Baby You Can Drive My Car
Menopause took my license
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I have a driver. This is an unfortunate midlife development, born of necessity and luckily available in the form of my retired husband, who loves to drive. Today, he is driving me to acupuncture, where I will ask why I can’t drive. It’s an absurd situation and I have not accepted it with grace. Midlife has taken my keys, relegated me to passenger — it’s humiliating. I’m hoping to reclaim my place behind the wheel, just as I’m waiting to reclaim my calm confidence. Put it on the list of things that midlife has stolen from me.
For most of my life, I loved driving. I loved the power and independence, the freedom and sense of competence. I took driving for granted, a right bestowed on all middle class, mid-century children in a car mad culture. When I was young, I drove too fast and too much, and my car was my world on wheels. I grew up in a state, Maryland, with the bad judgement to give me my permit when I was 15 years and 9 months old, and a license on my 16th birthday. In one of my first performances, I hit a parked car in the High’s parking lot. I drove away and never looked back.
My generous, trusting mother lent me her racy burgundy Camaro when I was 17, so that I could chase the Grateful Dead (okay maybe a boy) a few states over with other dopey deadheads. I’m still embarrassed by the chase, but I happily did all the driving in that cool car. Mom gave me a used blue Toyota Celica, my first car, with a long stick shift on the floor, topped with a palm-sized silver ball. It wasn’t long before I was required to park on hills so that I could roll the car and pop the clutch, the only way to start the thing. But it was so cute and zippy that, faults aside, I loved it. It got me mostly through college, though I had to park in the dangerous distant campus lots where the hills (and the rape phones) were.
I’ve driven in all weather, at all hours, through all traffic conditions. Highway, city, country, bridges, tunnels — I’ve done it all. Most of my cars have been four-on-the-floor, though the current chariot is automatic (easier on the complaining left knee, another midlife casualty). I’ve driven big cars and little cars, trucks and dirt bikes. I even drove an oversize van for a catering company. I’ve never cared much about cars, but was a happy, confident, competent driver for a very long time, aware always of the romance of the road.
After decades of four-wheeled freedom — chasing boys and bands, jockeying daily around the DC beltway, and ferrying four kids across the universe forever — I am now a nervous and reluctant driver. The spin cycle of peri/menopause spit me out rattled, with the neat gifts of panic and poor night vision, both unwelcome burdens behind the wheel. I’m fine with the short, daylight jaunts in my tiny, rural village, but the windows-down, music-up highway driving has become cautious, white knuckle cruising. Town driving is a shrill panic at every intersection, a butterfly stomach at the hint of traffic. A dizzy spell at home sends me to the couch, like a silent movie star, to dissect the depressing fact of my fallibility. But a hint of dizzy at a red light can send me into full-fledged panic, a mad rant of what-ifs chattering inside my odd, busy brain. Perhaps this should be added to the 34 symptoms of menopause.
#35: Sudden inability to drive a fucking car, you incompetent loser.
I’m not taking this well.
We recently bought a new car, a cute little red thing. I drove myself to town with the promise of a bookshop at the other end (the perfect carrot). I made it, after a nervous 30 minutes, and was so proud of myself that I took a picture of the new red car parked in front of the shop. In the moment, it was a triumph, and I bought a few books to reward myself. Later, though, when I made it home and looked at my phone, I saw the incongruous image of a normal car parked on an average street in a smallish town. My heart sank. This is what I’ve become? A timid, boring middle-aged woman who considers a short trip to the bookshop Insta worthy. How far the mighty have fallen.
I once read a profile of a famous woman author, a brilliant imperious figure on the international literary scene whose work takes my breath away. The profile said something about her quiet backstage husband, who is also her agent, taking care of everything administrative — the planning and scheduling, the reservations and appointments, and all of the driving. There wasn’t a whiff of apology from her about this fact — she did the writing, he did the driving (and all the other unsavory stuff). A logical and symbiotic relationship.
Midlife finds so many ways to diminish us, to challenge the sense we have of ourselves. It messes with our vision and our hearing, it knocks us down and keeps us up all night. It makes us dizzy, and angry, and scared and causes us to question everything from our hair to our sanity. Nothing is sacred, it’s a death by a thousand little cuts. I think if I could just have this one thing — the old confidence to ferry myself anywhere I’d like, anytime, in my new little red car — I would be happy. My husband is gracious and accommodating, but the loss of my wheeled independence has been one of the harshest cuts. I’m hoping to get back in the saddle, hoping that practice will tamp the fear and return me, somewhat, to my freewheeling self. But, for now, I have a driver. And I’m trying to find the imperious grace to lean into it.
