Modern Rites of Passage or If You Don't Like my Driving Stay Off the Sidewalk

Lately, I’ve been having melancholy thoughts and it’s all to do with our kids passing their Driving Test. The obvious first thought is -- get off the sidewalk!

But the problem isn’t with these new drivers, who are pretty conscientious and careful, it’s with me. I know it’s normal to say how quickly children grow up but what about how quickly I must have grown up? Only, when you pass twenty-one, the phrase isn’t ‘grown-up’ anymore, it’s ‘aged’ or ‘matured’, as though you were a cheese.

Passing the driving test is a modern ‘rite of passage’. In the good old days, at sixteen, you’d have either wrestled a large carnivore to the ground using only your teeth or been exchanged for a herd of cattle. Now it’s a driving licence. Generally speaking, I approve. There’s a limited supply of large carnivores and cattle and an apparently limitless supply of sixteen year-olds as I discovered that day at the Test Centre. However, having a child pass their test is a just as tricky rite of passage for parents as those old ones were, involving them in much the same worry and expense -- not unlike the dreaded Prom and Wedding for which it is an ominous, but relatively cheap, precursor.

The above three ceremonies, Driving Test, Prom, and Wedding, are the big ones in the modern child and parent rites of passage. There are others, graduation from kindergarten and primary school, and the first date, for example. However, these little events are cute and don’t bring much angst to the parent. There’s a warm fuzzy glow around these that blurs their significance and dulls the intimations of mortality that the later ones bring.

For example, passing their driving test makes the kid independent in a way that hits home, your home. To be precise, from now on you’re home and they’re not! All those years of driving them hither and thither (wherever that is) are over and so is your usefulness. There’ll be no more quality time with your kid on the road at midnight, stuck in traffic around the city returning from some game in the back of beyond on a Wednesday evening. You are cast aside, rejected by your own flesh and blood, only to attend their life’s future events by invitation. You are beginning the slide into the grandparenting role when you weren’t ready to cast off the parenting thing, no matter how much you said you were. And I did, frequently, particularly on the highway at midnight.

Then, unless you buy them a car, it’s back to the begging routine, ‘please may I borrow the car tonight?’ This is where you discover whether or not you raised them well. If you did, and they have no use for the car tonight, they might let you borrow it. If you didn’t or they have a particularly active social life you should get a bus pass, at the reduced Senior’s rate naturally.

Now when their friends drop in you can’t get up your own driveway -- assuming you have been allowed to use the car for work. The friends only live next door and once would have walked or cycled round in seconds but now they take fifteen minutes unparking and parking their parent’s car. This urge to destroy the environment by driving mammoth vans and SUVs short distances comes oddly from a group of young people who’ve been lecturing us all on the ozone layer since kindergarten. Where are Bob Geldhof and Bono when you really need them? Why didn’t they keep working their audience and help us save the planet from new drivers?

The ‘intimations of mortality’ I mentioned earlier, move up a gear whenever the weather turns bad or a gang of teenagers goes out in the car with your new driver. I’m pretty sure I would have lived forever had it not been for my children. But having one driving, on their own, without me gripping the hand brake and pressing my foot through the floor on the imaginary foot brake that is fitted to the passenger side of every parent’s car, knocks decades off my existence rather than just the odd years all the other anxious moments did. I calculate I’m down to a man’s average lifespan at this moment but another few weeks of fog and rain, or a summer of fine weather and parties, will see me in the newspaper’s obituary column instead of on Triond.