Brigitte Bowers: Driving under a spring break microscope

It’s a good thing that my eldest son, Casey, came home for spring break. It turns out I didn’t know how to drive, though I thought I’d been safely conveying my children around the state for almost two decades.

In fact, I’m such a bad driver that Casey staged a mutiny on the second afternoon he was home. We were at the Arco gas station at the Applegate Shopping Center, where I had driven us while Casey sat in the passenger seat, nearly dying from apoplexy every time I made a turn or came to a stop sign.

My turns were too fast, my stops too sudden – and this from someone who for the past seven months has been getting around San Diego by using Uber, which is staffed primarily by post-adolescent boys trying to stuff five rides into every hour.

At the Arco station, I got out to buy a soda while Casey pumped gas, and when I came back I found that my keys had been confiscated by the boy who not long ago rode in a carseat behind me, sucking on a pacifier and gazing out the window at passing traffic.

“Give me my keys,” I said.

“No, Mom. You’re not driving. You’re too dangerous.”

“Give me my keys,” I repeated.

“No. Mom, you don’t know how to drive. You’re a terrible driver. I’m not riding with you.”

I resisted the urge to tackle my son to the ground and pry my keys from his clenched fist.

“I do, however, know how to make the payments on this truck,” I reminded him. “I do it every month, which means that it belongs to me, not you. Give me the keys.”

We went on like that for a while longer, until I promised to drive better and my son, whose entire existence depends on the largesse of his incompetent parents, laid the keys in my open palm.

Later in the day, as we drove along Santa Fe to Wash’n Wag, I kept the speedometer at 40 mph the whole way. What should have been a 10-minute drive turned into 20 minutes, but I didn’t have to listen to a lecture about safe driving from my son again for the rest of his spring break.

I am not an unsafe driver, by the way.

I have an almost spotless record, no accidents that are my fault, and I am the only member of our family who has not been in any kind of accident during the past 10 years. The outburst at Arco, I suspected, was not so much about my driving habits as it was about my son needing to be in control.

And why not? He has spent the past eight months encountering a wide-open world vastly different from the one in which he grew up, and he has learned, despite all of his fears, that he can navigate this new world with some success.

But he also is suddenly living without the kind of connections on which a small-town kid learns to rely. His teachers are not also his coaches, and they do not know his family and friends. His classmates come from China and Brazil, and they have never heard of Merced or Atwater. His chemistry professor has 400 students, and he does not want to know any one of them outside of the lecture hall.

So if my son needs to be in charge when he comes home for spring break, I won’t hold it against him.

I remember at least a little of what it’s like to be 19 and living in a big city filled with strangers. I suspect my son is adjusting, and I know he’s making new friends and discovering surprising things about himself. But he still has a few months, or maybe even years, before he will feel confidently grounded in his new environment. I suppose my job as a parent is to smile and tolerate my son’s desire to be in charge.

But when he comes home for summer break, we’ll need to set some rules. The first one will be that Casey keeps his hands off my keys. That truck is mine.

This story was originally published April 1, 2016 at 12:50 PM with the headline "Brigitte Bowers: Driving under a spring break microscope."