Last week I took my 16 year old, Tessa, to have an emissions test run on the new-to-her car our friend had so generously passed this way.
She gets her license in less than two weeks.
These “adulting” experiences are all new to her.
I can see reality setting in at the responsibility and the cost of things.
She has a job, but I see her relief when I pull my wallet out to pay.
She leaned over as we sat in two torn up chairs in the shop, and made a comment that it felt like she imagined having an ultrasound would, as you waited to see if there was a heartbeat.
I smiled at her, watching her out of the corner of my eye, so excited for all the possibilities a very first car affords.
She didn’t even have to say what she was thinking about.
I knew it was camping trips with that trunk packed to the gills, and road trips, and drives out to the ocean, her windows down,
with her hand held out feeling the magic of the California breeze.
I heard her sigh of relief when the guy broke her daydream to tell us the car had passed.
I remembered then the car I had as a teenager that made me hold my breath every time I waited to hear that same thing.
A clunky old car is a right of passage, of sorts.
I will never forget my brown 1979 Volvo station wagon that leaned to the left, and how, if you drove with your windows down, every passenger in the back would soon be picking little bits of the shedding sheepskin seat covers out of their nose, teeth, and eyelashes,
but how I was grateful for it, because the car my parents almost chose, instead, was a retired police cruiser that was still painted black and white.
I knew that (when compared to the social suicide that driving a police car in high school would be) everyone would agree that shedding sheepskin in your braces was a small price to pay.
I would never tell her about how often I drove with two people to every one seatbelt,
or that how often I came screeching home narrowly in-time for curfew was the entire reason it had that left lean.
That was the “Well, I’m here aren’t I” lean.
She doesn’t need to know about such things.
After she was handed her certificate that said she had passed the emissions test,
she asked if we could go wash it, and she drove it through her first ever, self-purchased car wash with the same expression she had in them as a child desperately trying to stay hidden under her very best adult-like face.
I helped her vacuum it out, and put new seat covers on the seats.
We finished it off by getting air in her tires, and once we got back home, and we headed inside,
she gave one quick glance back at that little black hatchback with a smile on her face,
and her hands on her hips.
She didn’t know that I had seen.
What she also doesn’t know is that while she is busy making plans for her future with her sparkly eyes,
and while she is starting to think up a world of possibilities,
I am looking at her, recalling all of the times when I was a young girl, who was excited for all those same things.
When I look at her, I see an extension of all of my own plans, and my own story, that gets to live on, and go off in that little black hatchback further, further, further outside of me.
In these middle years I have sometimes felt like my own time has passed.
There are wishes, and regrets, and several unrealized dreams inside of this aching body.
Sometimes my big dreaming days feel far behind me;
But, then I have these moments, watching my girls living times like this that I remember so well,
and suddenly they are revived;
There, just from a different vantage point, the same as always.
And my hand gently reaches out the window, remembering to feel my own breeze.
It’s easy to get bogged down in mid-life with all of the pressing, “have-to” kind of things,
but then I watch a dream, or a passion be born in one of my girls,
and I remember that the roads are also open to my dreams.
She’s just at the beginning, and I imagine what may be coming:
College? Love? A home of her own? Maybe a daughter to sit next to at her first emissions test one day?
And, time will continue,
and she will remember her own dreams as she watches her daughter’s face
the same way that her face speaks of my dreams to me.
The wheel will spin –
That of time,
and also on some old clunker car -headed off (hopefully safely)
on down the street.
Mom Outnumbered
Hi! My name is Kerri Green; Wife to Justin, and mother to four highly entertaining daughters -Alena, Chloe, Tessa, and Paige. I am an artist, a writer, a daycare provider, a lover of people, a believer that there is humor and beauty in all things, and the author of Mom Outnumbered; a blog about real family life, and my observations of it. My goal is to make people laugh, to be there for them when they cry, and most importantly, to let them know that they are not at all alone in this up and down world. I live with my family in Sebastopol California, and I am opening the window into our life. So welcome! Come in. Sit down. Just please don’t mind the mysterious wet spots.
