When you live 10 miles to the nearest town, plenty of your parenting is done in the car.
On any given day, you might catch me tooling down the highway doing a rundown of the ABCs, singing the “Itsy Bitsy Spider” or — during summer construction season — offering my vast knowledge of the inner workings of skidsteers and forklifts.
Like many moms, I’ve become a front-seat parent. If I tilt my rearview mirror just-so, I can catch half the face of each of my children in the backseat (and very little of the road behind me, to offer a word of warning to any other cars on the road).
In the car, we’ve learned that red means stop and green means go. We examine fire engines when they pull up alongside us at lights. We’ve counted train cars, spelled out a stop sign and pointed out the colors in the American flag.
My little guy even knows to say, “Oh, for Pete’s sake!” when Mommy hits the brakes hard enough.
As my kids get older, I wonder how much of my parenting will continue to happen in the car. Will we talk about bullying on the way to school? Will my words help to mend a broken heart on the way home from a date gone bad? Will I guide them toward a good college, the right career, a precious spouse?
I fear that I’ll someday be tuned out by iPods and cell phones, that my words will be greeted with the “click, click” of someone dashing off a text to a friend.
But I hope that I will find the time, between the sleepovers and the football games, to teach my kids the lessons I really want them to learn. It’s all fine and good to count railroad cars, but some of the other things they need to know can’t be worked into a catchy song or a whimsical game.
Not long ago, my 3-year-old watched in awe as a construction truck wheeled in front of us. “I like dat,” he told me. “I will ride it when I a man.”
I grinned, and tucked that phrase away in my heart — “when I a man.” What he doesn’t know yet is that becoming a man doesn’t automatically come with age. It comes with wisdom, maturity and the confidence to do the right thing even when no one else does. There are plenty of politicians, doctors, lawyers and CEOs out there who have yet to become men.
