Suburban Stay-At-Home Mom Horror Driver

On the first October weekend – it was the last hot weekend of this extraordinary summer in the times of global warming -, we went to the beach. We got there by car, an old Daimler of the kind I’ve been driving for the last ten years or so.

All parking lots were full, so we took a residential side street where we finally located a free space. It looked tight, but so what? I only had to squeeze into this parking gap parallel to the sidewalk - something I used to manage in seconds in Cologne or Berlin when I lived there, without even interrupting the conversation I was engaged in.

But this time? I just couldn’t do it. It took me half a dozen attempts to get in there, tires screeching along the curb. I felt so embarrassed I was ready to drive back to P. there and then. Only that wasn’t an option with a slightly mocking husband, the children, swimsuits, and all the toy diggers in the car. So I ignored these people sitting on their porches smirking (as I was sure they were without really daring to look), and shepherded everybody to the beach.

When I later confessed this disgrace to D., she really smirked. “So, you’re finally here! The stay-at-home mom, queen of the suburb! Welcome!”

And it’s true. If you live in a suburb (or, well, a small town) in the US, there’s no necessity of any parking skills. No frantic competition for the few legal parking spots in the streets of your neighborhood when everybody comes home from work in the evening – there is your garage, or your driveway. No circling around the block where your favorite grocery store is located, to virtually make a dash into any space that another car left no ten seconds earlier - there is the shopping mall with its huge parking lot or garage, no parallel parking anywhere, just move in and back out. To cut a long story short: No practice, no skills.

Need more indicators how far I already departed from the city girl? Come to think about it, within my suburban surroundings, I use the car much more often than I used to when we first moved here. Now, public transport is hardly an option, of course. But biking is, at least in this small town of P. where there still is a downtown and, close by, a comparatively cozy shopping center dating from the nineteen-fifties. But isn’t it just so much more convenient to quickly take the car to go there, especially as you could transport two more gallons of milk and wouldn’t have to go again this week? This kind of thought wouldn’t ever have occurred to me in Berlin!

So, what to do to avoid “Death by Suburb”, as Dave Goetz puts it (Subtitle: “Keeping the suburb form killing your soul”)? I may not be religious enough to follow this author with his “spiritual practices” that, as he claims, counter “suburban toxins” like envy of the neighbor’s SUV or more aspiring soccer kids. I’m not there yet, thank God, and P., after all, has quite a few decidedly un-suburban qualities, which might prove soul saving.

But just in case, I should probably start with a reversal of driving habits. No shopping by car this week (even if that means I will have to go twice to fit three gallons of milk and the diapers for my little one onto the bike). But for the next trip to New York I will take the car and not the commuter train, even if I get stuck in the tunnel for two hours, and parking fees will be ruinous.

My big fear about that, though, is that I might already be this horribly dangerous suburban mom driver, knocking about the big city… Maybe I should try Philadelphia first.