Right now I’m superconcerned about this, the parking stall looming in my side mirror; have I got the right angle? I crank the gear into reverse. A 360° check: that’s what I should do now. I turn the wheel and begin backing up—can I see the white line yet? I straighten the car, and there it is in the backup camera. I head—slowly!—for the curb.
This is driving. This is me, learning to drive.
Oh, I know it’s silly. I’m coming up on forty-seven, after all. Public transit has been fine this long, especially for me. You can see from my unringed fingers, now whitening on the wheel, that I’m not married, and I haven’t got children either. Driving is something I’ve never had to do; nobody needs me for the school or grocery run. But it’s exciting. And now I would like to drive: local travel is looking more desirable, a visit to nearby wineries, nearby…anything. Now I would like to drive for me.
It’s strange as a woman to do something for me, I think now, as my hands go back to nine and three on the wheel’s black leather. (Is that a sign on the road? A marking for us drivers.) We women are usually caregivers; that’s hard-wired into most of us. There’s that oft-repeated sentence about prettiness being a female obligation, but that’s true of caregiving as well, no? This is our expected role in life, to help others, children especially and also parents, husbands, members of our communities. It’s hard to explain to people, I think, flipping the signal, moving up to half-way up the stall, checking for other cars, that I am not learning to drive because I have to, because it will help my career (a sort of societal caregiving) or because I need to ferry people around, aging parents, young children. It’s hard to explain that I want to drive just because I want to, because it might make my life more fun.
Fun: this is odd to admit. It feels odd driving, and not only because I’ve waited so long that I can see the white in my hair crisscrossing the youthful red the way a pedestrian crosswalk does the road. I always thought I would have those responsibilities. I always thought I would be a mother, a wife; I always thought I would have a career. Not having these feels jarring, the way it does when I screw up and turn too sharply, hitting the curb.
Being a mother and a wife was something that I honestly believed happened to every woman. Without those things I feel uncertain, shaky, like you do when you learn something new, something that requires a lot of steps: mirror, mirror, shoulder check and turn. I forgot there were other paths or maybe I never knew that in the first place; maybe no one ever told me there were other things to do with your life at all, and so I never pictured them. I am not sure what to do.
Driving is hard, soothes the instructor, who doesn’t care about all the angst I’m going through. Maybe he doesn’t know either; the thing about being a single childless woman is that a lot of our angst is invisible. Most people make assumptions about me. I am married, people think, and I do have children, or maybe I’m younger than they thought at first, and this life is yet to come. Having children and being a caregiver is so expected for women that people just think you do: everyone asks if I have children and no one knows what to do with my negative answer. No one is quite realizing that I have my own path to travel, and maybe it’s the same with this instructor, his wedding ring showing every time he grabs the wheel (sadly more than I like).
But having my own path is exciting, too. In this lesson, we’ve finished all the reverse stall parking I can do for the day, and the instructor wants a chance to fix a mistake he’s seen me do in my left turns, so we’re out of the parking lot and towards one of the major roads. Doing whatever I want, going wherever…as a driver I am not a fan of these big roads. There are too many lights, lines; too much noise, too many other cars. I always thought that’s where I’d be, on these well-travelled roads. Maybe a quieter, less worn path could have its benefits. I’m thinking of the local trips I’ve promised myself, unaccompanied by anyone else, the small visits I want to take around the countryside, small visits all by myself and just for me.
The last fifteen minutes and the instructor’s got me to pull over (signal, shoulder check, and a half-circle of the wheel). I’m not very good at it, ending up miles from the curb. I’m still going somewhere, but definitely not the way everyone else does. And stuck out here far away from where I should be is of course not the best place to be when you’re driving (I can see the instructor’s right hand, the unringed one, moving to the door handle to show me the gap), but maybe it’s an okay place to be in life. I’m on a different path. I’m learning how to travel down it. It’s not easy, but I will figure it out, just like I will figure out this driving thing (a half-circle one way and then a second to straighten out the car).
I’m at the end of this lesson now and of course I need more; I haven’t even begun to park parallelly, and my pullovers lack finesse. And I still feel uncertain; this new path is hard-going, the unexpected one, the one that’s different than I ever thought it would be. It’s a tough path, no matter how you travel it. But I am learning.
Colleen Addison
Photo from PX Here