I guess I really felt the need after last week’s blog post to strengthen my tenuous hold on adulthood – because the very next day, I went out and bought a minivan.
Ruby has been begging for a car with a third row pretty much ever since her sister was born, and now that Georgia is old enough to make her feelings on the matter known, she would just as soon have a third row, too. There is constant bickering over whose foot is on whose side of the car, constant shrieks of general dismay from both of them. For Ruby, who already thinks that my continued insistence on her riding in a booster seat is just too much injustice to be borne, every car ride was fresh torment.
“Mom, will you pleeeeeease get a minivan,” she asked when I told her I was going to start looking at new cars.
“I don’t know, Ru,” I told her. “I’ll have to see what we can afford.”
She ran off to her room and came back with a handful of wadded dollars. “I will give you $13 toward it,” she said. “It’s all the money I have in the world, but you can have it if it means Georgia will never spit Cheerios at me again.”
“Keep your money, kiddo,” I said. “I’ll see what I can do.”
And so, because I am a gigantic sucker for my kids, I bought a minivan. It’s a 2012 Mazda5, and honestly, I think I might love it as much as Ruby does.
“Buying a minivan is like wearing maternity clothes,” my friend Carolyn emailed me. “You say you’ll never do it, and then you hold off as long as you can – and once you do it, you wonder why it took you so long ‘cause it’s so awesome.”
I still have one pair of maternity pants that I wear on the weekends, and my youngest turned 2 in May, and so far my enthusiasm for my new car is about that intense. Ruby’s love eclipses even mine. “Buying this car is the best thing you’ve ever done for me,” she said, which was a little annoying considering the hours I have put in to school bake sales, Halloween costumes, birthday parties – and more than 500 blood thinner shots into my stomach while I was pregnant. Ahem. But still, I am glad she likes it.
All I can think, though, is that if I am still driving it in nine years, it will so be hers to take to high school.
And I really doubt that she will think it’s quite so cool then.
