I guess it’s the fact that I spent the past few months driving with my older kid in preparation for her getting her license, but I’ve been thinking a lot lately about learning to drive with my own mother.
“That light up there is green,” I still remember her saying as we cruised down Marconi, me at the wheel. “What does that mean?”
“Mom,” I said. “I’m 16. I know what a green light means, for God’s sake. Green means go. I’ve known that since pre-K.”
“No!” she yelled, startling me.“It doesn’t just mean go! That light has been green for a while now! That means it is about to turn yellow!”
“Are you serious?!” I yelled back. “So it’s not just green, huh? Even though it’s clearly green! No, obviously it’s part of a larger scheme in which GO actually means STOP. You just don’t want me to ever learn to drive, do you?”
But standing here now, on the other side of 40 with my own teenage daughter, I wish I could reach back through the decades and hug her.
Because I get it now. Green isn’t green in isolation. Green does mean go, but it also means it’s been green for an amount of time that informs your next decisions.
Very similarly, it is now Oct. 31. That means Halloween. I’ve known since pre-K that it means Halloween. But it doesn’t just mean Halloween. It means the holidays are about to start in earnest.
So here we go again. While today is devoted to costumes and trick-or-treating and parties and watching scary movies with my neighbors … it also means shit is about to get real. The Christmas engines are revving up. The presents-stockings-wrapping-baking madness is looming. I’ve already successfully sneaked four different catalogs into the recycling bin before my younger daughter saw them, but it’s about to be an all-on assault. And although poor Thanksgiving always gets left in the shadows, it also means it’s time for recipe-testing, gumbo-making, and pies.
I’m not ready for it, not even a little bit.
But just like driving, all you can do, in the end, is buckle up and hope for the best.
