Conversations from the road

Road trips.  Yeah, that other great American past-time.  Hitting the road with the whole family and the dog.  In our case, it’s the whole family minus the dog.  Sorry animal lovers, I do like animals as long as they don’t come near me and as long as they live in someone else’s house.

Road trips are often an exercise in saint-like patience, something I don’t have at all.  I mean you’re cooped up in the car for hours, your muli hurts from sitting for so long, the kids drive you crazy asking “are we almost there” every 15 minutes, and you can’t have any of the yummy snacks (chips, cookies, candies) because you’re on another diet.   Munching on an apple is just not the same as sinking your teeth into a king size Butterfinger on these trips.  Torture, I tell you, pure torture. 

Still, road trips have become sort of a family tradition and it has grown on me over the years.   We’ve been on a lot of road trips, that’s for sure.   We’ve even driven coast to coast not once but three times.  Over the years, we’ve developed a pattern that works for us.  Basically hubby navigates and drives, the kids play their xbox or watch a movie, and me, well as my boys sometimes like to say when they’re caught dozing when they should be paying attention –  I watch the back of my eyelids.   Well I do navigate when I need to, for example if we’re traveling on an unfamiliar highway or street, then of course I sit with the map on my lap ready to tell hubby which intersection to take, er, if I can figure out the map, that is.   The next family car we’re picking out is defintely going to come with a GPS.  It’s just as necessary as air conditioning as far as I’m concerned.

Seriously though, my favorite thing about these long trips is having insightful conversations with my boys.  Not the superficial “how was your day” type that we sometimes fall into on a daily basis or the awkward “interview” that happens when we ask one of them to sit down with us to talk about something.   The interview is usually associated with “I’m in trouble” in their minds so they’re immediately on the defensive.  I know my barriers went up whenever I heard my parents say that they needed to talk to me about something. 

No, these road trip conversations are different.  They’re often fun and quite relaxed.  There is something about being cooped up in the car for hours that allows them to talk freely about anything and everything.   There is nothing planned or rehearsed about it.  Its spontaneous, usually starting with one of them saying something like, “Mom, did you know that ………?” Or sometimes its “Did you hear about that incident in the news ……….?”  Or this one aimed directly at me, “So Mom, when you were my age did you ……….?”  Or “is it true that…….?” These and similar openers like them have led us to some of our most enjoyable and enlightening discussions while on our many road trips.

This past week we took another road trip, only a 6 hour one this time, but it was enough time for our high schooler to explain in detail why he thinks that his European History teacher is a weirdo, that a couple of kids in his class are getting on his nerves and what he did about it, that he’s going to stay with us until he’s forty since I’m not letting him get his driver’s license yet, and that I’m getting a lot of gray hair so what am I going to do about it.  And somewhere in there we had a great discussion about the economy and racism in this country.  He is taking mostly Honors and AP classes so he is quite the intellectual.  It was no mean feat keeping up with him, good thing I’m a nerd just like him:-).  In fact, he did ask me if I was a nerd in high school and I said, “Of course.  There is nothing wrong with being a nerd, nerds are cool.”