To Drive or Not To Drive

Clues that perhaps driving should be taken off the table

• You keep getting lost going to your daughters' homes that you have been to hundreds of times
• You not only leave your car keys in the ignition, but you leave the car running in the grocery store or church parking lots
• You back into your daughter's car and then can't figure out how to take the car out of reverse and put it into drive

Those were the big clues that my mom shouldn't be driving.  I know. Don't laugh. You would think that we would clue in earlier, but it is amazing how difficult it is to say to a parent that it is time to stop driving. It is such an affront to their independence. The last item on the list was when I finally called my siblings and said, "She can't drive anymore."  We were fortunate that she lost her keys the next day and no one ever found them. We made sure that the spares remained "lost" as well. However, I did talk to her about not driving anymore and for several months after that, she was upset at me for taking away her ability to drive. She would shake her finger at me which, so far, is the most physical she ever gets in expressing her frustration.

I was at a stop light once with Mom in the passenger seat when I got rear-ended by an older woman. It was a gentle bump, but the woman put the car in reverse and then into drive and promptly rear-ended me again. I hopped out of the car and went to look at the damage. She backed up again, and while I was standing between her car and mine looking at the damage, she came rolling forward for a third bump. Fortunately, my son yelled at me to get out of the way. The woman could not figure out how to put her car into park.  She just kept oscillating between "drive" and "reverse"--how familiar did that sound? When I was talking to the policeman explaining that she clearly should not be driving, he patiently explained to me that, although he agreed, they couldn't take her keys away. She was not driving under the influence and the accident wasn't serious enough to do more than a citation. I was so grateful my mom wasn't still driving. The humorous part of the story (humorous now) was that my mom who was sitting in the car was irate, not because I had been hit, but because they would allow a woman like that to drive and they still wouldn't let her drive. My son said to her, "Grandma, they won't let me drive either" (he was 14) and she said, "What did they get you for?"

We probably should have taken her keys sooner. We were fortunate that there was never a serious accident especially with her driving that big, powerful Buick.