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facts & arguments

DANIEL FISHEL/The Globe and Mail

Facts & Arguments is a daily personal piece submitted by readers. Have a story to tell? See our guidelines at tgam.ca/essayguide.

'Watch it!!!"

"Mom, please stop screaming."

"Stop driving like a maniac, then!"

"O-M-G, I'm just backing down the driveway!"

I had desperately wanted to be that composed parent who maintains a resting heart rate while offering wise, emotionless counsel to her first-born as he learns to drive. Instead, I screamed till my throat was raw and called on God to take me.

Though I'm an amazing mother in all other respects, being in the passenger seat with the fruit of my loins was not my finest hour.

In spite of my neuroses, my son is a natural driver – and it's no wonder. As a little boy, he spent hours ferrying his younger brother in a little red motorized jeep.

One Halloween night, when he was four, he proved he had a knack for the open road, swerving through the neighbourhood with eerie precision in the jeep and stopping only to fling treat-stuffed pillowcases into the attached trailer.

He glanced expertly at his rear-view mirror before chewing up more asphalt. The other goblins and superheroes parted in the street, slack-jawed, as he took those corners like a pro. But what could possibly go wrong at 0.02 kilometres an hour?

That kid had grown into a responsible teenager, but this time I was panicked. Besides the obvious safety concerns involved in the prospect of him clocking 120 km/h in a steel trap while distracted by blaring tunes and a carload of testosterone-charged cohorts, my issues ran deeper.

I am a Very Bad Passenger. I have been known to kill a good family road trip with my vigilance: "Stop tailgating!;" "Moose!;" "Where's my fireproof jumpsuit and matching helmet?"

I inherited this prudence from my mother. She always offered my father helpful driving tips, such as "Wake up!"

I remember one incident when I was a kid and we were driving to my grandparents' home for Christmas dinner. My father lost control and we swerved and spun – on an icy but uninhabited country road going 10 km/h. Though there was no real danger, my mother's fear came out in the form of advice for my father: She told him repeatedly to (rhymes with Canuck) a duck. We made it to our destination alive, but along the way I gleaned the art of back-seat driving, not to mention marital dysfunction.

I wasn't always this uptight. Far from it.

When I got my driver's licence at 16, I ignored my overwrought parents when they made unsolicited remarks: "That 'speed bump' was a raccoon! Slow down!" No chance. Once that official piece of paper had been issued and tucked into my wallet, I chucked the shackles of my small town and burned rubber. Road trips without a driver's training course, GPS or seat belts were proof of my chutzpah back in the day.

Thirty years later, I can still conjure the thrill of getting a driver's licence, but now that I'm the parent in the passenger seat it feels more like bad gas. To get through it, I took up smoking. Plus, I remind myself that our son was capable – in fact, he offers me driving advice these days: "Uh, you stopped on a crosswalk, Mom." Big hairy deal. He even had the gall to roll his eyes and tell me I did "everything wrong" while I was driving in a snowstorm last year. Since when is letting go of the steering wheel, covering my eyes and screaming "I don't wanna die" wrong?

Regardless of his competence, I felt it was my duty to be crazier than a bag of hammers when he got behind the wheel. I'd trained long and hard for this.

I buckled in, sat ramrod-straight beside him and took out my rosary. I turned off the radio to heighten my senses and put on my night-vision goggles – even if it was 10 a.m. As we hit the main road, every pedestrian I spotted within 50 metres made me seize up and blurt, "Watch it!" Every empty chip bag the wind rustled had me reaching for the imaginary passenger brake. Every looming catastrophe, such as a snowstorm in Antarctica, found me clutching the door handle yelping "We're doomed! We'll never make it home."

It almost felt as if my son didn't appreciate my advice: "You're insane. I'm driving with Dad from now on." Fine. Be that way.

Eight months later, he got his licence and I could finally stop gesticulating like Mick Jagger.

My heart is still skipping beats, but it's no longer from my seizures in the passenger seat. Now, that thump in my chest comes from watching the puff of exhaust vanish as my boy-man takes the last corner on our street like a pro.

For a moment I see the boy in the little red motorized jeep, but he, too, has disappeared. In his place is a wise and composed soul. Just like his Mama.

Colleen Landry lives in Moncton.

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