Helicopter Moms: A driving force

SKOKIE, Ill., Sept. 24 (UPI) -- What strikes more terror in a parent's heart than a child saying, "Mom, it's time to go for my learner's permit"?

For a woman who put off learning to drive until her final quarter in college, having the young 'un demand a trip to the Secretary of State's facility the day after his birthday (the only reason it wasn't on his birthday was because it fell on a Sunday that year) was traumatic to say the least.

I should have known there would be no procrastination on his part when it came to driving. When he was 3 he slid behind the wheel and told me he would be driving the next year. He was just waiting for his legs to get long enough.

I felt no great rush to learn to drive because:

a) It was unlikely I'd ever get access to the one car in the family,

b) My father got very busy after he took me out twice -- once in the resort town of South Haven, Mich., where he claimed I nearly took out a whole block of parked cars, and

c) I went through driver's ed more than a year before I could legally get a learner's permit so there was no real peer pressure to do what my friends were doing.

No such impediments for my boy.

I didn't know whether to hope he'd fail the written test or not. Of course, he aced it. On the way home, he begged to be allowed to take the wheel. I took him to a parking lot and let him have a shot. What he hadn't counted on was that driving a stick takes a little more coordination than an automatic transmission. After he killed the motor for the fifth time, he agreed to go home and take his first lesson from his father, whose car was an automatic and ready to be junked.

Several months later we wound up driving to New York for a wedding because my mother refused to get on an airplane (we were supposed to fly out the day the British busted the group of terrorists who planned to make a liquid bomb aboard a plane).

So that morning, I hopped on my computer for Mapquest directions to our hotel, headed over to the mall for a new road atlas and hit the road with my son riding shotgun and Mom in the backseat. Too bad I forgot to check for road construction delays. Let's just say getting out of Chicago took two hours more than it should have.

I figured the trip would be a good way for my son to get in some highway driving practice. Little did I realize I was releasing a speed demon. I spent a large part of the trip screaming at him to slow down ("Are you trying to get us all killed?") and to get out of the left lane because in some areas, that's a ticket magnet.

No sooner did that advice leave my mouth than a highway patrol officer in Ohio pulled us over. Mr. Speedy had been doing 85. I drove the rest of the way home.

We went for his license the day after his 16th birthday because he had two swimming practices on the day itself.

The tester was so impressed he could drive stick, she ignored the curb he ran over on the road test.

(Editor's note: Sometimes it's hard to tell whether you're tackling motherhood in the 21st century -- or being tackled by it. This is the latest in a series of reflections by UPI writers.)