My Road to Driver's Education

Our driveway will be the death of me. Or, at the very least, of my car. Especially now that Allison is licensed and eager to get some time behind the wheel.

The more time she gets behind the wheel, it seems, the further away I get from my goal of snagging the "Most Excellent Parent of the Millennium" trophy.

. . . as though such a downward-spiraling thing is even possible.

This morning, for instance, long before the first cardinal had yet to even try out his first yawn, there I was, frantically explaining to Allison the difference between "hard right" and "hard left," all the while eyeballing our disastrous trajectory in the rearview.

Allison's actually a very good driver, aside from that pesky 30-foot stretch of driveway cement, where she tends to hug the edges the way a 15-year-old boy hugs his date on the dance floor. She generally is a careful, aware and confident driver. But between that skinny-jeans, rearview-sucking garage of ours and its cursedly narrow driveway, we are perpetually bereft of visions of a future, simply by the act of leaving our home.

Frankly, it's enough to make a mom feel a bit verklempt, even at 5:15 a.m., when a ridiculously-early cheerleading practice at Lincoln High School propels us into the larger universe.

And, this morning, that sting of my impatience was somehow heightened, knowing that I'd be returning to work a few hours later.

This is the bane of being a teacher by trade--that continual reminder of just how inadequate you are at it, especially when the walls happen to be your own rather than those of some handsomely-subsidized government building with the name "High" stamped on it.

Apparently, I save my "best" for other people's children, settling, instead, on "just shy of a Social Services intervention" when I'm amongst my own.