Teaching My Baby to Drive


I took my baby driving today for the first time. She turns 16 on Thursday and she will troop off with her father to the DMV that day and get her learner's permit.

There is a huge parking lot right down the street that is empty on the weekends. It's the lot for an office complex and it has straightaways, curves, narrow parts, a stop sign, geese that waddle into the road sometimes, and of course a zillion spaces for parking marked clearly with white lines.

It's the same lot where I taught her to ride her bike when she was 7 or so. Then all I had to do was run behind her and shout encouragement. She picked it up quickly. I was teasing her today about how when she got her first bike she asked us when she could start taking "bike riding lessons".  As she explained today, "well, there were lessons for everything else. I thought I would just take lessons to learn."

Now she'll be learning to drive a car before she takes official driver's education training in the fall. In olden times in Maine, one could get a learner's permit only after taking driving lessons. At least that's what we were told. However, you only had to be 15 to get a full-blown license.

 These days, there are junior licenses and senior licenses and stops in between. The kids all seem pretty unclear on the exact rules. Officially, one is not allowed to drive with other kids in the car until a certain period of time has elapsed. In practice, it's a small town of 15,000 and siblings get driven around town, as do friends. Sometimes lots of friends. Local cops who stop a "junior" driver generally make the friends walk home but they don't log an official violation. The penalty for an official violation is death--or losing all driving privileges until you're 21, when you can then attempt to get your license again. Or death.

She drove well today and I was only slightly terrified once. I was never terrified while I was teaching her to ride her bike. Her insurance will cost an additional $55 a month until she gets her license and then it goes up to $74 a month. Go figure.

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