Driver's Ed: A Lesson in Trust

Amanda Woodiel describes how teaching her oldest child to drive has revealed that, when it comes to trusting God, she still holds only a learner’s permit.

Do you trust me? asks God. 

Oh yes, I say. I do. 

Do you trust me? asks the Lord. 

I do trust you, Lord! 

Do you trust me? He asks a third time. 

You know, Lord, that I trust you! I’ve come to understand that you are my heavenly Father and I am Your beloved daughter. 

Then give your son, the one with the learner’s permit, keys to your car and sit inside next to him.  

The moment of getting into your family car next to your teen son is absolutely terrifying and requires every morsel of trust in God you’ve built up over the years. You’re in a two-ton missile with a guy at the helm who, most days, can’t remember to bring his water bottle home from school.  

Nobody warned me about this

I don’t remember any of my friends talking about this stage of life. Maybe they didn’t. Maybe they did, and I wasn’t listening. For me, it’s worse than potty-training. Worse than the first day of kindergarten. It’s hard. No, it’s insanity. So I found friends with older children and asked them: Am I the only one who finds this dreadful?

Whether their kids are the straight-A types or personality A types or anything in between, they all agree: Teaching your kids to drive is awful.

I ask hopefully in response: It gets better, right? With the next kiddos?

There’s a pause and maybe even a shudder. Uh, no.   

The only parents who had a milder reaction were those whose kids are farm kids. So — note to your future parenting self — find those 14-year-olds farm jobs that involve slowly driving machinery you didn’t pay for.  

I am the more expressive, outspoken parent, so naturally I assumed my husband would do the training. That works in theory, except for the fact that I am the one who drives people around all day. This being the case, I came to terms with my lot as the driving teacher and started to brainstorm how I could get through this stage of life with both our relationship and my nervous system intact. 

A learning curve for parent and child

It dawned on me that if we were in a “beater” car: the kind of cheap car that looks like it’ll fall apart by the county line – that would alleviate at least the anxiety of having our only good car wrecked. By God’s merciful intervention (and I truly mean that!), we found a 2000 Toyota Camry for sale parked outside our neighbor’s house, a little bit of tax return money left in our bank account, and the five people who had said they wanted to buy it fall through.  

Purchasing that car helped alleviate some strain, but learning how to process traffic situations and articulate and communicate effectively has been a steep learning curve. I’ve learned to bark one-word commands: “Stop!” “Watch!” “Slow!” One day our son was easing the car into the area on the driveway where we park. He was trying to swing it in next to grandpa’s Jeep. When I realized he wasn’t going to slow down and back up in order to gain more room, I hurriedly choked out, “That’s enough! That’s enough!”

My son, who, I found out later, had been asking himself interiorly, “Do I have enough room?” interpreted my comment to mean “yes, that’s enough room” and gunned it into the Jeep. Luckily, we bounced off of its tire.  

As predicted, my husband was my son’s preferred driving teacher until the day they were on their way to a graduation party in a neighboring town with a high Amish population. He drove through the country roads with burgeoning confidence until my normally-silent husband suddenly shouted exuberantly, “Now we have to watch the car!” Our startled son frantically looked around for the car that was putting them in peril. It turns out my husband had made some kind of joke, funny only to him, about needing to wash the car; they had just trundled over some horse droppings. (“Who says that?” my son, disgruntled, asked me later.) 

The worst part of teaching your child to drive 

But really, what is the worst thing about teaching your child to drive? Is it the parking lots, which are, as my son says, “like little cities” with myriad pedestrians and cars zipping around? Is it when your kid, with only a permit, gains enough confidence to start honking at the guy in front of him at the red light who, at least in his estimation, doesn’t move off of the line quickly enough? Is it being driven home after school by a teenager who is thinking about his new school and certain females there?

Maybe it’s driving into the ditch on day one because he hadn’t mastered the rapidity with which you need to straighten out the steering wheel after you turn. Or maybe it’s when you blow through the stop sign because Dad has distracted him by insisting on hands at “10 and 2” and the permit-holder is arguing about whether that’s preferable after all. Or is the crazy driver who passes him on a double yellow line squeezing between him and a bicyclist coming the other way? 

It’s all terrifying, but what’s really the worst is knowing that your child might be responsible for injuring someone else or even his own family member out of innocence and inexperience and that he might have to live with that–which is a suffering I pray every day he will be spared. So to train him the best I can and let him go is, yes, a whole new level of trusting God. And as far as that goes, I’ve still got only my learner’s permit. 

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Copyright 2024 Amanda Woodiel
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