Not one bit. In my mind, that was her first step on her path away from us.

Now she literally has the keys to freedom. And again, I don’t like it.

Yeah, I know I’m being a hypocrite. For years I’ve been complaining about driving them places—to school, to soccer practice, to their friends’ houses, etc. Now my daughter can just drive herself. And if her brother (aka The Animal) needs a ride to the gym or whatever, Dad’s off the hook once again.

Great. Now I’m even more unnecessary than before. (Don’t tell my wife.)

When you’re the parent of young kids, you think that as they get older, there will be less to worry about. Not true. Now that my daughter can drive, my worry level has skyrocketed. Luckily, modern technology allows me to monitor their location (i.e., spy on them) at all times through a handy app on my phone. But all that does is enable me to worry in real time as I watch their little avatar move around my smartphone screen.

I have no idea how my parents felt as they watched me drive away for the first time, with no way of knowing where I was going or when I would arrive at my mystery location, other than me calling them from a landline or a payphone. The not-knowing must have been unbearable.

Parents sure were a lot braver back in the day.

I guess there’s nothing I can do about it. This is just my kids taking yet another step (albeit a big one!) away from us and down the path of their lives.

And make no mistake, I’ll be following that path like a hawk on my smartphone. ~