Note: Every autistic person’s experience is different. This is my experience with my daughter and she read and approved of this before I posted it.

I can tell you the day I discovered freedom because I remember every intoxicating detail of the moment I drove alone for the first time after getting my driver’s license.

It was August. UB40’s song “Red Wine” was playing on the radio and the Alabama sky had just opened up and sprinkled that kind of Southern rain that makes everything — even the air — smell like grass. I rolled down the car window and breathed in independence as the road before me stretched around the Birmingham airport. Out of my peripheral vision I saw planes take off and land.

Now, in what seems like a single heartbeat of time, my daughter is learning to drive.

This week I took her to get her learner’s permit, a delayed inevitability. Her autism means some developmental milestones are postponed, which means that she, at the age of 20, arrived where many people are at 16 — wanting her driver’s license.

Isabel has challenges with various sensory experiences so it’s more difficult for her to learn to drive than it was for me. When I try to see the road from her point of view I realize it’s terrifying.

Sit at a large intersection and imagine being sensitive to light and noise, even on a quiet day. It’s not a fun time for someone with sensory challenges. For me, sovereignty over the car as my kingdom is a great high. For her it feels like certain death and equals panic.

So I purchased bright yellow, reflective magnets that say “Student driver: Please be patient.” (Sometimes I drive around with the magnets on the car when I’m alone and it’s amazing how kind people can be just because of a magnet.) It occurs to me that we could all use ”Please be patient” magnets, buttons, T-shirts, stickers and even tattoos.

“Hmm. People who practice patience,” I think to myself as I stick the magnets to each side and the back bumper. “What would that world look like?”

Teaching Isabel to drive has been unexpectedly comical because I’ve been super chill. Dear reader, I am not normally chill, much less super chill. But teaching her to drive has allowed me to maintain my imaginary title of “cool mom” while she has alternately been overwhelmed, shaky, lacking confidence, downright terrified and sometimes paralyzed. (All her words.)

I tell her this is to be expected and that I would rather her be overly cautious behind the wheel of one-and-a-half tons of weight:

“This is not,” I explained, “The time to rip around the streets like we’re in ‘Dega.”

(We’re from Alabama so I’m certain it was decreed that I could not teach my child to drive without a NASCAR reference.)

Teaching Isabel to drive slows me down. It makes the world outside be still for a while. It’s quiet. Chatter dies away and the focus is on the potholes. The confusing left turns. Jaggedly parked cars. Parked cars with opened doors that hang into the road. Dogs. Toddlers. Joggers. Ambulances. Blown-out tires. Litter. Stray cats. Downed branches.

Blinkers. My focus is on counting people who don’t use blinkers.

The world outside the four car windows no longer exists during our lessons. It’s just us, inside, trying to survive.

We mastered how to do that during the pandemic so this feels almost comfortable.

The two of us alone in a car reminds me of our many, many road trips. In 2017–18 I drove 10,000 miles with Isabel in tow for her home schooling as I completed a project to chronicle journalism in America. On that trip I wished out loud many times that she could help drive, especially as we tried to outrun a blizzard.

In 2019 alone we drove so many miles my foot became one with the gas pedal, all in the name of great road trips. I drove us to Providence, R.I. as part of a college tour; to Miami for the Youth Climate Strike; Baton Rouge for a National Federation of Press Women conference; Montgomery for another youth climate strike and cross-country to Los Angeles via stops in Plano, Texas and Anaheim (had to get Disney into that year.) We came home after visiting Portland, Oregon then Wyoming, Nebraska, Missouri, Arkansas, and Mississippi.

I later that year drove us to Princeton, Manhattan, Chattanooga, Washington, DC, Harrisonburg, Virginia and Atlanta for Isabel to be an extra in the Paramount movie “Instant Family.” In our home state I drove us to Florence, Huntsville, Mobile and Montgomery for various events.

All of this left me happy and exhausted. 2019 was a blur of gray highway.

Yet when the Covid pandemic began I could look back and see that those many miles — from interstates to intersections — were for a reason. We stored up those miles and memories for the long Covid winter. We were full and happy and serendipitously ready to be inside.

***

As Isabel drives us through a green light I think of how far she has already come in her journey. One week in and she’s already driving us to the store but she’s still learning to her trust herself.

During our lessons, as Isabel drives, sometimes my mind wanders for a brief moment. This is an unexpected luxury of having a new chauffeur.

I think back to when Isabel was a young girl. She owned two Barbie cars. One was pink and one purple. Of course they were convertibles. I was jealous of how effortless and trouble-free Barbie seemed as she hopped into the car in style, back straight. With a stiff hand, she waved to her imagined fans. The teddy bears and assorted menagerie of animals stared, stone-faced, as Barbie vroomed around the room. Top down, she would cruise into the kitchen, or sometimes the bathroom, unannounced just as I stepped out of the shower. It’s a miracle I never went to the ER due to Barbie car puncture wounds in my feet.

Jesus taught love and forgiveness but nowhere did he confront how to teach a child, teen or adult to drive and that’s a noteworthy shame. God knows I needed guidance. On a recent evening my friends and I brainstorm by text about what hypothetical Biblical guidance from Jesus might have been. One says:

“Goeth thee forward, and sometimes in reverse, with patience and determination to teach safe driving and unparalleled parking.”

This gets a big laugh from me. I’m the worst at parallel parking and now it’s my turn to teach someone how to do this. Lord, help me.

Teaching a child to drive is a clear metaphor for letting go. Driving equals autonomy, which has always been my goal for Isabel given the statistics that face autistic women.

“Nothing is more interesting than time,” the author Ann Patchett wrote. “The days that are endless, the days that get away.”

I think of this quote as I take Isabel — who, in my mind, I held in my arms as a baby just yesterday — to a deserted parking lot near our home to practice driving. As we pull in her Siri, which she has set to be a pleasant Australian woman’s voice, calls it a “car park,” which makes much more sense to my brain. I laugh at Australian Siri then step out of the car, into an extremely windy day, to let Isabel drive.

The plan is for her to drive alone across the lot as I take video of the moment to send to my parents who surely remember the joy and terror of teaching me how to drive.

I want them to see that I can do this too.

I want Isabel to know that she can do this.

I watch her drive away from me in our old, beat-up red Volvo named Ruby that overflows with road-trip memories.

In that moment — just for a fraction of a second that contains hope and anxiety — I hold my breath and wait for her to come back.