Driver's License Eve
I’m writing this on the night of June 30th. It’s Driver’s License Eve. In Indiana, new laws take effect on July 1st. The state constitution was set up that way so that, if Indiana ever legalized the really good fireworks, there would be a minimal delay before Hoosiers could start blowing stuff up. Patriotism demands colorful explosions. Indiana’s current law, which will be an odd footnote as of tomorrow, stated that the kids had to be sixteen years and three months old before they got their driver’s licenses. On July 1st, that law changes to be just sixteen. Betsy will be sixteen and a month and a half when the new law goes into effect. You can bet we’ll be at the Bureau of Motor Vehicles that first day, if not the first hour. If I had more vacation time, I might camp in line like this was a new Star Wars movie. I haven’t been this excited since right before the release of The Phantom Menace. Then again, we all know how that turned out. Hopefully, the BMV won’t have any gungans.
Normally, only kids sharing one birthday become eligible for a driver’s license each day. For the first time ever, ninety days worth of birthdays will be eligible at once. Tomorrow could be the second-busiest day in BMV history. The first busiest was the day it opened after the invention of cars. Before that, you probably didn’t need a license to drive a horse. Imagine convincing a Clydesdale to parallel park. Given the flood of teenagers who will be suddenly eligible, going to the BMV on that first day would be truly foolish. That’s why I have to go. It’s the last thing they’ll expect. Everyone else will fear the crowds and stay home. Unless everyone else thinks everyone else will fear the crowds and decides to go. I’m confused, but I’m also impatient. I’ll be there on July 1st.
At least we can skip part of the process. We won’t have to take the driving test at the BMV. Betsy is scheduled to take it with her driver’s ed instructor at 8:15 a.m. tomorrow morning. She should be done by 8:30 a.m.. That’s the final requirement before she can get her license. We could be in line at the BMV when it opens half an hour later. That would only work if she passed the test. I’d hate to take a day off work only to discover she’ll need to take the test a second time on another day. Instead, I’ll go to work at my normal time and wait for her to text me. If she passes, and if the wait times listed on the BMV website aren’t too unreasonable, I’ll head home at noon. My definition of “unreasonable” will be charitable on the long-awaited day. If I can get there by 1 p.m. and get to the front of the line before they close at 5 p.m., it will absolutely be worth it. Being stuck in the lobby for four hours would be nothing at this point. I’ve been waiting for her to get her license since middle school.
That was about the time that sports started up and she suddenly had to be in two places at once. Since then, my commute has only gotten worse, making it a challenge for me to get back to my own suburb in time to help my children bilocate. If Betsy could drive, even for short distances, it would solve roughly ninety-five percent of the problems in my life. For example, on Thursday, I might have to use vacation time to leave work early and drive five dollars worth of bottled water from my house to the school’s music department so Mae’s marching band can stay hydrated this summer. I wish I could just donate the five dollars, or even a full twenty if they want to toss in a delivery fee, but instead Lola had to go on a Costco run to get the water. I’ll have to return home early for the second leg to get it to the school during the designated drop-off window. Any bottles left in front of the school outside of that window will be considered suspicious and be destroyed by the bomb squad. You can never be too careful. If Betsy has her license by Thursday, she can simply spend five minutes driving it over to the school while Lola and I stay in other parts of the city. It could be the start of her life running petty errands for me. She has so much to look forward to.
Then again, she’s easily the busiest of my children. Expecting her to have the free time to transport the other kids or their liquids might be asking too much. I don’t know why I think this will be the first chore one of my kids helps me with where they won’t somehow create more work than they actually perform. Even if she handles only her own activities, that would still be a huge relief. She has, by far, the most places to be. A few weeks ago, we had to leave her cousin’s birthday party early so I could take her to four different graduation open houses for her older friends that were all in the same timeslot. I went to exactly zero graduation open houses for my own classmates. I chose to play Dungeons and Dragons instead of going to one of them. Looking back, that was still the right call.
