My daughter got her driver’s license this week. Enough said?
She has been looking forward to this momentous occasion for months … no, make that YEARS. She is convinced that having wheels will give her a newfound freedom unparalleled in her otherwise-boring life.
She is sure that her world will change for the better.
I remember that feeling. It lasts for a while, but begins to dim when Mom starts asking you to drive your brother and sister everywhere. Not only does that not fit into a teenager’s schedule of important places to be and be seen, it’s also not SO “not cool.”
My oldest daughter became my grocery shopper when she got her license, but she’s away at college and I’ve been without an assistant for a while now. This daughter doesn’t realize yet that she just inherited that job, too. Tee-hee.
Yes, her world just changed in many ways. But, then, so have ours.
The first thing we had to do was figure out what sort of vehicle we would be adding to our car lot. She had her eye on some brand new really nice sporty things for herself, but she knew it was really wishful thinking. She surfed the Internet nightly and printed out volumes of pictures, hoping beyond hope that she would get a new car and Mom would continue to drive the old one.
Nope, didn’t happen.
Still, we had to add one more vehicle and one more teenage driver to our insurance policy, and well, let’s just say we are still recuperating from that little shocker.
And figuring out who gets what parking space will take some time. We have a two-car garage that after all the lawnmower and stuff gets put in it, only has room for one car. I’ve already called dibbs on that space.
Our driveway is narrow, so if one car is pulled up in the driveway and someone pulls in behind it, we have to play musical cars when somebody has to leave. And the mail lady won’t deliver mail if there are cars blocking our mailbox. Now that problem just got one car worse. When my college kids come to visit, it’s comical.
My new-driving daughter had her license for, oh, about ten minutes and she asked if she could take the car. That would be in the “my-car-soon-to-be-her-car” vehicle.
I said, “Sure! If you’ll take this movie back to Blockbuster for me.” She was ecstatic! Teenagers-with-new-licenses actually think running errands is fun.
The next morning, I got into the car and it had changed personalities. When it was my car, it was clean, dependable, and smelled like whatever fragrance I had squirted in it when I went through the car wash last. It had a magnet on the dash where I could stick my cell phone.
In one short day, it had become a teenager’s car. A fun thing. It had a zebra-striped velour steering wheel cover. It had a dog stuck to the dash where my cell phone used to be. The dog’s head had a bouncy head that bobbed up and down at every turn.
It had a miniature fan stuck to one of the air conditioner vents, sending waves of floral scent throughout the car. There were candy wrappers on the floor. The gearshift had a hair clip thing around it.
It didn’t even feel like the same car anymore. It’s amazing how in the blink of an eye, a teenager can swoop in and change our lives, our insurance rates, and even our cars.
But I think the car likes her new owner … she’s a lot more fun than I was.
