Most stories like this start by saying, ” I hope my husband, wife, neighbour, colleague-from-ten-years-ago never reads this story…” But I know my mother’s going to read this story.
My mother and I have quite the history together. Something that I love and appreciate her to the world’s end for, a decade later—but that annoyed me to no end at the time—was her penchant for making me learn things in the most difficult circumstances possible.
Whether I was up for it or not.
When I finally started learning how to drive again, long after this story, it was, oh, its snowed so much that no one else is driving? And everything is slush? “Get in the driver’s seat.” And oh, there’s a really tight roundabout a few blocks from the house? Well that’s the route we’re taking every single time we drive into town. And. We just hit the boundary of the city where every few blocks there are giant four-lane roundabouts that all the transport trucks use? And that you must drive through to get anywhere else? Hold on, let me start a conversation on my phone right before we reach them. (Well, I’m still alive to write this…).
But, like I said, I do appreciate it now. Driving in really extreme weather conditions doesn’t faze me, and when my husband and finally bought our first car and started driving around a lot together a couple of years ago, I taught him how to drive through roundabouts properly. (Or as well as can be done, because although we’ve started borrowing the idea from Europe and Australia, we haven’t really actually bothered to pay attention to whether we’re actually putting them in right. (See, for example, the teeny-tiny roundabout installed in my hometown at a T-intersection that is useless when it snows, and the buses just drive straight over it).
So, ten years ago, when my mom said she wanted to teach me how to drive, being scared wasn’t going to get me out of it. She literally got out of the driver’s side of the car on the way home one evening and said, “Switch!” I got in the driver’s side, promptly ground through all the gears, stunk us up to high heaven, and started creeping down the road at about five kilometres an hour towards the house. (I’d only ever been in a driver’s seat once before. Ever.)
Then she says turn left.
Well I did. Right onto the boulevard, kitty corner from where we were, and by some sort of miracle found the brakes, oh about two inches from the neighbours six-foot-high wrought iron fence. (I wish I was exaggerating at this point in the story.) I looked over at my mother, who is cool as glass, and got out of the car.
(This would all have been easier if I’d already known how to drive, and was just learning stick, but see above. I hadn’t even gotten used to where the pedals were, didn’t know how far to turn the wheel to go left, and have no idea now how I was somehow even driving because I certainly hadn’t learned how to get the car into gear. Any thoughts, Mom?)
So a week later, we are sitting in the driveway at the trailer out in the boondocks, and I am practicing getting into first gear. Clutch, gas. Clutch, gas. Clutch, then gas, to infinity and beyond. Now the thing about this ancient car was, was that it was loose. When you shifted gears, it wiggled and jiggled its way from first gear, into sixth and back again. It had a five-gear box, and each gear slot was so worn out that you couldn’t feel where the gears were, you just had to know. My mom had put the car in first gear, and I was well, see above. Clutch, gas…
After about five minutes of this, she says, “Wait, hold on, let me check something.” Wiggle and jiggle. “Oops, sorry.” I had been trying to start in third from a dead stand still and had almost got it, too! About fifty times. But don’t worry, I was about to get a little come-uppance of my own.
Now this is where I blow the top off your head, just a little bit. That ‘learning-curve’ concept that we learned about in school? It doesn’t exist. When you’re learning a new skill, it actually goes: try, fail, try again, fail, try a new way, fail, try a slightly different way fail, try again, trial, error, oh, wait, dammit, fail again, try, try more, succeed! Even if it seems that you are slowly improving in smaller and smaller increments, you are still following this process over and over, just more subtly each time, getting some component right, until you’ve mastered whatever it is you’re trying to master.
Each individual data point in the study that gave us “the learning curve” is actually a flat line followed by a giant step. The only thing is, the researchers averaged all the data points in their study, which created the pretty little curve that you learned about in school.
