When your children start driving

Along the way, you learn that chauffeuring has its privileges. It produces the random, unexpected question, of the sort best addressed to the back of a parental head. How does the baby get out of your tummy, exactly? Does Rachel have two mommies? Even the side of the parental head, when they are older beside you in the front seat, offers a no-escape opportunity to broach topics so delicate — yes, I’m talking about sex now — that your child would flee were she not strapped inside a moving car.

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The parental chauffeur also benefits from the useful fiction that the “help” has no ears, even when the help is your mother and you are yakking away about who did what with whom. This is the moment when the driver, like a hunter trying to remain invisible to her prey, must try to blend in with the surroundings, barely breathing for fear of alerting the chattering creatures.

Then comes the moment, simultaneously terrible and liberating, when your children, and their friends, learn to drive. For us, anyway, the friends-who-can-drive experience paralleled the babysitters-who-can-drive experience — from intensive investigation of driving history to lax acquiescence.

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