Mothers' Little Helper & The Road To Nowhere

THE MESSAGE LIGHT blinking caught me by surprise.  It’s not often I get a call on a Saturday night these days. Calls are mostly exchanged in the afternoon, plans set or broken.  By Saturday evening either I’m out with those most likely to call, or burrowed in for a bit of middle-aged hermitage.

Last night, then -- a dinner party for a friend’s milestone birthday.  Much mirth & fine conversation and then, a strange echo of a once-common ritual – a bunch of us sitting around watching Betty White take her unlikely star turn on Saturday Night Live.

Once upon a time, watching SNL in a big group was a common Saturday night activity, usually punctuated by a cheap two-four of whatever beer was on sale.  But Lord, that was seven casts, a passel of missing friends, practically a whole head of hair and a half-dozen apartments ago.

I hit the blinking light and my Mother’s voice filled the room.  She sounded happy, but tired.  Mom’s in Massachusetts, with her sister.  This weekend the two of them are tag teaming, minding my second cousins, so their Mom gets a well-deserved shot at attending a reunion of friends in Manhattan.

The kids are adorable; big-hearted, full of life – two boys and a girl, all under the age of eight.  But sadly, it seems, none of the kids in my family are any less than an advanced level parenting assignment.   My mom has laughed about it before, “It all comes back to you after awhile – it’s just everything happens a whole lot more slowly.”

It was something seeing Betty White hoof it through her sketches at the age of 88 and a half, but having seen my cousins in action, I’m definitely glad that my Mom & my Aunt had each other’s backs.

It reminded me of another time, or many other times – fidgeting in the back seat, bored out of my skull, feeling the pointlessness of a drive that would never end.  A stretch of I-4 in Orlando.  The time: The mid 1970’s.  A stretch of the highway from the downtown to Winter Park.  It seemed we’d drive that stretch of road for hours & hours, butt becoming numb against the tacky vinyl of the back seat of the Ford LTD, seat belt pinching as you tried to scale the back seat, or lean forward far enough to see the good stuff.  I’m there on the right.  On the far left is one sister.  She’s nervous & a little unsure.  To my eternal shame, this is the sister who would sometimes thump down onto her butt the moment I wheeled into a room in my bullish six or seven year old glory.  You don’t spit into a hurricane, after all.   

In between us is sister number two – red tight curls & thumb parked firmly in mouth as she regards you with the stare – a size-me-up, suffer-no-fools countenance that recalled both my Grandmother & your best approximation of a police interrogator...Age Four.  It’s not that she wasn’t buying whatever you were selling – she just demanded the time to judge for herself.

So then, I-4.  Past Colonial Drive & Church Street…the wrong way from Disney World or anything fun. On the ramp. Off the ramp.  Same stretch of road, again and again.  Would anything else ever be this boring?

I had my answer, of course. At that point I still remembered the great furniture store incident. That involved, I believe, eighty two hours of debate about the relative merits of a couch in Huffman Koos.  That previous incident ended inauspiciously with, I believe, me lying on the floor of the store wailing.  Not my finest hour, I’ll admit, but when you’re under three feet tall your quiver of arrows is a little shallow.

Past the bank building. Neon sign. Off ramp to Winter Park. Again. And again. And again.

What stygian horror was this? Why were we being subjected to this mind numbingly boring exercise? Distracted thoughts turned to whether I should poke my little sister. It might provide some momentary scuffle, some enjoyment, a little drama when the wailing started.  And the denials could stretch out a few more minutes. But then, as now, the blowback of tussling with the little red curls came with a high, high price.  If the thumb leaves the mouth, trouble starts.  Then maybe it's the wooden spoon. You don't want to the wooden spoon. The wooden spoon was very bad.

Oh I indulged. I gave into baser instincts. I don’t want to sugar coat it. I acted out.  I whinged & complained and hit, & hogged the seat & undid the belt, & probably made things a lot worse. 

See, when you’re a 34 or 35-year old mother of middle-class means with three kids under the age of eight, your learning opportunities to change & grow are necessarily restricted.  So you find yourself in imperfect situations, where you have to improvise, like practicing for your Drivers' road test, getting on and off the highway with three kids in the back seat.

Truth be told, practically my Mother’s entire driver education career happened with her three kids buckled in in back. For the life of me, I don’t know how the lessons took.  But they did.  She took lessons from an instructor, and weekends would be for practicing with my father. On the ramp. Off the ramp. Parking lot. Park. Reverse. Again.  Mom, can we goooo?

It would be years before I associated the boring drives to nowhere with the necessity of her practice.  And then, the wash of shame would wave over me as I realized my role. Wow.  In the real life driving game of life my poor Mom never got to play at anything other than the Expert level.

That might have had something to do with the failed tests.

Oh Yeah.  My Mom failed her driving test.  She failed it a lot.

She was cautious, she knew the rules, and she was a perfectly qualified novice driver, but it seemed like the action of testing & being judged was infinitely more difficult than learning to check mirror, signal, blindspots, kids in the back not killing each other.

Finally, in what has become family legend, my Mom’s driving instructor came up with the solution.  A final, last minute refresher before her fifth crack at the test.  “You know this,” he said.  “You just have to stay calm, and not get nervous.”

Three kids under the age of eight.  One of them a rambunctious proto-sociopath.

He sighed.

Then he slipped her a valium.

The time of the appointment grew closer.   A few last minute parallel parks.  My mom talked, and the driving instructor rolled his eyes.

“Try not to be too talky. Stick to yes & no if they ask you questions.”

Liiiiitttle bit slurry, y’see.

In the end, fifth time was the charm.  And I can say with confidence that not only is my mother an excellent driver who has never been in an accident, I can’t even really recall any close calls with her behind the wheel. 

Though I’m also pretty sure she doesn’t like going above sixty.

The message on the machine last night, then, was a thank you for the gift basket I’d sent Mom and Auntie & Cousin – just three of the wonderful mothers in my life.  Anticipating the end of the weekend of kid-minding, I’d instructed them not to stint on the wine.  My mom seemed to appreciate that, and look forward to the end of her shift.

“I’ll tell you this,” her message said.  “God bless young mothers.”

Amen to that.

For all the white knuckle times,  behind the wheel or not…thanks for everything, Mothers everywhere.