My 21-year-old niece recently decided that it’s time to get her driver’s license. Because my niece’s parents aren’t in the picture (long story), hubby and I try to be a support system whenever she wants to tackle a major life milestone. We helped her get her state ID card at age 16, coached her through earning her high school diploma at 17, and set her up with a phone and calling plan, which she needed once she started job hunting.
So, when she expressed interest in driving, I volunteered to take her to the DMV to get her permit and give her some driving lessons.
The day we went to get her permit, I insisted we get to the DMV the minute it opened. I was used to my local DMV, where there’s a line of people waiting for the doors to open each day and a typical two-hour wait for those without an appointment. But we were headed to the DMV in her much smaller town. I was shocked when we walked into a nearly empty lobby and a representative behind the counter called out “Can I help you?” When we looked slightly confused, he encouragingly waved us over to his window. My niece looked at me with an expression I can only describe as “I can’t believe you made me get up this early to not wait in line.”
Our visit to the DMV literally took all of 10 minutes, and we were soon out the door with her temporary permit (the actual card would arrive within 10 days, we were advised). We drove to the local high school, whose large parking lot was nearly empty due to it being summer. I parked the car and had my niece slide into the driver’s seat.
I remembered my own early driving experiences with my impatient father. I went home from many of those lessons in tears, so I was determined to be reassuring, supportive and positive.
I could tell my niece was nervous, so we spent our first 15 minutes simply adjusting her seat, moving the mirrors to give her the best visibility, and going over the basics. When she felt she was ready, she backed out of the parking space and began moving forward at a glacial pace. For the next 30 minutes, we simply drove—very slowly—up and down the aisles in the parking lot. My constructive feedback was mostly, “Make sure you’re on your side of the road,” as she seemed to want to drift into what would have been the lane of oncoming traffic. I assured her that the more she drove, the more comfortable the spatial aspects of driving would be. But, regardless of this encouragement, her hands were locked on the wheel in a death grip and a small bead of sweat ran down the side of her face.
During our second lesson, I was able to coax her out of the parking lot and onto the street. We drove around, and around, and around the block where the parking lot was situated. At first, I realized that I was physically leaning away from the parked cars we were passing a little too closely. But she soon got the hang of distancing herself safely from the other cars and the curb, and I poured on the praise.
Lesson three took us farther afield, as in three blocks from the high school parking lot. She was doing great until we encountered a city bucket truck trimming tree branches and blocking half the road. I talked her through getting around the safety cones, the flagger and the tree debris, but I could tell it was nerve wracking for her. I told her to go ahead and drive back to the parking lot. We could swap seats and I’d drive us to lunch.
As we pulled into the parking lot, I pointed to a distant parking space. “Let’s park over there and you can practice centering the car between the space’s painted lines.” Unfortunately, the space I’d picked was in a part of the parking lot that sloped downward. As we pulled into the space, she was going a little fast, and gravity was adding to our speed. “Brake. Brake! Brake!!”
Flustered, she’d hit the gas instead of the brake. “Other pedal!!” Once we’d jerked to a stop, the front passenger side tire was resting on top of the parking block and the car was diagonal in the space. Luckily, we’d missed hitting a utility pole by about 2 inches.
My niece was devastated, but I assured her that every single person who’s ever learned to drive a car has, at one point or another, hit the gas when they meant to brake. It’s a right of passage, and she’d gotten it out of the way early. She wasn’t really buying my story, but I did get a small smile out of her.
Life and medical appointments for my parents have made it tough to schedule our next lesson. But we’ll make it happen. And once my niece has her driver’s license, I hope she’ll look back fondly at our lessons and think I wasn’t too terrible as a coach. |
