I Am Going to Learn to Drive!

When I was a much younger man, I posited my inability to drive as a “charming eccentricity” born of my uniquely fucked up childhood. 

When people would ask me why I did not know how to drive I told them the truth: I spent an unhappy adolescence in a group home where we were forbidden from getting driver’s licenses for insurance reasons. If one of us were to get behind the wheel of a car and cause an accident, it could cause huge problems for the Jewish Children’s Bureau, the agency that ran the group home. 

That was true but it wasn’t the entire truth. I didn’t know how to drive because I never got my license as a teenager but also because pretty much everything about driving scared me shitless. 

I was scared that I would never learn how to drive. I was scared that if I did learn how to drive, I would get into a car accident and die. I was scared I would get into a car accident and kill someone else. I was scared that the process of learning how to drive would expose me as a hapless, emotionally stunted man-child unable and unwilling to grow up and embrace the responsibilities of adulthood. 

I was scared of failure. I was scared of success. I was scared of falling into some unhappy, unpalatable middle ground between success and failure. 

I told myself and others that there were other good reasons for not knowing how to drive as well. I told myself that it was the environmentally sound decision, that by opting out of the whole “driving" thing I was refusing to further pollute the earth with noxious emissions. 

But the bitter truth of the matter is that my choice not to learn how to drive was rooted less in idealism than in fear. All-consuming, gut-wrenching fear.

If I had lived out my days as a confirmed bachelor I might have been able to continue to think of my inability to drive as a charming eccentricity, one of the many things that made me different from other people. 

But I did not linger indefinitely in the weird purgatory of bachelorhood. Instead I got married and sired two wonderful children. 

Needless to say, my wife does not view my inability to drive as a charming eccentricity. To her there’s nothing charming about it whatsoever. I don’t think of it as a charming eccentricity anymore either, if I ever genuinely did.

There’s nothing charming or appealing or even acceptable about making your partner do one hundred percent of the family driving because you do not have a driver’s license. 

So about five years ago I began the process of trying to learn how to drive for the sake of being a better husband and father. I enrolled in Taggart’s Driving School in Marietta, Georgia, where I had a driving instructor who broadcast her contempt for her job, showed us LOTS of driver’s ed films of negligible quality and, on the final day of class, fell asleep while on the job, which struck me as unprofessional. 

I nevertheless got my driver’s permit and took lessons with a very good, very patient instructor and a very nice friend of the family. 

I began the process of learning how to drive. I did not finish it. I wouldn’t say I failed, necessarily, but I did not succeed either. I let my fear get the best of me. 

Now the time has come for me to finally learn how to drive. It’s something that I NEED to do, for my family, my wife and also for myself. That’s why I recently enrolled in Nathan’s Driving School for online classes so that I can get my permit and then, god willing, my license.

You know what? It still scares the shit out of me. Hell, it probably scares me even more now than it did five years ago. 

As I’ve told my therapist, learning how to drive doesn’t trigger one of my longstanding anxieties: it pretty much triggers all of them. I’m scared of all of the things that scared me before about the prospect of driving but now I have five more years of shame and embarrassment over not being able to do something pretty much every American adult is expected to do, particularly if they have children. 

I am brave enough to concede that learning how to drive is one of the many things that scare me shitless. 

But life is not about not experiencing fear: it’s about overcoming that fear for the sake of becoming a better, fuller person. So even though it scares me down to my very core I am committed to making it to the finish line this time. 

Who knows? I may even enjoy driving. That seems like a very distant possibility right now, when my feelings about driving are dominated by gut-wrenching fear but I am open to the idea at least because it’s good to be motivated by the positive as well as the negative. 

I want to be a better man and a better father, not just a less terrified one. Learning to drive can only help in that regard. 

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