Have you figured out where this is going yet? Well, if not, here goes…
I sat in the drivers seat going, clutch, gas, clutch, gas, arrrgh, clutch, gas, until I finally figured out that it didn’t matter at all how slow or fast I released the clutch and hit the gas pedal, it just mattered that I did it at the same time and speed, and so I simultaneously released the clutch, stomped on the gas, and pop out of her seat went my mother like there goes the weasel…
We finally left the driveway and are driving along. Get in first, creep two metres. Stop. Repeat. Repeat. repeat. Along comes by two guys in a truck and they pull up beside us to find out if I’m having engine trouble. But don’t worry, my mom was right there to lean over me and call out the driver’s side window that I was just learning how to drive stick so they could have a good grin at my expense.
You would think…
It got better…
From there…
My mom also taught me how to navigate with road maps. (So did my sergeant a little, but topographical maps have no roads, and compasses don’t work in the city.) Usually she drove, and I played navigator, and she stayed supremely patient while I kept getting her lost on teeny-tiny back roads with no ends because it took me a while to figure out that a straight line on a road map isn’t always the quickest way in a car. Whenever my husband and I go on road trips now, we have a giant foldable map of the province, and a two-inch thick road atlas for our part of it. Although, the editions now are made to line up with what roads the GPS can find, so I still prefer my mom’s because it has all the roads. (And you know how apparently according to some drivers, you can follow your GPS into a lake? You don’t? Well neither did I, until somebody did just that. Well, lakes and rivers, and well, any kind of water really, are all labelled quite clearly and conveniently, in blue, on actual maps.)
But, as we all know by now, I’m in the driver’s seat in this tale, so that means she was playing navigator. And you may not believe it after this story, but I’d rather get lost with her holding the map than almost anyone else.
So that same night, after dinner, we pulled out the maps and she said, “Okay we’re going to find a large country block so you can practice turning and stopping.” If you haven’t ever driven standard it goes a little something like this. Slow. Second gear. First gear. Stop. Clutch/gas/first gear. Second gear. Third. Keep going. Or, slow. Third. Second. First, if you have to slow down a lot. Second. Third. All while you’re turning the wheel with one hand. Easy if you already know the basics of driving a car, kind of like playing twister in a giant hunk of moving metal if you don’t. (But don’t worry, my mom was shifting gears for me, so there is that.)
Out we go the next morning, headed for that country block we found, four nice and flat roads in a square, with long straightaways and four places to turn, only a road or two from our gravel drive. Funny thing that, maps. The first road we arrive at is hilly and sandy. The next has stop signs on loose gravel going uphill, and by the time we get to the third road which is so old and rocky, and has such deep ruts that the center hits the undercarriage and I hear “ oh just put the left wheel on the raised part in the middle, I’ve had enough and I still haven’t practiced even one turn.
I’m not even going to tell you what happened next with the cop. Ask her. The cottage vacation ended soon after, the loosey-goosey car died, the next car she bought happened to be automatic, and I did eventually learn how to drive.
There is a funny ending to all this though…
Seven years later…
It’s seven o’ clock; really early on a Saturday morning and I’m sheepishly calling my mother. I say sheepishly because we’d driven an hour and a half into the city where she lives, to visit somebody else, and hadn’t even told her we were in town. My husband and I were still dating, and still driving his parents giant van, and we’d gotten exactly halfway home the night before when the automatic transmission gave out. Which meant a giant towing bill no matter where we headed back to, hence why I was sucking in my pride a whole lot at that particular moment.
Of course the first words out of her mouth are, “Well you remember how to drive standard, right?” Umm…no. “But you know when to shift gears right?” Maybe a little something got in there during all the adventuring? Thankfully her third sentence was about how the two and three on the automatic gear shift were the same ones as in a manual car, and as long as we were happy to drive home in second and third gears, we were golden. My husband, who’s never driven stick got behind wheel, I yelled when to shift, and we drove home going eighty. Go Mom!
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