Our oldest is 16 years old. He will be 17 in September. He did get his learner’s permit, but he hasn’t yet taken his driver’s test. I don’t know why. It just kind of took a while.
My husband Doug used to be like, ‘Yates, you got to get in there and take your test.’ And then I finally said to him, why encourage it? As soon as he gets his license, he is probably going to want to drive himself to school. He is not going to want us to drive him anymore.
Since our kids were little, Doug and I split the drop-offs. He takes the two boys three days a week while I take our daughter to her school, and then the next week we reverse it so I take the boys three days and Doug takes Yardley. But that changed for one year when we were commuting from New York City to Connecticut.
It is a long story, but we wanted to get the hell out of Manhattan and those woke schools. For one school year before we fully moved, we had to commute our boys out of NYC. They got in and the school basically told us it was now or never. So, for the full year, Doug and the boys used to leave our house at the crack of dawn when it was still pitch black outside and drive to Connecticut. It was tough.
By the time they would get to Connecticut, everyone was bleary. Doug started this tradition with the boys of pulling over before they arrived to the school and doing what we call a fire drill. It was sort of the Chinese fire drill that we used to do as kids. They crank the radio, get out of the car, and run around the car with the music blasting.
Once we moved and were splitting the drop-offs again, Doug started to do it with our daughter too. And they are still doing it to this day. My oldest is going into junior year of high school. I pointed out to Doug that as soon as Yates starts driving, there will be no more fire drills.
And boy, that put an end to the encouragement of Yates to get that driver’s license. Now it’s like, take your time. What’s the rush? You’re good.
As I was talking about with my guest Jesse Kelly today, kids growing up and moving out is all a fact of life. But that doesn’t make it any less difficult as a parent. My one comfort is seeing the dynamic of families we know with older kids.
We spend summers at the Jersey Shore and there, in particular, we have friends who have children in their mid-twenties now and they are so close to them still. They come back all the time when they can in the summer or on weekends. They have different friends, they have more serious boyfriends or girlfriends, and they are going through a different phase of life, but they are still so tight and so loving.
If you do it right, if you raise a loving family where they feel connected to you and vice versa, I think it is a change, but it is definitely not goodbye. It can be a really exciting, fun new phase where they bring all sorts of different energies and stimuli back into your home that will expand your universe and make you feel happier. So, fingers crossed for that kind of a future.