My mom drove me today. I shouldn’t have let her. The end result is always me feeling part anxious, part amused, part mad. But I wanted to eat a sandwich on the way to the airport and my mom doesn’t condone eating and driving. So I buckled into the passenger seat and prepared myself for the worst.
Mom may very well be the world’s crappiest driver. Albeit very cheerfully so. One of my clearest memories from my childhood (other than that one time my mom told me my sister was her favorite child) was when seven year old me realized that my mom often drove right in the middle of two lanes- her reasoning was that she “didn’t want to hit the medium and that lines were just guidelines, anyways.”
So there I was, sentenced to the passenger seat with a sandwich as my only solace. My hopes that my mother would just focus on driving were dashed when she started grilling me once we got on the highway.
“Are you excited about Florence?” My mother asked, as she repositioned her haphazardly placed hand on the steering wheel.
“Yes.” I wasn’t in the mood for talking.
“What are you trying to do by going abroad?” She merrily munched on an apple. The jerky hiccups of the car told me that we were rolling over the dividers. (My mom once told me that she liked driving over the dividers because it “sounded like making music”.)
“Ugh, I don’t know, find the meaning of life.”
“Ha ha!” she flipped on her turn signal and swerved 3 lanes over in one fell swoop. “Like the Julia Roberts movie? Where she goes on adventures and learns lessons?”
“Are you talking about Eat, Pray, Love?”
“Yes! That movie!”
My English snob came out. “It’s a book, Ma.” I was momentarily distracted when she suddenly braked for no reason. “Christ, Mom, how do you survive when you drive like this?!”
“I know, I know, I’m a terrible driver”. She laughs as she says this. “But I get it done at the end of the day!”
So what’s the point of this story? I think what had me thinking was my mom’s optimism. I often can’t decide if my mom is plain ballsy or just really doesn’t care about what other people think of her. Yes, she is one hundred percent the Asian mother that drives a minivan and drives it disastrously BUT she does so cheerfully. Because as long as she gets from point A to be B, everything is fine and dandy.
I don’t quite know how realistic it is to apply such an approach at somewhere like Carnegie Mellon, a place that has taught me that I’m pretty terrible at certain things (heyyy calculus and boy situations). I’ll be the first to say that simply getting from point A to point B in a sloppy fashion doesn’t sit well from me. But I think if there is anything to reap from the situation, it’s that a cheerful outlook can provide the fuel to keep on keeping on.