When your child calls and you can’t help, it is terrifying. As a parent, your job is to protect them, but when they are out in the big wide world in trouble and you are far away, there is nothing you can do. I can only imagine the horror of […]
Teaching your child to drive strikes fear into the heart of any parent and I only have one bit of advice; DON’T DO IT. It has taken me years of terror to reach this conclusion and sadly, my youngest child is the recipient of my unwavering refusal to get in […]
We got a taxi from Tuscon to the airport to pick up our hire car and then did a Thelma and Louise style drive up a very straight road for two hours to the north of Scottsdale. Our middle aged, very chatty taxi driver advised us to avoid crossing the […]
My daughter has passed her driving test. WOOHOO for her. This is still a very scary prospect, but not much I can do about that. Watch out on the roads I warn you. She is very, very happy and now, although I have payed a fortune in lessons for her […]
Give me the rollercoaster ride, bungy jump or icy ski slope any day. Never before have I experienced such extreme fear. I have just been on a ride more terrifying than other any death defying journey of my life. My heart was literally in my mouth, my palms were sweating, even my feet were sweating so much that when I finally got out I kept slipping off my flip flops..
Being a passenger in my newly qualified 17 year old boy racer’s car is right up there with any other heart in the mouth rides I have ever done and I nearly had a heart attack. I tried SO hard to be cool and not be my mother who sits in the passenger seat with me even now, pinned to the back of the seat with a fear of god look on her face and her foot constantly pressing on an imaginary brake, emitting sharp intakes of breath every 10 seconds until I want to drive on the pavement just to annoy her.
It is not natural for me to relax when the product of my own loins has taken my life into his hands. It is a constant source of amazement to me that my children are capable of doing anything on their own, without me. Least of all when I briefly considered whether he should show me due respect by turning the thumping, vibrating, sweary lyric’d music down and by not jolting the car until I felt car sick and by not speeding up at inappropriate moments. I kept having to duck down in order to avoid the disapproving looks of other drivers and pedestrians because the music was so unbearably loud. At one point when we stopped next to some people having a civilized meal by the side of the road I had to apologise by telling them it was my son that was driving and that I had been kidnapped – but I don’t think they heard me.
Needless to say, I am officially turning into my mother. I tried to turn the music down twice, I audibly gasped twice and I commented on the fact that he hadn’t looked or used his indicator several times until he told me to “shut up” and even worse was that my daughter kept pointing out that in her opinion he was a much better driver than me.
As I waited at the end of my road for the complete tosser, arsehole, idiot driver to come screeching towards me WAY too fast and turn into my road without indicating I had to completely revise my opinion. Because above mentioned tosser, arsehole, idiot was my son. Newly qualified. Looking smug and over-confident and taking hands off the wheel to wave at me in a blur on his way passed. It made me wish I still had him strapped into a buggy being pushed about by me and in my complete control and out of harms way. Although there was the occasional moment when even getting any of them into the buggy required a quiet karate chop to the stomach to make them bend in the middle.
HOW did he get to be so big and scary? I can’t bear the thought of anything happening to him or my other two and teenage drivers are just notoriously dangerous. My daughter wants him to drive her to their dad’s house this weekend. Down the motorway and I’ve said no. Again. I can’t cope with the thought of them being together in the car on a motorway when he’s been driving 5 minutes and easily distracted and now she’s pissed off and thinks I’m being ridiculous and it’s going to become an issue no doubt. I do hope my X backs me up on this one.
I wish they’d introduce the laws they have in the States about not being able to drive anybody the same age for a year and limiting numbers of passengers too. Although I have to say it’s pretty impressive that I so far haven’t been in the car with him – not whilst he was learning or since he passed his test – is that the sign of a shrewd parent or a rubbish disinterested one. Must make him take me for a drive as soon as he gets home from school.
Here is an interesting quote about children:-
“”The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers”.
Socrates 400 BC.
