The Last Thing Teenagers Will Let You Teach Them
· The Atlantic
A strange thing happened to me in a deserted parking lot on a recent Sunday morning: My 16-year-old daughter actually asked me a question.
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I was telling her everything I know about reversing a car without the help of a backup camera. “First turn your whole body, shoulders rotated, right hand on the back of the passenger seat, until you’re looking out the rear window at the world behind you.” Her hands were on the wheel. Her phone was face down in the cup holder. She turned her body the way I’d suggested and nudged the wheel to the left, and the car floated backward in a woozy arc that wasn’t quite what she’d intended. “Wait,” she said. “Do I turn with both hands? Did I do that wrong?”
I want to stop here, because I don’t think I can convey just how unusual such an exchange is these days—her listening to me and asking for help. Sometime in the past year, she stopped wanting anything from me other than my credit card and maybe my nicest suede boots. She definitely stopped wanting my instruction, my opinion, my take on anything, having concluded that she already understands pretty much everything.
The talking is what I have missed. For 14 or 15 years, my daughter narrated in a fire hose of chatter—to me, to her father, to whoever. So much talking: about why the sun sets, the kid she was mad at, the plot of a show she was three episodes into, how she wanted to decorate her room. Around the start of high school, the talking thinned out, siphoned almost exclusively to her friends. Nothing announced the change. It went the way a baby tooth goes, loose for a while and then simply absent.
[Helen Lewis: I’m the driver now]
When she got a learner’s permit, some measure of talking reappeared. It wasn’t fully restored, exactly, but confined within one small, sealed space that moves. Inside the car, she knows she doesn’t know: In no version of parallel parking can she wing it without asking for tips from someone who has done it 10,000 times. Learning to drive is something she cannot fake her way through.
This wobbly uncertainty, this return to a kind of innocence, is the rarest condition in a 16-year-old, and it lasts about as long as a learner’s permit does. So my daughter asks, and listens, and we manage to simply talk in some of the ways we haven’t in a long time: about what her friends did over the summer, which kid at the pool where she lifeguards asked her if she could babysit them. For an hour at a stretch I get a version of my daughter that I had filed away as gone for good.
But this is also, in some ways, the worst hour of my week, because the terms of a driving lesson are the exact inverse of the many other kinds of lessons that came before it. Everything else I ever taught my daughter, I did with one hand on the thing: I steadied the tail end of the bike, I held the knife and moved her fingers back from the blade, I grasped her hand crossing Seventh Avenue for so many years that my palm still expects to find hers at intersections. In the car, though, she has the wheel, and I have the fear. My only instrument is my voice, which is not connected to anything that stops the car.
Parents say they’re letting go or loosening the reins or handing over the keys, as if adolescence were a series of small, deliberate releases, each one manageable. Then you hand over the actual keys, and the metaphor becomes a physical arrangement staged on a public road at 40 miles an hour, at which point it breaks. First there is supervised driving, and soon there is nothing. In between, the passenger seat is one of the few places on Earth where a parent gets to occupy two conditions at once: maximum proximity plus zero control.
I have thought about this a lot from that seat, just 18 inches from my daughter, slowly understanding that being nearby was never the same as keeping her safe. Ever since she was born, I had assumed that being close to her was a form of protecting her. I could catch her if she slipped. In the car, that assumption comes apart, and all I can do is sit there with my fear.
What surprised me is that the fear runs both ways.
For the first time in years, my daughter is frightened of something in front of both of us rather than scared of something I might do to embarrass her—that is, afraid of me. That distinction turns out to be enormous. Since she hit adolescence, her anxiety, in my presence, has generally been about whether I would say something wacky (yes!), make a dumb joke (also yes!), or exist too loudly in a space containing her peers (duh). I have been the weather she is bracing against. But in the car, we are braced against the same thing, and it is outside the windshield. A massive truck backs out without looking; a cyclist suddenly appears. We both suck in air at the same instant, and her hand and my hand tighten—hers on the wheel, mine on nothing.
Coming to a stop at a red light, she sees me sending a text from the passenger seat. “I can’t understand how anyone texts and drives,” she says, almost bewildered, the way a fifth grader might talk about someone doing calculus in their head. At that moment, she is using every part of her brain to keep a two-ton object between two painted lines, and the idea that a person could do this and tap out a message strikes her as physically impossible. I agree with her, but what I don’t say is that practicing will help her rethink this. Competence makes the risk available. One day she will be good enough at driving to consider being more careless about it.
As she improves and gains confidence, the driving, for her, slowly grows less frightening and more thrilling. She presses the accelerator, her foot more sure, and we both know that she is on the edge of a huge new expanse of freedom and change—that driving lessons are not about a test to pass but a way to get farther than she has ever gotten on her own. The shared fear is temporary, and I can already feel the expiration date on it.
Some Sunday soon, we’ll have our last lesson. And what I’ll miss isn’t the driving; it’s the asking—the tacit admission that she doesn’t know everything—and how she lets her guard down while she’s admitting it. When the questions end, she’ll be very much on her way, and I’ll be the boots and the credit card again, which, I remind myself, is part of the assignment too.