Hey there, awesome readers!
This post is brought to you by a recent Facebook status update:
To follow-up, my son and I didn’t end up driving that day because of the weather. To be perfectly honest, I felt relieved. Then I felt guilty for feeling relieved. (Why? Because I’m a mom and I do guilty like a ninja.)
If you have teenagers that are learning how to drive, the following statement will resonate with you (and your accelerated heart rate):
Teenagers learning how to drive is a frightening experience for everyone involved.
The laws for getting your driver’s license are different depending on where you live but here in Quebec, new drivers HAVE to take a course. I’m actually happy about that because while learning how to drive is scary, the responsibility of teaching someone how to drive is nerve-racking. So yayyyy we, the parents of Quebec, get to pay ridiculous amounts of money for someone else to teach our kids how to drive. Yes, that was sarcasm. The truth is that while someone else teaches our kids the basics of driving, the actual “practice” falls on our shoulders.
It’s a tough call because while we want our kids to grow into independent individuals who can taxi themselves around, we also want them to stay forever young and safely strapped in the passenger’s seat. It’s this gap between idealism and realism that defines our role as saints parents. Sounds like chaos but mostly it’s an ever-evolving process.
As an almost new driver, my son is now noticing everything about the way the rest of us drive. Just the other day we were in the car together, I was driving (because weather), and while I thought we were both lost in our own thoughts, I realized that he was OBSERVING when he said, “I see that speed limits are optional.”
Clearly, gone are the days when I could do nothing wrong in his eyes. Sigh.
Haha! Don’t feel bad Mona, he does the same to me.
He likes to do it “subtly” too: “Oh, I usually go 35 in this 40-zone. Slower is better.”
And when he says something like that, I say: “Oh yeah? Can you parallel park in one try? How about on both the left and the right?” And then he looks at me in awe. 1-0 Camille.
Although when I did MY lessons several years ago, I do remember getting upset at my mom when she wouldn’t do a full 3-second stop at a stop sign. I set up a points system and every time she committed an infraction, she would lose points. But my teenage self got bored of that system within a few days.
Since I don’t drive, I’m thinking of lobbying the government to change the minimum driving age to 11– I think my son can handle it. And, hey! Free taxi! 🙂
Hah. “I see that speed limits are optional.” Fantastic.