All the Rage #44

I'd like to tell a story about why I love my mom.

At the end of my junior year in high school, I had just started to drive places on a regular basis. One of my first assignments as a taxi service for my mother was to pick up my younger sisters from school and take them for lunch at Wendy's. So I got home from my last final, hopped in the car with my oldest sister Sarah, and proceeded to pull it out of the garage.

Here we stop for a comment. Now, as most of you that drive know, the process of driving backwards isn't that difficult. It's just like driving forward, except it's backward, which is why it's called driving backward instead of driving forward. But we tend to forget just how confusing and difficult some parts of driving were when we first started. For example, I found driving backward to be terrifying. I couldn't figure it out. I steered the wheel as though I was driving forward. Since then, I've learned how to do it; otherwise, I probably would be dead in a mangled wreck somewhere. But anyway, it's important to keep this in mind for the next part of the story. Sorry for the interruption. Back to the action.

I'm driving backward out of the garage; Sarah is sitting in the passenger seat next to me, twirling her hair in that junior-high style that's so charming you want to throttle her. I'm intensely nervous. I cannot tell you how nervous. Sarah looks back in the car, evidently to check on my progress, since she at age 13 must know more about driving than I do. However, this time she does have a productive, insightful comment to offer, and she does:

"Matt, you're driving on the grass."

I look back. Oops! I am. Not only am I driving on the grass, though, but I'm also driving toward the fence pole and fence on the left side of the end of my driveway.

Panic ensues; my mind races. I hit the gas instead of the brake (I had only been driving for a few weeks; gimme a huge-ass break) and the car has a bitter encounter with the fence and pole. I began to whine a mantra that has since become familiar to me, as I've become more and more mishap-prone in my advanced age:

"Oh my God. Oh my God. Oh my God."

I got out of the car and gave the crime scene a look. If I were a girl or not panicked like a lemming at the edge of a cliff, I would have cried. As it is, I whined and died a thousand little, insignificant deaths. I prayed the prayer of the damned; this act had flushed a summer of spontaneity and fun down Fate's dirty toilet.

Springing to my feet with the energy of one fleeing the scene of a murder he has just committed, I decided to do my job first and get my sisters for lunch. We returned to the house a half-hour later, the back seat full of greasy burgers and my mind full of the things my parents might do to me over what amounted to a stupid accident. I brooded over frustration for a while, picking up the pieces of the BROKEN CAR MIRROR as I did. Then my mom called. She had been at the beauty shop, and was just checking up on things. Moms'll do that, y'know. Anyhow, she wasn't really mad when I told her. She just sorta moaned my name in that sad, beaten, disappointed way moms have:

"Oh, Matt. Oh, Matt. Oh, Matt."

After getting over her beaten disappointment, her mind kicked into gear. She told me not to do anything until she got home. When she arrived, she announced her plan: we would tell my father that the car had been side-swiped at Wendy's; we didn't know who did it.

There. That's one of the greatest things my mother's ever done for me, and like most good mothers, she has done everything for me at some point (insert incest joke here, if you must). I know what you're thinking, that it's pretty depraved for me to be so flattered by my mom encouraging me to lie. But it demonstrates perfectly the love that she has for me, a love most mothers have for their children. It's a selfless act, a shameless act, one only focused on saving my ass, and not her own needs or interests. She didn't want me to have to go through the wrath of my father, and the punishment, so she helped me in the best way she could.

I got caught, but I'll never forget that my mother lied for me. She loved me enough to lie for me. That means a lot.