Sometimes a writer is lucky enough to be at the confluence where ideas bang into each other and a story is born. Driver’s Ed is one of those projects.
I wondered as I moved from my college idealism into the real world of paying taxes, making do, and getting by, how would that idealism fare when I had the opportunity to send a fresh soul into the community? If I prepared my child for the world that should be; you know that world where equal pay exists for equal work, and if one acts like a lady one is treated as such. Will the world that exists defeat her? This caused the odd situation that sometimes when I knew exactly what I was supposed to say as a parent, what I really wanted to say was something completely different.
Then in child-rearing, there’s that eternal letting go. From the time the doc cuts the cord to when you release the back of that two-wheel bicycle the first time to the moment you’re in the passenger seat and they’re behind the wheel, parents live through years of just waving bye.
And then it comes down to sex. If it’s not splashed across the headlines as some politician’s misbehavior, it spills out of a health class textbook where denial and death deal the facts. Someone may still dream about romance, but that first talk is always mechanics.
Idealism, driving and sex bumped together to make a story about a Mom who learns it’s okay to be her true self while she’s teaching her teenage daughter to drive, resist peer pressure and become her own best person.
Driver’s Ed.
We’re going for a ride.
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