Turning fear and frustration into motivation and meaning
Wisdom of a 16-year-old: "If mom can do it, I can do it too"
Like many North American kids my age, I got my driver’s license on my 16th birthday. It was a learner’s permit. My dad and I went out for dinner. My older brother was in Norway and I can’t remember where my mother and my younger brother were.
Dad took me to a Chinese restaurant. After dinner, Dad threw me the car keys and said, “You have your license. You drive.”
I’d started taking driving lessons, but hadn’t spent much time behind the wheel. On the way home in the orange outside black inside, Volkswagen Rabbit, we had to cross a railroad track. (There are no railroads here anymore, the tracks have been converted into bike and walking paths.) The tracks were slightly raised. Lack of coordination and fear of rolling backwards caused me to stall the old stick shift Rabbit numerous times. The frustration boiled over into a shouting barrage of swear words aimed at the stupid car. My poor Dad was likely wounded in the crossfire… I was an adult before I ever heard him swear. If he whacked his thumb with a hammer, he would loudly groan “NNNNNMMMmmmm”… but no swear words escaped his mouth.
Every time my mother drove us anywhere, it bothered me to no end that she, a woman, my mother, coolly and calmly accelerated away every time she stopped at that incline. She even mastered starting on steeper inclines. Man, that bugged me to no end!
Those were the first times I formulated the motivational sentence in my mind: “If she can do it, there’s no way I’ll ever accept not being able to do it better!”
That was the first time I put into words (at least internal words, I never said them out loud) a motivation that I had felt a few years previously. I was in the hormonal storm of puberty. Girls were becoming interesting and not just noisy people that didn’t know anything about hockey. I was a shy introvert, something that was amplified by my weight.
I wasn’t “fat”. I know that because when my mother took me to buy new clothes for school when I was about 14, a salesman at the menswear store told us we should look in the “husky” section if we wanted to find something my size. So, I wasn’t fat, I was husky. I was also another thing that starts with “H”… I was humiliated.
I was also a sports fan that loved sports almost as much for the burgers with fried onions from the concession stands as for the sports. That was, at least, likely the case for my “love” of indoor lacrosse which is more or less ice hockey without ice.
Not a whole lot of people were lacrosse fans in our town. Maybe they just didn’t know how good the burgers in the arena were but for whatever reason, not many attended the games. On one particular night, when most pubertal boys were at home fantasising about girls, I was at a lacrosse game and I wasn’t fantasising. I really was enjoying the juicy burger of my dreams with the added succulence of onions that had been perfectly sautéed in butter.
There were only three other people in my section. They were sitting four or five rows ahead of me, three rows up from the boards where, if it had been hockey season, the blue line would be. Two guys, one girl. The girl sat between the guys. They were all adults. At least 19 or 20 which was full blown adult compared to my 13 or 14. They were obviously friends. They were laughing, joking, cheering and jeering. When the home team scored the two guys high-fived each other. Most of the time the one guy sat with his arm around the girl’s shoulder. They were a couple. Both good looking. (All girls were good looking to me in those days, and this guy personified the type of guy that always got the girl.) There was a small distance between the girl and the second guy. A respectable distance. A distance that would have let any observer know they weren’t a couple, even if her boyfriend wasn’t there.
What struck me was that the non-boyfriend guy, was overweight. He took up more space than the painted number on the bleacher bench allotted to one person. He was “husky”, but to me he was the guy that didn’t have the girlfriend. The experience sticks with me even today if I don’t feel like going to the gym. It motivates me. For all I know, maybe the husky guy at the lacrosse game had an even more beautiful girlfriend than the girl that was there. Maybe she just didn’t like lacrosse. It doesn’t matter. What matters is that my perception of the situation was first one of fear. I was afraid I would end up being fat and lonely. The fear became my motivation.
By my 16th birthday, I had lost weight, was in pretty good shape, and by the way, my dad and I did finally make it across the tracks to home. A month later I signed up to take the driving test that would give me my official driver’s license. I was, by then, a relatively comfortable, confident 16-year old driver. Most 16-year olds are comfortable, confident drivers even if they aren’t necessarily competent ones. I would be taking the test in “the tank”, our main family car. The 1973 Volvo 145 station wagon from Europe accelerated slowly and, most importantly, had an automatic transmission. You couldn’t stall it if you tried.
In front of the court house you had to parallel park. After three or four unsuccessful attempts, my mother reminded me that she was dead set against me taking my driver’s test that day. I couldn’t parallel park, so how did I think I was worthy of a license. I drove around the corner and pulled into a spot with angled parking.
When the adjudicator and I got into the car to start my test he asked which driving school I had gone to. When I told him, he said: “They’re good. You’ll pass with flying colours. In fact, it’s so hard to find parking spots these days, we’ll just skip that parallel parking thing.”
The driving gods had come to save me!
I comfortably, confidently and more-or-less competently drove around town, following the adjudicator’s instructions. We were heading back to the court house when he suddenly said:
“Oh look! A parking spot. Park there!”
The spot was between two other parked cars. To me it almost didn’t look big enough for our car. I was doomed. I heard my mother’s voice telling me that she knew I wasn’t ready to take the test. Fear was bubbling up in me as I pulled the car to a stop beside the car I was going to park behind. I sucked in a big breath and let the fear become my motivation.
When the adjudicator opened the door to check how far I was from the curb, he said, “Three inches. You slid straight in on the first attempt. No hesitation. I knew it. We could have skipped this.”
The god of driver’s licenses really had saved me.
We can never control what other people say. We can never control what they think or what they do. So, if all that is out of our control, why should we ourselves let it limit us in what we ourselves think we can do or achieve? Seeing someone who is better than us or hearing someone that doesn’t believe in us can be scary.
Fear is a great motivator. I can still drive a stick shift, I can still parallel park and at my nephew’s wedding I wore the same tuxedo that I wore when I got married almost 20 years previously. It was a little loose.
Thanks for reading 87 Stories - Lessons from the University of Life!
I’m Paul, and I like to say that my post-high school gap year in Europe, included a 30-year, basement-to-boardroom career at a company that didn’t want to hire me.
Written with the clarity of hindsight, the accuracy of a faded memory and countless creative liberties, 87 Stories is a journal of how my gap year lasted four decades, made me an emigrant, an immigrant and a gave me a life I never dreamed of.
Stay safe, Always Care