How teaching my daughter to drive reminds me of the Daytona 500

Pro tip: Don’t yell at your kid when you’re teaching her to drive, ESPECIALLY not when she doesn’t deserve it.

I haven’t written on deadline very much in recent years, and I’m glad of it. Writing is hard enough. Writing under pressure is a nightmare.

I used to cover the Daytona 500 every year. The deadline anxiety started when I woke up that morning, kept going as I drove to the track, waited in traffic, parked, walked to the media center, etc. It got really bad in the last 30 laps.

Starting with a (mostly) blank page when the checkered flag falls and writing 2,000 (hopefully coherent) words quickly … while being creative and accurate … and telling readers who watched the race something they don’t know even though, as I said, they watched the damn thing … well, it’s really damn hard.

Hours after I turned in the story, when I finally crawled into my hotel room bed, falling asleep was a challenge, staying asleep even more so. My brain would be fixing every mistake in the story that it was too late to correct. My heart would be pounding in my chest, half out of adrenaline, half of out of elation that it was over, half out of fear that I screwed the story up, half out of gratitude that I got to do such a thing for a living.

Teaching a teen-ager to drive is like that.

My daughter (a subscriber! Hi, Honey!) recently got her permit. I have spent the last few weeks riding shotgun, and when she pulled into the driveway after a session the other day, I had emotional déjà vu: I recognize this feeling, I thought. I feel like I’ve been on deadline all day.

She’s doing fine; good even. This is not a story making fun of her for blowing off stop signs or almost killing me because nothing like that has happened.

It’s me who’s struggling. 

Who’s teaching who, I have thought more than once. I didn’t realize until now that I set a terrible example as a driver. I treat most traffic laws as suggestions. I don’t drive the speed limit, I don’t come to complete stops, and I use my turn signal only when I think of it, which isn’t often.

When I hold this particular mirror up to myself, I don’t like what I see. It makes me wonder: What other areas of life do I set a terrible example and don’t know it (yet)? There’s delicious irony in the fact I’m trying to teach her to check her blind spots while being ignorant of my own.

As I said, she’s doing fine. But I must confess, my deadline-copying anxiety amps up every time I get in the car, even though she has proved, over and over again, that I have no reason to be.

I keep jamming my right foot into the floorboard and telling her, brake-BRAKE-BRAKE!!! because I don’t feel us slowing down. Each time, we stop early and gently; I keep expecting her to be herky-jerky on the brakes and put me half-through the windshield. Instead, she slows gradually because she is adept at feathering the brakes.

This habit has been distressingly hard to break. I wrote the above paragraph a week ago and thought I was over it. Then I yelled at her today to slow down so we wouldn’t hit the car in front of us, even though, again, there was no need for me to be worried. Pro tip: Don’t yell at your kid when you’re teaching her to drive, ESPECIALLY not when she doesn’t deserve it.

She also has made it clear she can see the stoplights and doesn’t need me pointing out they are red. I’ve graduated from saying “the light’s red” to thinking it as loud as I can.

I have repeatedly asked her how fast she’s going, and it’s not because she’s going too fast. It’s because she’s going the speed limit, and I am fighting the urge to tell her not to.

There are many areas on the road where people go so fast that driving the speed limit is (arguably) dangerous, or at the very least, going the speed limit will make her seem like a bad driver/cause problems for others. Already, on one road near our house, other drivers crawl stupid close to our back bumper when she follows the law. At some point, that’s going to make her nervous, and she’ll make a mistake because of it.

The obvious solution is to tell her to go over the speed limit. I wouldn’t advocate she break the law in any other circumstance. Is it OK to do that when it comes to speed limits? “Everybody else is doing it,” is an ugly reason to do something and I’d laugh (lovingly) at her if she used it with me.

The best thing about parenting is all of this confusion will continue on a variety of topics until I die.