Driving Legs
Yesterday I embarked on a journey with six freshly-minted
high school sophomore girls. One of them is my daughter, the others are her
friends. We are taking a 17-day road trip in my minivan.
Why so long, you might ask? Excellent question, really. Allison’s
most highly desired endpoint was California, specifically L.A. and Universal
Studios. But it’s kind of a long drive, so we need to break it up over a number
of days so that I, the only licensed driver, don’t fall asleep .
And so we left yesterday at 6:45 am. That is 15 minutes
AHEAD of schedule. Unheard of. At 8:13 the passenger next to me announced that
she had done everything she had brought with her to do. By 10:28 everyone was
starving, so we ate lunch at a rest area somewhere in western Illinois. We got
some strange looks pulling out our picnic since it was only 9:28 Illinois time.
These first two days are the longest legs on the westward
trip. We needed to cover a lot of ground to get started. We stopped in Kansas
City last night, where we feasted on way too much barbecue. Tonight we are in
Colorado Springs, staying at my sister-in-law’s house. She met us at the door
with a ready dinner, brought out cupcakes for a fellow traveler’s birthday
today, and sent me to my room with a glass of wine. Have I ever mentioned how
great my sister-in-law is?
Being the mom/driver for all these girls is sort of a concentrated
form of motherhood. I steer, I guide, I take charge a lot of the time. At the
same time, I try to stay even-keeled, keep quiet a lot of the time, and am
often left to my own thoughts. There’s not much curiosity from anyone else
about what my thoughts might be.
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| Breakfast cook at work |
As the mom, you observe all of these stages, join in the fun
when it works, listen quietly when it doesn’t, and offer help when you can.
That’s day one.
I’ve learned some things already these last two days. It’s
sort of a tale of two daughters. My two daughters are very different people. I
already knew this. But I didn’t realize it meant that their friend groups would
have such marked differences too!
When I took Natalie and her friends on the road a few years
ago, they were eager to see things. They took joy in some art-related stops and
some cultural experiences we were able to have. But they moved along in a
different way. Taking them on a road trip was like taking a small hippie
commune in my van with me. They are somewhat introverted. They floated through
the days, as unaware of the concept of time as newborns. They took their time
getting going, and they took their time finishing up, stopping to see whatever
caught their attention.
This current group has a vastly different way of being. They
are up-and-at-it people; they just asked if we could get going tomorrow morning
earlier than originally planned. This morning, they got up, got dressed, and one
of them made breakfast for the rest, and then they asked me what they could do
to clean up, hauling all the coolers and boxes, etc. out to the car so I could
load it without me even asking for help! I don’t even know what to do with
this.
And then we stopped at the Tallgrass Prairie National
Preserve in Kansas this morning. We checked in at the visitors’ center, where three
girls were eager to get their National Park passports stamped. Then they all
filled out the requisite informational booklet that allowed them to become
junior rangers, complete with plastic badges. They even somehow got me an
honorary badge. I have to say, the ranger seemed super pleased. I’m guessing
that preserve doesn’t get a lot of groups of teen girls, let alone those who
choose to become junior rangers. These are type-A personalities who like to
achieve and collect.
We took a short hike (it was already 87 degrees outside) in
the prairie, which is about knee high right now. The tallgrass will reach 6
feet by the end of the growing season. There is a path mowed through it so you
can walk through. While the grass was not as impressive as it might be if it
were later in the year, the wildflowers were phenomenal. This is the Kansas of Little House on the Prairie. But we
couldn’t stay long, because, as I mentioned, we had to get to Colorado Springs.
I don’t mean to make it sound like my earlier passengers
were ungrateful or uninterested, just that they moved at a different pace and
looked for different things.
Day two, they started the morning as fully-formed expert car
passengers. Everything was pretty chill most of the time, except for at the end
of the long drive they started getting more restless, because really, it’s been
two days!
Along the way, we have watched farmland roll out before us,
we’ve crossed the mighty Mississippi, we’ve passed by cattle ranches and
watched the environs change from fresh and green to more brown and arid, and we
spotted the outline of Pike’s Peak from about 30 miles away. I have listened to
my music and sung along with it, watched the changing countryside, pointed out a
few things along the way. Thanks to the fact that I am navigating via Google
maps, we were not fast enough to get the desired picture of the “Welcome to
Colorful Colorado” sign, because I was thinking about when my next road change
would be, not when we would cross a state line. We can get anywhere but we don’t
ever know exactly where we are. I try to pull out the atlas once in a while.
Motherhood can be a lonely experience. The people you care
about most in the world don’t often lift their eyes to behold the person in
front of them. And there are always things you wish you’d done differently.
But the payback is experiencing the ups and downs and the
things that are so unique to each child in such an intimate way. Even when they
don’t want you around or don’t remember that you are sitting there too, you
learn more about them and remember what it’s like to be young.
They give me a great deal of laughter, glimmers of lingering
childhood, glimpses of their fantastic imaginations and humor, and a renewed understanding
of the complicated path between childhood and adulthood.
What more could I ask? And this is only day two.
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