Betsy is just as eager as I am for her to finally get her license. She’s tired of the heavy sigh I struggle to suppress every time I find out I need to drive her to sixteen places in the next hour. She’s especially over having to share that news at odd hours. I’ve woken up early and stayed up late to get her and her sisters to places in the most extreme circumstances. I’ve picked up kids at 2 a.m. and dropped them off at 3 a.m.. The latter was for Mae’s class visit to Washington, D.C.. The bus company’s regulations wouldn’t let them drive overnight, but starting at 3 a.m. only counted as driving in the morning. That’s one inconvenient loophole. As Betsy has gotten older, her older friends have driven her home from practices, but that help was offset by a sharp rise in extracurricular activities. In a way, all of middle school and high school have basically been one extended road trip. We’re finally approaching the destination. It’s about time. I really have to pee.
Six months after she gets her license, Betsy will be able to pay it forward to her younger friends who need rides home from practices or games. She’ll be able to haul a lot of them. I’m confident that she’ll be the only kid at her high school driving a minivan. All her classmates will be jealous. They’ll wish they had their own party bus. It will be a sober party that will actually just be driving to and from school with friends. That sounds like more of a punishment than a party, but don’t tell Betsy. I really want her to start driving herself.
There’s no waiting period for transporting siblings. The law knows it can’t protect sisters from each other. It will be up to Betsy to get Mae to and from school this fall when she doesn’t have practice or a meet. I’d like to think they can get along on that five-minute drive. That’s wishful thinking. My kids have done battle over far less consequential tasks than piloting a 4,400 lbs. steel box through traffic. They can’t even fold laundry in the same room as each other without erupting into a full-blown fist fight. My brother and I managed to get along a million years ago when I drove him to school. I was a senior and he was a freshman. We didn’t kill each other or anyone else that whole year. Our main point of conflict was that I liked to get to school half an hour early while he wanted to be there a few seconds before the bell rang. My fear was that there would be a delay and we’d be late. The penalty for being tardy was detention, which was shorter than the thirty extra minutes I spent at school each morning. If I had been better at math, I would have cut it closer. Harry knew better. That’s why he’s now a pilot and I’m not. His flights are never early.
All of this depends on things going well with Betsy’s driving test tomorrow morning. The anticipation of Driver’s License Eve is killing me. I don’t want to even bring up the possibility of failure in front of her lest I make her nervous and create a self-fulfilling prophecy. I also took my driving test in my driver’s ed class rather than at the DMV. (We had departments instead of bureaus in Illinois for the sole purpose of causing chaos. Bureaucrats have to find their fun somewhere.) My driver’s ed instructor took pride in being more difficult than the evaluators with the state. He believed in challenging us, whether it was in sports or in life. Today, I know that kids don’t need artificially created adversity. Life already has plenty of the real stuff. Regardless of how unfair it was, I had to make it through his gauntlet. That’s how I ruined a vehicle. I burned out the power steering of my dad’s Plymouth Reliant as I practiced weaving through cones backwards, a staple of my driver’s ed instructor’s extra hard test. I wouldn’t be able to do that today, especially not with a minivan. For the record, in all the years since then, I’ve had to weave through cones backwards exactly zero times. He wasn’t preparing me for driving in the real world. He was preparing me for dealing with petty tyrants. Sadly, I use that lesson every day.
If Betsy doesn’t pass her driving test, we’ll have to book another time for her to retake it. Hopefully they can get her in again the next day. If she can’t get in for a week or more for the retest, it could ruin the rest of the summer. I’ve already penciled her in for a series of tasks that will require driving in the coming days while I’m at work. I won’t count my chickens before they hatch, but I will assign errands before the state of Indiana issues the necessary driving credentials. Betsy has her own plans that will require driving. She signed up to volunteer at the hospital to gain healthcare experience. It’s too far to ride her bike without becoming covered in sweat or fire depending on the high that day. Her bike could melt into molten slag. If she survived the trip, she would arrive at the hospital completely gross. They’d have to turn her away for being a health hazard. If she can drive there, on the other hand, she’ll spend five minutes in an air conditioned vehicle and arrive no worse for the wear. If anything, the minivan might actually make her better for the wear, improving her confidence and overall health. Instead of volunteering inside the hospital, she could help patients by simply driving them around in our van. Car insurance is cheaper than health insurance any day.
I originally planned to write this after we got the results of the driving test rather than before, but I had to take advantage of being wide awake. There’s no way I’m falling asleep on Driver’s License Eve. Hopefully, tomorrow is actually the end of our years-long quest. It’s possible I’ve written more about the approach of this milestone than any other parent in all driving history. After all of that, you still don’t know if she actually got it or not. I suppose I should add an addendum so you actually know the ending to the story.
Addendum:
