For the longest time, I sat in the backseat of my mom’s minivan while she drove me anywhere and everywhere: piano lessons, soccer practice, the bookstore, across town to my best friend's house, and, when I was lucky, the Bennington Chocolate Shop. During the summer, as each lazy day blurred into the next, the two of us would run what felt like countless errands together.
One August afternoon when I was five years old, we drove to the post office. I stared out the window that didn’t roll down, and in a daze of quiet contentment, counted the little black dots around the window’s perimeter. 10, 20, 30. When we got to the post office, I hopped out of the car and slipped my hand into Mama’s, letting myself trail behind her so I could avoid eye contact with the tall men whose beards looked terribly scratchy. While she wrote out addresses and weighed packages and did boring adult stuff, I looked at the colorful gift package wrapping, refusing to let go of her hand.
Soon enough, we hopped back into the car and I continued counting window dots. 40, 50, 60. We arrived at our town’s local meat shop and market, Henry’s. We wandered up and down the two tiny aisles, Mama picking out corn and tomatoes as I sampled free sausage on toothpicks. As we left the store, I looked across the street and saw my doctor’s office, remembering how last time I was there she had asked me about what classes I wanted to take when I got older. I frowned and reached for Mama’s hand then. I didn’t like when doctors asked me questions I couldn’t answer. Mama swooped me up and kissed me and told me not to worry.
When we finally got home, Mama put away the groceries and I went outside to pogostick with my sister. My pogostick was better than hers, because it was bright yellow and extra bouncy and I could stay on it forever. Once our bare feet got sore, we flopped onto the grass. At that moment, I stepped on a bee, and it stung my big toe. I limped inside to get some frozen peas to stop the swelling, and when Mama came downstairs, I told her that a bee had stung me and it hurt. I started crying, even though it didn’t really hurt that much anymore, but now, Mama was here. She always brought the truth of my tears bubbling up, just to instantly dry them. This, I knew, was my mom’s superpower.
But one day, a bee stung me and my mom wasn’t there. Except, it wasn’t a bee sting, it was a stubbed toe, and I hadn’t just gotten off my pogostick. It was my first year at college. On this gray Sunday morning, I had to decide my classes for next semester, read a couple hundred textbook pages, maybe apply for a job, hopefully recover from a hangover, and definitely write an essay. While my mind whirred with distractions, I hurriedly stumbled inside Armstrong, failing to notice the fast-approaching, angry corner of the big glass door.
I sat by myself in the Armstrong lobby in a chair turned away from the lazy trickle of students passing through the doors. I wrapped my bloody toe in toilet paper, cursing as the blood instantly seeped through and tears started streaming down my face. I texted my best friend, Why when I stub my toe do I feel like I’m five years old again? Yet for all my annoyance, something about the pain felt refreshing, almost nostalgic. Almost like I could see the grass stains on my feet, feel the bag of thawing peas, smell the lingering scent of warm minivan on my Mama. And as she wrapped her arms around me, the bee sting, the stubbed toe, suddenly didn’t hurt quite as bad.
It’s funny how at college, I find myself behaving like a capable adult while I pretend to forget that just last summer, my mom still cooked me dinner, reminded me to schedule a doctor’s appointment, and cleaned up after me in the kitchen. In a way, this growing up business feels like I’m faking each stage of maturity until the faking becomes so believable that it’s deemed genuine, at which point I’m allowed to proceed to the next stage. As silly as it sounds, I think this is a necessary part of growing up—in order to get anywhere, you have to begin by pretending. But sometimes, convincing ourselves of a maturity that we don’t possess can become exhausting and confusing.
Take last week, for example, when I realized for the first time that my childhood was over. My head was throbbing, my class was exhausting, and after 24 hours of pure denial, I finally admitted that I was sick. So I called my mom. She showered me with love, suggested a new TV show, and told me to cuddle up and take some Advil. But a few minutes later, she said she had to go. She’d just gotten a new puppy, who needed attention, and I guess I had an essay to write. So she wished me a fast recovery and we hung up.
For a moment, I leaned back against the pine tree I’d been sitting next to and sighed. I let my eyes wander, getting temporarily lost in its branches, and wondered if I should have told her that I didn’t use a condom a while ago, and that my fever was just a little extra scary because of that. But when does my gynecologist take my mother’s place on such matters? Are condoms and bee stings in the same category?
I brushed the pine needles off my pants, walked inside, made myself some tea, and deliriously rooted around for my Advil. Apparently, I didn’t have any Advil, so I had to borrow my roommate’s minivan to get some from the supermarket. And while driving home, I almost crashed into another car. As it turns out, minivans have tremendous blindspots.
Last night, I FaceTimed my parents to say a weekly hello. It was 9 p.m. in Bennington, and they were already tucked in bed. Though their eyes lit up when they saw me, they couldn’t hide their obvious exhaustion. We giggled about this and that as my dad made goofy faces into the camera. And while they told me about their rather monotonous adventures at a wedding that night (they ate fish for dinner and even though the band seemed fun, they left before the dancing got “too rowdy”) I noticed that their hair looked grayer than I remembered. For all their fun-loving, wedding-going ways, my parents were going to bed at 9 p.m. They were getting older. And so was I.
As I watched from across the country while my parents dozed off, I realized that it probably wouldn’t be appropriate to hold my mom’s hand in the post office anymore, and that I had to actually learn what those boring adult postage duties meant, and that these days it wasn’t only the doctor asking me what I was planning to study “when I got older.” That I couldn’t sit in the backseat of my mom’s minivan and count the little black dots on the window that didn’t roll down, because now it's me in the minivan, me who’s pretending to know how to drive.
How have I been swept along for so long, only to realize late on a Saturday night that childhood had come screeching to a halt? Maybe it’s an unsaid rule of driving a minivan. Don’t tell the kids about the scary stuff. Let them feel the pain of a bee sting and the pain of a hangover, the exhaustion of pogo sticking and the exhaustion of monotonous college readings. We learn through experience, and blindspots, it seems, exist for a reason.
Even though Mama sold our old one ten years ago, I somehow keep finding myself sitting in the back seat of someone else’s minivan. As good as I am at convincing everyone around me of my maturity, the world keeps finding ways to splash water on my face, wag a finger at me, and remind me that no one ever really “grows up.” Because we’re all children to our future selves, aren’t we? We make it from one day to the next by stumbling through the blindspots, and the only way we grow without wilting is to constantly stay humbled by them. Some days we drive the minivan, and some days we’re driven. But no matter where we’re seated, this humility is beautiful. It’s what allows us to realize that even as one chapter of childhood is ending, the next one is only beginning.
Mommy Issue | December 2019