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The day I turned 16 I did not get a car. As the fourth child, there was usually someone around to drive me where I needed to go, or sometimes my father would let me borrow his green Pontiac LeMans. When my last sibling left for college – taking his old Monte Carlo with him -- my father leased a Chevy Nova.  I thought it was one of the ugliest cars ever to hug the highway.  Today it’s so vintage it almost looks cool.  My Nova was temperamental and cranky – stalling every time it rained. (Did you know that “No va” translates roughly to “Doesn’t go” in Spanish?)  I didn’t care. I had a car.  Freedom!  A ride to the beach so I could smoke cigarettes behind the Bible College with my best friend.

Most nights I would get in my car, pick up my pack of girlfriends … and that was it. We hardly ever knew where we were going; we’d make up plans as we went along. To be honest, the car was the destination; like an apartment on wheels.

This week, the tradition continues (hopefully without the contraband smokes). My son has been saving his money for years so that he, too, can know the love of a clunker.

It’s just that clunker was not his first choice of make and model.

I remember being clueless about makes and models; I couldn’t even tell you what my friends drove.  (Except my boyfriend, who drove a bronze Mustang. It’s amazing how much you can remember from making out in the backseat of a car.) All that really mattered was that you had wheels to get you and your friends to the Friday night football games and the post-game gatherings at Denny’s or Lum’s.

My son, on the other hand, has been all about his wish list: carmakers, years, models, features. A list that, unfortunately, was whittled away by the size of his budget. Trying to find a used car that met my son’s cool-factor and our safety-and-sanity-scale at a reasonable cost was much harder than I thought it would be. The search really heated up as we got closer to the day of his driver’s test. Apparently my son had visions of taking the test in his new used car.

So I pulled up a blank spreadsheet on my laptop and began to fill it with all the “accessories” that come with owning a car: tag, title, taxes, inspection, registration, insurance, maintenance, gas. Then Jake filled in his “necessities”— GPS, back-up camera, awesome paint job.

Clearly this was going to be a long day.

When we hit enter and Excel did its magic, my son’s face fell. He either didn’t have enough money for his dream car, or he could buy the car of his dreams but have nothing left over for gas. Or anything else.

Jake realized, as so perfectly put by the 1970s' Socrates of pop wisdom himself:  You Can’t Always Get What You Want. 

So we went shopping. After several weeks of damn-glad-to-meet-you salesmen, the Car Gods intervened. I was at the car dealership for my 114,000-mile check up, and while it was being serviced I wandered over to the used car section to see if they had anything in my son’s price range. As luck would have it, a car had just come on the lot an hour ago – the dealership hadn’t even had time to clean it up. It was from a customer I could see myself being friends with – a wife and mother and carpool mom who had driven her car for 13 years and babied it every 5,000 miles with scheduled maintenance. With her kids out of the house, she had treated herself to a new car. But her old best friend now parked on the used car lot looked like a beacon of hope to me. Broken-in. Friendly. Well-loved and loving.

I thought I heard it speak to me: Hey, boy-Mom, it said. I know you’re nervous. I know your son is your most precious cargo. I understand that driving is the most dangerous thing he has ever done so far in his life. I will take care of him as I cared for my previous family. I may not look so tough, but I am more stable than the bike you let him ride to camp every day when he was 10. I will be a reliable friend. I will protect him. I will even learn to find my way home if he can’t.

Jake took the car for a spin and it all started to click. His three-point turns were tight, his highway driving well within the limit, the brakes quietly confident. He liked it. While it wasn't his dream car, it wasn't a Nova, either. .

He pulled me aside and whispered, “It's cool, Mom, it's just that... I didn’t want my first car to be this old.”

“I didn’t want you to be this old – not so damn fast,” I said, suddenly realizing what this car would mean, how it would change the dynamics of our family. I understood how little time I would have with my son now; how much I would miss our 16 years of riding together to kindergarten, soccer games, fairgrounds, garage sales, gymnastics, drum lessons, play rehearsals, movies. My son gave me that notorious teenage combination of eye-rolling and lopsided grin that let me know that he knew … this wasn’t just about buying a car. This was about letting go.

Again. 

Ginger is a 20-year veteran corporate writer in Atlanta, and most recently, the former national web editor at skirt!,www.skirt.com. She is a regular blogger for Huffington Post’s divorce vertical (www.huffingtonpost.com/divorce) and skirt.com, the mother of a 16-year-old son, and the author of the hilarious and helpful book, “Back On Top: Fearless Dating After Divorce.” She is a regular ShareWIK.com columnist, and has been featured in More.com, Glamour.com, LovingYou.com and several other women-centric media. She has appeared dozens of local and national TV and radio shows, including as host of Book Talk with Ginger in Atlanta, Georgia. 

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