For Sanity’s Sake by Taprina Milburn

“I feel like a soccer mom,” said my 16-year-old daughter. “I always have to drive.”

Oh, how a few short months of driving will make a martyr out of you.

Friends told me this would happen, warning that the eager new driver would volunteer to run to the bank and dry cleaners. She’d be the first to volunteer to drive back to the grocery store and pick up the items I forgot.

“This is pretty nice,” I said to a friend over coffee. “Having a teen driver takes a load off.”

“Just wait,” she said. “The newness wears off.”

It’s been nice to have an extra driver around to drop off my son at the practice field. But to a teen who’d rather not be seen with her brother—she’d rather pull up to a friend’s house instead of a field with moms in minivans—it feels a little too matronly.

That’s when the soccer mom statement was tossed out. And you can only guess how I responded—certainly not with Mom-of-the-Year rhetoric.

“Tough,” I said.

Then I proceeded to list all the activities she has participated in over the years—Girl Scouts, piano lessons, and cheerleading, to name only a few. I droned on about the carpools I drove as a stay-home mom, the miles, and the traffic. I reminded her of the gas money we put into her hands, etc. You know...all the guilt-producing lists moms can pull out and use on our kids.

Oh, how long years of driving will make a martyr out of you.

“Mom, it’s no big deal,” my daughter said, with a maturity she obviously didn’t inherit from me. “I was just saying I feel like I drive a lot.”

The fact is, she is driving a lot for me, and I really appreciate it. The errands she runs allow me to rest a minute before I begin dinner in the evening. Sometimes she wants me to go with her, and I take the passenger seat. At the end of a day (and the end of a daily work commute), this is just a little piece of heaven for me—being driven around.

We recently took a trip together out of town, and she crawled into the passenger side.

It was like old times, when she was younger. She played with the radio and read a book while talking to me about school and friends. On the way home, I asked if she would mind driving some on the way back.

“I left my license at home,” she said with a sly little smile. “I knew what I was doing.”